It would probably be safe to say that for every week Ireland spent in the throes of rebellion in the course of our history we spent a year involved in serious and often violent land agitation.

The 1830s and 1880s in particular were times of agrarian uproar as the Tithe War, the Land War and the Plan of Campaign dominated the political and social agendas. From the Land War came the word and the practice of ‘boycotting’ – a peaceful but effective form of isolation of despised and uncooperative landlords. But sometimes the tactics employed on both sides were less than peaceful and distinctly unpalatable. The term ‘Ribbonism’ was used to describe the activities of the members of illegal secret societies who took direct action against those opposed to the interests of the tenants. The term Royal Irish Constabulary was used to describe the response of the authorities.

One of the myths of the periods of agrarian violence that frequently bedevilled rural Ireland was that members of Ribbon societies spent their evenings running around with blackened faces killing landlords. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not that many Ribbonmen would have objected to doing violence to their friendly neighbourhood aristocrats it was just that they rarely got close enough to take a pot shot at them. More at risk were the agents of the landlords, bailiffs who did their bidding, fellow tenants who did something inadvisable, like taking on land vacated by someone who had been evicted, aka ‘land grabbers’. or, more often than not, completely innocent livestock.

One significant exception, however, was an extremely modest landlord based in Clonbur in Co. Galway, Lord Mountmorres. He was ‘modest’ in the context of the size of his holdings. He was one of the smallest landlords in the country with only 11 tenants producing an annual income of around £300. The country’s bigger landlords – there were about 10,000 landed families altogether – would have boasted 20,000 or more acres and incomes of more than £10,000 a year. Unlike some of his peers Mountmorres was not known for evicting his tenants, led a relatively frugal lifestyle in the unpretentious Ebor House and was said to be quite popular in the part of Galway where he lived. So why was he shot dead a few miles from his home in September 1880 when another Galway landlord, the loathsome and avaricious Lord Clanricarde, notorious for evicting tenants, avoided a similar fate.

Two reasons come to mind. Firstly Clanricarde didn’t regularly take to the roads of Galway in a horse and trap – he spent his life in London and paid others to do his dirty work. Secondly, when you scratch the surface of the ‘benign landlord’ narrative that surrounds Mountmorres you find someone who was not nearly as popular as he was cracked up to be.

Mountmorres was shot at around 8.00 on the evening of 25 September driving alone between Clonbur and Ebor House. When his horse and carriage made it home without their driver the alarm was raised. His body was quickly found. He had been shot six times, some of the shots were at close range, and he had obviously died quickly at the scene. A local family, the Flanagan’s refused to allow the corpse to be taken into their house before it was finally removed, saying that ‘if they admitted it nothing belonging to [them] would be alive this day twelve months.’

Despite a £1000 reward being offered for information no one came forward. One of Mountmorres’s tenants, Patrick Sweeney, who had been served with an eviction notice, was suspected but no one was ever convicted, or even tried for the murder.

Later Michael Davitt would claim that Mountmorres had been killed because he ‘eked out his wretched income as a landlord by doing spy’s work for the Castle’. When Lady Mountmorres testified at a tribunal investigating agrarian crime in the late 1880s she claimed that the atmosphere changed in the locality after Sweeney was issued with his eviction order – ‘The men ceased to touch their hats, and they were disrespectful in their manner.’ – she later fainted under cross examination.

It emerged that Mountmorres had little time for the activities of the newly formed Land League, had sought police protection and demanded that the army be brought into the area to suppress the activities of the League. None of this was calculated to increase his popularity.

But, the truth is that we will never know who killed Viscount Mountmorres, and precisely why he was murdered 135 years ago, on this day.

The American Roman Catholic Church can be a very conservative institution indeed. And few Irish-American prelates have a reputation for being on the progressive wing of that conservative institution. That’s why John Ireland, Kilkenny born bishop of the Twin Cities of St.Paul/Minnesota stands out. He was a 19^th century political progressive on issues like Church/State relations, education and immigration. He was friendly with two American Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley and was vocally opposed to the widespread and pervasive political corruption of the late 19^th century USA and to racial inequality. Cardinal Paul Cullen he was not.

