CHAPTER 1

A Tradition of Violence: Agrarian Agitation, 1910–18

This chapter examines land agitation in Galway before the rise of republican militancy and the extent to which elaborate communal and associational structures existed through which the rural poor exerted considerable influence over their social and economic ‘betters’. As Tony Varley has shown, the cessation of land redistribution by the Congested Districts Board (CDB) for the duration of the First World War contributed to the economic desperation of the rural poor and ‘the war impinged greatly on how hard, and by what means, western nationalists were prepared to press for redistributive land reform’.¹ Fergus Campbell has highlighted the formative influence of land hunger among the rural poor on the subsequent development and character of the republican movement in County Galway and the transformative role of land agitations.² It is instructive, therefore, to examine the scale, nature and evolution of land agitation in the years prior to the widespread emergence of militant republicanism.

A common theme of the literature on peasant societies is the dislocation that rural communities experience with the advance of agricultural commercialisation that undermines traditional institutions including bonds between peasants and their economic masters.³ The period covered in this study should have been one of opportunity for the rural poor, many of whom had reason to hope that they would benefit from an acceleration in land division, yet, the suspension of land redistribution during the War heightened the sense of disappointment and desperation among small farmers, just as steadily rising prices increased the profits of middling farmers. This contributed to an acute sense of alienation from and disaffection with the machinations of the state, principally the Estate’s Commission and the CDB, both of which were charged with redistributing estates of land, and the sense of moral outrage felt by many communities was summed up by the refrain of western agitators – the road for the bullock and the land for the people!

In terms of the development of Sinn Féin in rural districts of east Galway, Campbell has asserted that, ‘far from being established on the basis of the “Home Rule tradition”, Sinn Féin emerged from the radical agrarian and republican political culture of [Thomas] Kenny’s secret society’.⁴ While the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and agrarian secret societies were separate and distinct phenomena, Campbell’s research has demonstrated how the IRB was closely involved in land agitation in Galway for many years. The police described the main area of IRB influence at this time as, ‘all along the Railway line right up to Tuam and for a few miles on each side of the line. Then again in Galway, just touching places along the line to Clifden and fairly active at Leenane and Letterfrack.’⁵ Campbell has stated that the ‘Galway Secret Society’ owed its origins to an offshoot of the violent revolutionary movement, The Invincibles, started in Galway in 1881 and was blamed by police for a number of agrarian murders in the county in the 1880s.⁶ Under blacksmith Thomas Kenny from the village of Craughwell, the society grew to have a presence throughout the county and its influence became considerable. The society’s main aim was the redistribution of grazing land among the rural poor and this represented a continuum in the centrality of agrarian secret society influence in Galway from the land struggle in the nineteenth century through to the struggle for independence in the twentieth. Through all manner of intimidation, including attacks on property and animals, assault and even murder, the society exercised a great deal of control in east Galway, particularly in the hinterland between Athenry, Craughwell and Loughrea.

The defining feature of agriculture in Connacht has always been the scarcity of economically viable land and the 1903 and 1909 Land Acts did not address the prevalence of uneconomic holdings among the rural poor.⁷ The new legislation did little to further the creation of an economically viable class of small farmers in very impoverished districts because the amount of good land available for distribution was so small and the number of tenants so numerous. The sheer impossibility of satisfying so many land-hungry tenants in areas where land was poor heightened the desperation of potential claimants and fuelled the violence that characterised agrarian disputes.⁸ As Varley has noted, resolving the inherent blight of rural poverty could not be resolved by large-scale land redistribution as the abundance of uneconomic farms combined with the predominance of poor land meant that despite the vast process of land redistribution which the state had embarked upon, the potential benefits would always be heavily constricted in the west.⁹

Counties Galway and Clare were exceptional in the opening decades of the twentieth century for the degree of violence over land. The Connacht Tribune declared in an editorial in March 1915:

The second main factor [after drunkenness] that leads to unrest in the County is the delay in the agrarian settlement of certain districts. Unfortunately this leads to evils by no means directly connected with the land problem, for there is no disguising the fact that instances have occurred where reckless irresponsible men have made so-called agrarian emancipation the cloak for acts of outrage that bring disgrace and shame upon the whole community. Men of this class are a distinct danger to the country and can in no way serve the high purpose they protest to advocate. Their spurious patriotism, behind which they shelter personal motives, is by no means new.¹⁰

