During the 1860s and 1870s the merchants, tradesmen and substantial farmers of provincial Ireland, with their clientage of customers, debtors and sub-tenants, often became centers of patronage and power. Through a combination of wealth, prestige and intimidation they wielded considerable influence in both national and local politics, mounting a successful challenge to the near-monopoly of political power long enjoyed by the landed elite. Few were in a position to stand for parliament, although they exercised increasing influence over those who did, but many members of this new elite found an outlet for their political ambitions in contests for the poor law boards of guardians, whose prestige and power over life in rural Ireland increased enormously between the Famine and the Land War.

A. METHODS FOR ESTIMATING MISSING DATA

Evictions were not recorded before 1849. Consequently, estimates of the number of evictions between 1846 and 1848 must be derived from judicial records that only record the number of ejectment decrees issued. These figures do not reveal how many of the decrees were actually carried out or how many of the evicted tenants were reinstated, either as tenants or as caretakers. I have dismissed the first deficiency in the data as insignificant for calculating evictions during the Famine. Clark has argued that following the Famine landlords often used ejectment decrees as a means of compelling recalcitrant tenants to pay their rents or abide by estate rules. This argument is effective for conditions after the Famine, but would seem to have little relevance during the Famine since most landlords realized that such tactics would not work on a destitute population. Consequently, I have assumed that all of the ejectment decrees were carried out, although no doubt such an assumptions results in overestimating the number of legal ejectments. This is probably compensated for by those incidents where tenants were thrown off their holdings without the niceties of legal decrees and by those tenants who fled the country rather than stay to be evicted.

As was the case with the economy, popular politics and rural protest in County Mayo remained on the periphery of national life during the half-century before the Famine. Only with the unexpected landing of the French at Killala in August 1798 did County Mayo have a brief moment in the spotlight of radical politics.

The final year of the land agitation was a period of great despair in Mayo. The harvest of 1880, while improved over the previous years in the core, had not improved in the periphery. The sharp rise in emigration during the year demonstrated the degree to which Mayo people had lost faith in the land system, but it also reflected their distrust in the ability of the Land League to reform that system. Reporting for The Daily News on a land meeting held at Tiernaur, County Mayo in October 1880, Bernard Becker found the people “rather tired than excited by the proceedings.” While there was no decline in the number of land meetings during 1880, there was a noticeable reduction in enthusiasm for the League, with Fenians rather than Land Leaguers often dominating the proceedings. At several meetings in October, including the one attended by Becker, The Connaught Telegraph noted that the League failed to send promised delegations to Mayo meetings, thus contributing to the decline in its support among Mayo farmers.

A further indication of the League's loss of influence in Mayo was the dramatic increase in agrarian crime during the fall of 1880. The murder in late September 1880 of Lord Mountmorris, an unpopular landlord and magistrate, near Clonbur, County Galway, a few miles from the Mayo border, highlighted the serious nature of the new wave of agrarian crime.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century Ireland was convulsed by three periods of agrarian agitation, which together form one of the most important protest movements in recent European history. The first phase began in 1879, when economic crisis brought on by a confluence of bad weather, meager harvests and low prices undermined the post-Famine prosperity of larger farmers while devastating the fragile economies of the smaller farmers. The Land War quickly spread from the West of Ireland, where it began, into the East and South, until by the winter of 1880–1 the Irish National Land League could boast of hundreds of branches comprising over 200,000 members. At its head was Charles Stewart Parnell, who managed to harness the agitation into the service of a revitalized Irish parliamentary party, in the process propelling himself into the leadership of the party at Westminster. An active party in parliament, supported by a massive agitation in Ireland, forced the Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone to act on the Irish land question. Although the resulting Land Bill of 1881 fell far short of abolishing landlordism in Ireland, the ultimate goal of the land movement, it corrected some of the most glaring abuses of landlord power, established land courts to arbitrate rent disputes, and laid the foundation for the transfer of land ownership from landlords to working farmers.

The West's Asleep

The Irish Land War began at Irishtown in County Mayo on 20 April 1879. By summer much of the county was enveloped in an agitation consisting of Sunday rallies with fiery speeches and militant resolutions. It was a heady time, when gaily dressed men and women marched to rallies in military formation, following pike-carrying horsemen and local bands playing patriotic airs. They cheered lustily the most inflammatory anti-landlord speeches and listened attentively to balladeers lament their plight and joyfully affirm their new militancy. Yet this air of festivity could not mask the increased foreboding of Mayo people that the economic distress of the previous two years would soon turn into a full-fledged famine.