So it’s something of a shame that, in Minnesota at least, he is best remembered, and none to fondly by some, for his encounter with a group of fishermen from Connemara in the 1880s

Ireland, disturbed by reports of the economic conditions being experienced by Irish immigrants in Eastern cities, and conscious of the need to populate the wideopen spaces of the Minnesota hinterland, established colonies with names like Clontarf, Avoca and Iona that provided land and a fresh start for impoverished urban dwellers. The Kilkenny-born archbishop was highly successful in populating the often inhospitable prairies with pockets of Irish settlements through his Catholic Colonization Bureau The project brought more than 4000 families from eastern slums onto 400,000 acres of farmland in rural Minnesota. Many of the colonies remain relatively intact to this day.

Ireland’s right-hand man in this enterprise (which used railroad land) was Roscommon man Dillon O’Brien, born into the Catholic landholding class, who had been financially ruined by the Famine and forced to emigrate.

However, the philanthropic archbishop had an unhappy experience when he agreed to take on a group of impoverished fisherman from the West of Ireland that he misguidedly attempted to turn into frontier farmers. The saga of the ‘Connemaras’ is part of the lore of the American Midwest.

Ireland had to be coaxed into accepting the fishermen and their families in the first place. He allowed himself to be persuaded to take them on but the wisdom of his initial reluctance was rapidly justified. The fifty or so families that came from Connemara were coastal inhabitants. When Dillon O’Brien’s son first saw them he was not impressed. He described the group, mostly monolingual Irish speakers, as ‘not the competent, but the incompetent; not the industrious but the shiftless; a group composed of mendicants who knew nothing about farming’.

They were settled near a pre-existing colony called Graceville. The settlers already there were even less well disposed towards the new arrivals than O’Brien’s son. The timing of their arrival was unfortunate as well. It coincided with the harsh prairie winter. Opportunities for planting were not promising. The soil was only to be penetrated with pickaxes rather than ploughs or spades. One of the first things the bewildered fisher folk did was to eat or sell the seed crops allocated to them.

Ireland was forced to find employment for many members of the group in Minneapolis and St Paul. Worse still from his point of view was the charitable intervention of the local Freemasons. The Connemaras, happy to accept assistance from any source, had no awareness of the antagonism that existed between the overwhelmingly Protestant Masons and the American Catholic church. Ireland spoke out against the donors and the recipients. As few of the Connemaras had any English their right of reply was somewhat circumscribed. In attacking such obvious underdogs for accepting the charity of members of a highly respected organisation Ireland lost some of his progressive gloss.

Today a street that runs from the Cathedral of St.Paul to the Minnesota State Capitol building is named after him. Despite his brush with the Connemaras he is still held in high regard.

John Ireland, Catholic Archbishop of the Twin Cities, was born 177 years ago, on this day.

1843 was to have been Repeal Year. A series of huge gatherings, dubbed ‘monster meetings’ by the hostile Times of London, was designed to put pressure on the British government to restore an Irish parliament.

Of course, it didn’t happen, and an almost inevitable consequence of the failure of the Repeal movement was the arrest and prosecution in 1844 of its leaders, the principal motive force being Daniel O’Connell, the architect of Catholic Emancipation.

The charge against The Liberator and a small number of key allies, including his son John, was one of conspiracy. As defined in the mid 19^th century this tended to reverse what we would see as the natural order of justice. Essentially the accused had to prove that they were not involved in a conspiracy rather than the onus being on the Crown to prove that they were.

The fact that, in essence, many potential Catholic jurors were excluded from the jury panel, didn’t help O’Connell’s cause. There were four presiding judges, led by Chief Justice Pennefather, a man described by one of the defendants, the Nation newspaper editor Charles Gavan Duffy as ‘descended from a family of Puritan[s] … gorged with lands and offices during the penal times, but still on the watch for ministerial favours …’ So no help to be expected from that quarter.

The defence case was also placed at a severe disadvantage by the refusal of the Crown to supply them with even a list of witnesses. Try that today and see how far you get. Evidence was introduced by the prosecution from official government notetakers of the allegedly seditious speeches made by O’Connell and others at the monster meetings in evocative locations like Tara.

The almost inevitable result of the lengthy trial was the conviction of the accused, helped by a summing up from the Chief Justice that read like a continuation of the closing address of the prosecution to the jury. Anything Pennefather felt the Attorney General had left out, he generously supplied himself.