Land redistribution

Galway was remarkable for the volume of land transferred from large landowners to small tenants under consecutive land acts. In terms of the amount of land transferred by the state under the 1903 and 1909 Land Acts, Galway ranks a clear first, when any number of categories is considered. Under the 1903 Land Act, 166,507 acres of land was transferred in the county to small tenants from November 1903 to March 1918.¹¹ This figure equates to just under the entire amount transferred in the province of Munster (169,988) or the amount transferred in all of Ulster and Leinster combined (90,138 and 80,774 acres respectively). In terms of allotments of untenanted land, i.e., grassland previously given over to the grazing of sheep and cattle, the figures are even more remarkable with a total of £731,071 advanced by the state under the combined 1903 and 1909 Land Acts up to March 1918.¹² In County Roscommon, where the next highest amount of money was allocated, the government invested £118,188 and in no other county was more than £100,000 allotted, with Galway dwarfing counties like Clare by a figure of roughly ten to one.¹³

The ongoing fracturing of social class facilitated by land redistribution coalesced with the rise of the shopkeeper/grazier as a social and economic force and the displacement of landlords from the upper tiers of the economic structure.¹⁴ The land issue became reconfigured as a sizable rural proletariat, who were unable to take advantage of successive land acts, were exploited by the emergence of a new class of graziers who increasingly replaced landlords as the main targets for agitation by the rural poor.¹⁵ Graziers were farmers who owned, or more often leased, large grassland farms or ‘ranches’, stocking them with cattle and sheep. This agrarian class had the capital to outbid smaller farmers for available land under the predominant eleven-month lease system and the rural poor blamed graziers for denying them access to land – creating a society, the poor frequently claimed – in which bullocks were valued over people. Many of the old Galway gentry families, such as the Mahons of Ahascragh, who sold their estates to the state over the previous decades, had retained enough land to become graziers and these farms were often leased to other large farmers.

Fundamental structural changes to the rural economy had been ongoing since the early nineteenth century and a relentless decline in crop acreage in the west testified to a formative switch from tillage farming to pastoral farming among landowners of all sizes. Crop acreage in Connacht decreased by 65 per cent from 1851 to 1914, representing a decrease of 235,128 acres given over to the grazing of sheep and cattle.¹⁶ Pastoral farming was less labour intensive, provided little seasonal employment and was historically resented by the rural poor with clearances and the displacement of the role of the agricultural labourer seen as a function of the unstoppable advance of grazerism. The relentless rise in the amount of land under hay across the country since the Famine, with an increase in 1,059,776 acres between 1851 and 1914, is testimony to the unstoppable dominance of grassland farming.¹⁷ The preference for sheep and cattle over tillage was not confined to strong farmers and the emergence of a formative class of sturdy smallholders in Galway is attested to by the small but significant growth in agricultural credit associations.¹⁸

While lacking dialectical sophistication, social and economic tension between broadly defined social groups remained a formative feature of a rural society increasingly defined by the ranks of the class of sturdy smallholders who had replaced large landowners as the dominant social group in the rural economy.¹⁹ There were almost 17,000 households living off less than five acres of land in Connacht in 1914 with 40,110 families surviving on farms of between five and fifteen acres and 35,695 families occupying farms of between fifteen and thirty acres.²⁰ As Table 5 indicates, at the bottom of rural society in Galway in 1914 were a sizable minority of farmers/labourers occupying 2,350 plots of less than one acre of land and 2,942 plots consisting of less than five acres. These landholders supplemented their incomes with seasonal work, casual labour and remittances. The most numerous class of land holdings in the county constituted the ranks of the small farmers and plots consisting of between 5 and 15 acres totaling 9,658 farms, with plots of between 15 and 30 acres comprising 8,990 farms. Middling and strong farmers constituted a significant social group with 4,518 plots of between 20 and 50 acres and 2,353 plots of between 50 and 100 acres. Large farms or ‘ranches’ occupied a formative economic position with 865 farms of between 100 and 200 acres; there were an additional 465 farmers who occupied farms of between 200 and 500 acres. A minority of landholders held farms of a vastly greater scale with 273 landowners occupying farms of over 500 acres, testifying to the continuing saliency of landlordism.

For the rural poor, the eleven-month land lease was synonymous with the increasing marginalisation of the agricultural labourer. As the regulations in the government’s land acts only applied to leases of one year or more, eleven-month leases were excluded from government stipulations. Occupiers leasing under the eleven-month system could be evicted without notice and did not gain formal tenancy of their farms, thus, a spiral of economic marginalisation based on access to land led to an increasing concentration of economically valuable grassland in the hands of the relatively small number of farmers. The system was most prominent in counties Roscommon, Galway and Clare, and in parts of the midlands, including Kildare and Westmeath. In 1915, Meath had the most land rented under the eleven-month system nationwide with 73,038 acres, with Galway a close second with 72,801 acres.²¹ Crucially, Meath did not have as high a number of smallholders as Galway and agrarian violence was not a significant feature. Better comparisons with similar sized counties like Mayo with 30,449 acres and Tipperary with 20,146 acres highlight the dominance of the grazing system in Galway where over twice that amount of land was leased under eleven-month leases.²²

Historically, the prevalence of this system, which excluded thousands of small tenants from access to land, had been a major source of turmoil and violence. Localised campaigns against individual graziers were a recurring phenomenon in the opening decades of the century and frequently involved considerable violence, including intimidation, the maiming of beasts and people, burnings and shootings.²³ The failure to develop a precise classification of what was contemporaneously labelled by the authorities as ‘outrage’, without analysing the nature, form and causes of these disturbances has obscured the complexity of the phenomena. As both Campbell and Terence Dooley have shown, rather than viewing agrarian agitation as the opportunism of a greedy peasantry, these manifestations of crisis among the rural poor involved a level of crude sophistication which cannot be dismissed as mere ‘unrest’.²⁴

Galway, Clare and Roscommon consistently featured in police statistics as the most violent centres of agrarian agitation. In terms of crimes against property from 1908 to 1912, Galway ranked second nationally, behind Clare, once the major metropolitan centres of Dublin and Belfast are excluded.²⁵ When the exact type of offence is contextualised, the remarkable level of a particular kind of violence in the county becomes apparent. In 1914, Galway ranked first nationally for convictions for ‘intimidation by threatening letter’ with seventy convictions, with Mayo, the second highest, having a mere eighteen convictions.²⁶ In terms of malicious injury to property, Galway ranked second behind Belfast with sixteen convictions, while in terms of convictions for ‘assaulting dwelling houses by firing shots into them’, Galway ranked first nationally with nineteen of the forty-five convictions nationwide. These types of crimes were associated with agrarian agitation and should not be extrapolated into an extraordinary propensity for ‘ordinary violence’ in the county, as for other crimes such as larceny, drunkenness and riot, the figures for Galway are unremarkable.

Men imprisoned for their role in agrarian disputes were frequently treated as heroes upon their release. After being released from custody in Galway jail for a riot at an anti-grazier demonstration near Clifden, land agitator, P.J. Wallace told a crowd of supporters, ‘all the CDB succeeded in doing was looking after and giving jobs to broken down military colonels and land agents and sending ladies around to teach people how to cook eggs, paying more attention to bulls, boars and rams than poor people’.²⁷ William O’Malley, MP for Connemara, had been a trenchant critic of the CDB. In November 1914, as the new members of the Board were being considered for their five-year term, O’Malley wrote to the CDB requesting that a Galway member be appointed. Decrying the difficulties faced by tenants in what it described as the ‘agricultural slums’ of Galway, the Connacht Tribune echoed O’Malley’s sentiments, complaining that western tenants were ‘too often made pawns of purely experimental measures by the Board’.²⁸

To understand changes in popular collective action in Western Europe over the last three centuries, historian Charles Tilly analysed the effect on collective violence of major structural transformations such as urbanisation and industrialisation.²⁹ The social organisation of groups contending for power in western European countries changed over the nineteenth century and the nature and targets of their goals altered accordingly. There was a decline in collective violence by small communal groups, either struggling for power with one another or trying to resist the centralisation of power in nation states, in favour of a transition to collective violence that erupts as broadly based interest groups, organised associationally, within the structures of the political parties and voluntary associations, seeking to influence the state and make claims to rights not previously enjoyed. In Connacht, collectivities composed of the rural poor traditionally sought to ‘regain’ access to land popularly perceived to have been theirs prior to the Cromwellian confiscations of the seventeenth century. In the imagination of the rural poor, ‘grazierism’ and landlordism had no legitimacy and the agrarian agitators were righting an historical injustice perpetrated on their ancestors.