Although, at the advanced age of 69 and in bad health, O’Connell became a felon his punishment was, in effect, in inverse proportion to the supposed gravity of the crime. O’Connell and his fellow prisoners were allowed to choose their own place of incarceration. They opted for the Richmond Bridewell, a prison mainly used to accommodate debtors, on Dublin’s South Circular Road.

O’Connell and his fellow inmates actually served out their sentences in the comfort of the homes of the Governor and Deputy Governor rather than in prison cells. In time the entire episode would become known as ‘the Richmond picnic’. Hailed as a martyr for the nationalist cause O’Connell’s Richmond experience was, in truth, ‘martyrdom de luxe’. One of the detainees wrote that ‘the imprisonment proved as little unpleasant as a holiday in a country house.’

Not only were the prisoners afforded the facility of having their spouses present at all times – O’Connell himself was a widower – they were also allowed their own servants. Food was imported from eating-houses outside the walls of the prison or, more often than not, provided by hundreds of well-wishers. O’Connell, enabled to take daily exercise, regained much of hi

OTD – 4.9.1844 HOUSE OF LORDS FREES O’CONNELL

1843 was to have been Repeal Year. A series of huge gatherings, dubbed ‘monster meetings’ by the hostile Times of London, was designed to put pressure on the British government to restore an Irish parliament.

Of course, it didn’t happen, and an almost inevitable consequence of the failure of the Repeal movement was the arrest and prosecution in 1844 of its leaders, the principal motive force being Daniel O’Connell, the architect of Catholic Emancipation.

The charge against The Liberator and a small number of key allies, including his son John, was one of conspiracy. As defined in the mid 19^th century this tended to reverse what we would see as the natural order of justice. Essentially the accused had to prove that they were not involved in a conspiracy rather than the onus being on the Crown to prove that they were.

The fact that, in essence, many potential Catholic jurors were excluded from the jury panel, didn’t help O’Connell’s cause. There were four presiding judges, led by Chief Justice Pennefather, a man described by one of the defendants, the Nation newspaper editor Charles Gavan Duffy as ‘descended from a family of Puritan[s] … gorged with lands and offices during the penal times, but still on the watch for ministerial favours …’ So no help to be expected from that quarter.

The defence case was also placed at a severe disadvantage by the refusal of the Crown to supply them with even a list of witnesses. Try that today and see how far you get. Evidence was introduced by the prosecution from official government notetakers of the allegedly seditious speeches made by O’Connell and others at the monster meetings in evocative locations like Tara.

The almost inevitable result of the lengthy trial was the conviction of the accused, helped by a summing up from the Chief Justice that read like a continuation of the closing address of the prosecution to the jury. Anything Pennefather felt the Attorney General had left out, he generously supplied himself.

Although, at the advanced age of 69 and in bad health, O’Connell became a felon his punishment was, in effect, in inverse proportion to the supposed gravity of the crime. O’Connell and his fellow prisoners were allowed to choose their own place of incarceration. They opted for the Richmond Bridewell, a prison mainly used to accommodate debtors, on Dublin’s South Circular Road.

O’Connell and his fellow inmates actually served out their sentences in the comfort of the homes of the Governor and Deputy Governor rather than in prison cells. In time the entire episode would become known as ‘the Richmond picnic’. Hailed as a martyr for the nationalist cause O’Connell’s Richmond experience was, in truth, ‘martyrdom de luxe’. One of the detainees wrote that ‘the imprisonment proved as little unpleasant as a holiday in a country house.’

Not only were the prisoners afforded the facility of having their spouses present at all times – O’Connell himself was a widower – they were also allowed their own servants. Food was imported from eating-houses outside the walls of the prison or, more often than not, provided by hundreds of well-wishers. O’Connell, enabled to take daily exercise, regained much of his health.

The main source of irritation was the huge number of visitors anxious to meet with O’Connell now that he was no longer a moving target. That was quickly sorted by a ban from the privileged inmates on visits outside of a four hour window from noon to 4.00 pm.

One aspect of the incarceration in which the Irish public were not permitted to share was the fact of O’Connell’s growing infatuation with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, Rose McDowell, daughter of a Belfast Presbyterian merchant He corresponded with her and may even have proposed to her. To the relief of his family she was not interested in becoming the second Mrs. O’Connell.

The Liberator, despite the massive celebration that marked his release, may well have had mixed feelings when the House of Lords reversed his conviction 171 years ago, on this day.