Writing about the Irish Land War of 1879–82, Samuel Clark applied Tilly’s model to rural unrest in nineteenth-century Ireland.³⁰ He concluded that collective action had begun to change significantly in Ireland during the nineteenth century. Active collectivities had become less local and more often national in their scope, less often re-active and more often pro-active in their aims, and less communal and more often associational, in their organisational basis and structure. The oath-bound agrarian combinations and feuding factions of the pre-Famine period tended to be highly localised, but as the century progressed, there was a noticeable transition away from this type of inherently local collective action to broader national collective action involving national movements such as the Fenians, the Land League and the United Irish League.³¹

Numerous examples of all three categories of collective action identified by Tilly – associational, communal and competitive – were active in Galway during the years immediately preceding the rise of militant nationalism. Small campaigns, which were communal in character, were based on bonds of extended kinship within small districts. Larger agitations that were associational in character were prominent in the hinterland between Ballinasloe, Loughrea and Portumna, and were organised within the structures of the United Irish League. The vast Ashtown, Clanricarde and Clonbrock estates were divided into numerous dispersed portions in the north and east of the county and were the focus of complex and concerted campaigns by tenants for a number of decades. The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) supported these campaigns with priests and MPs providing crucial support. Feuds between small farmers and tenants, which had their origins in competing interpretations of rights and entitlements to land, constituted a significant source of violence. In the period 1913–16, feuds between organised factions took place at Boyhill and Graige Abbey, near Athenry; in Lackagh village in the parish of Turloughmore; around the village of Craughwell; and in the Riverville and Bookeen districts that previously comprised the large Dunsandle estate. These feuds over how land was to be divided or had already been divided to the dissatisfaction of local parties frequently involved sustained violence, aggravated by the abundance of local knowledge about the whereabouts of potential targets in inherently ‘neighbourly’ disputes.

‘Thoroughly organised and quite unscrupulous’: communal agitations

Communal collectivities composed of groups of small tenants bound together by intimate bonds of family and townland frequently sprang up on landed estates in frustration at landowners’ refusal to sell their land to the CDB for division. In a parish such as Athenry, numerous communal agitations were simultaneously active, with small groups of tenants targeting different landlords in their respective vicinities. The bounds of communal collectivities did not generally extend beyond neighbouring townlands and there is scant evidence of co-operation between agitators involved in separate disputes. During the early years of the revolution in Galway, several communal agitations were active in the Athenry district with long-running agitations at Moorpark, Tiaquin and Colemanstown.³² The police noted the tension in the district in the summer of 1914: ‘land hunger is very keen around Athenry and the forces of disorder there are thoroughly organised and quite unscrupulous’.³³ As Fergus Campbell has highlighted, these agitations often had the support of local IRB members and an overlap in terms of membership existed with the authorities noting in February 1915: ‘these secret societies around Athenry and Loughrea, if not actually IRB circles, are believed to be under the control of that organisation and work in connection with the Estates Commissioners and the UIL [United Irish League] in furthering agitation.’³⁴

The violence employed by communal collectivities involved a considerable degree of crude sophistication and as conflicts between tenants and landowners escalated, an intensification in the level of pressure employed by tenants followed recognisable patterns. Communal agitations generally commenced with a formal delegation of tenants to the landowner. The intense ‘smallness’ of the groups was a common feature, as too large a number of competing claims for inclusion in any subsequent division became inherently problematic. When landowners refused to concede to their tenants wishes and give up their land to the relevant state board for division, an escalation of coercion, often lasting many years, frequently commenced. Campaigns by tenants often commenced with the invoking of a boycott of the landowner, extending to his workmen, his family and any merchants or tradesmen who interacted with them. When local communities commenced agitations, the UIL frequently offered moral support. James Vallely of the Letterfrack UIL explained the position of his party in relation to a boycotted landowner at Tullycross: ‘Graziers were surely something they were all striving to be rid of, but certainly a grabber was a still more loathsome creature. He was something to be despised and shunned by all decent and respectable people. Thank God Connemara would soon be rid of all grabbers and graziers and the members of the branch should feel proud that they were involved in such work.’³⁵ Boycotts were generally adhered to by the wider rural community and were powerful instruments of communal coercion. Landowner Walter Joyce told a meeting of landowners in Galway in 1914 that because of a boycott by tenants of his estate, ‘I have lost my labourers and have great difficulty in working a farm of over 1,400 acres for the last four years. I have to go a distance of nine miles to draw coal and it takes a large force of police to protect me. When I go to mass, I and my family have to be protected by forty policemen.’³⁶

As campaigns wore on, cattle and sheep drives involving the scattering of a landowner’s stock represented an escalation in hostilities, with drives often forming festive occasions with large crowds, ‘rough music’ and fife and drum bands cheering the drivers on. Repeated cattle drives inevitably provoked the police into establishing a permanent police presence on boycotted farms which made open confrontation between agitators and landowners more difficult. While wider associational collectivities usually refrained from more extreme violence, smaller communal collectivities frequently escalated their campaigns at this point with threatening letters, the digging of graves outside homes, arson and assaults on farm workers forming part of a pattern of intimidation. The knocking of stone walls, the spiking of meadows, the gouging of animals and the arson of outhouses or farm equipment was frequently resorted to as such disputes wore on.

Communal campaigns were facilitated by the police’s inability to secure criminal convictions in cases of agrarian violence and at the Galway assizes in March 1908, the police secured only two of the twenty-six cases brought for conviction.³⁷ In extreme cases, gun attacks on landowners and farm workers represented the most serious phase in tenant campaigns. A long running communal agitation was active in Athenry against landowner Frank Shawe-Taylor of Moorpark, which lasted seven years and culminated in Shawe-Taylor’s murder in March 1920. In March 1913, a tenants’ deputation requested a meeting with Shawe-Taylor to ‘convey the strength of feeling’ among the tenants of the district that he surrender his farm of untenanted grazing land to the CDB.³⁸ He allegedly consented to give up 249 acres of the farm, but this offer proved unacceptable to the tenants who were resolute that the whole farm be sold. The police noted, ‘the people feel it wasn’t really a genuine offer, but made for the purpose of trying to fool them, hence his unpopularity’.³⁹

Shawe-Taylor’s determination to resist the demands of the tenants led to repeated threats against him and weeks after the initial deputation he was placed under constant police protection.⁴⁰ As no local would work on the estate, farm workers from the Property Defense Association had to be brought in from the north of Ireland and police were forced to keep track of all changes of personnel on the farm. The agitators’ threats were not idle rhetoric and in April 1914, a malicious fire destroyed an extensive collection of out-houses and farm equipment.⁴¹ The subsequent claim for compensation, for what local people claimed was an accidental fire, heightened ill feeling and in June, he sought £600 compensation at Tuam quarter sessions. The court was told that a man who sold him oats had his house burned down and his brother’s home fired into.⁴² In March 1915, a herd on the farm was brutally assaulted and a man subsequently sentenced to six months in Galway jail for the attack.⁴³ The judge noted the defendant would have got twelve months but for a character reference provided by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) sergeant in Athenry.⁴⁴ The willingness of a police officer to stand as character witness for a defendant in an assault case in which the victim sustained brain damage was indicative of the local RIC’s sympathy in the case. Four months later, another workman from the estate was viciously beaten while attending a hurling match in Athenry, being struck about the head by a group of men with hurls.⁴⁵

With increased police surveillance, the agitation at Moorpark died down for some time; however, Shawe-Taylor continued to be boycotted for a further seven years. In the ensuing period, the community rigidly observed the boycott and the Shawe-Taylor family remained protected by a constant police escort. The land at Moorpark could only be farmed with the assistance of the Property Defence Association with workmen living within the confines of the property protected by a permanent police hut. The boycott was punctuated by sporadic acts of violence and the grim determination of the community left the family in no doubt about their isolation and vulnerability. The agitation came to a conclusion with the killing of Shawe-Taylor on 2 March 1920; the shooting took place amidst a resurgent campaign of agrarian violence.

‘Standing menaces to the peace’: associational campaigns

There were three major associational land agitations active in Galway at the commencement of the First World War, directed against three of the county’s largest landowners: the Marquis of Clanricarde, who held a vast estate in the district between Loughrea and Portumna in south east Galway; Lord Ashtown of Woodlawn, whose estate was situated in the Kilconnell district between Loughrea and Ballinasloe; and Lord Clonbrock of Ahascragh, whose estate was in the Ballinasloe hinterland. All three agitations were supported by the UIL, the clergy and local MPs and involved significant levels of intimidation, cattle driving and sporadic battles with the police.

As well as hunger for land, the tenants’ campaigns were fuelled by elements of religious and political resentment. In 1901, Ashtown fired his Catholic workmen replacing them with Scottish planters who were subsequently targeted by a boycott by the local herdmens’ association and the UIL.⁴⁶ Likewise in 1903, there were sixty-four Scottish and northern planters in possession of amalgamated plots on the Clanricarde estate from which Catholic tenants had been evicted between 1886 and 1914.⁴⁷ All of the three landowners were advanced unionists and Clonbrock was a leading officer in the County Galway Unionist Association and the Irish Landowners Convention. Ashtown held views of the most extreme kind, producing his own loyalist news-sheet, Grievances From Ireland; he acted as President of the fringe group, the Imperial Loyalist Federation.⁴⁸

Herbert George de Burgh, the second Marquis of Clanricarde, succeeded to the title of the third Earl of Clanricarde in April 1874. Clanricarde was a figure of hatred in Galway, where his vast estate of 52,000 acres was scattered across 128 separate plots.⁴⁹ The Times of London famously described him as ‘a danger to society’, for his campaign of evictions in the winter of 1886 that led to the imprisonment of approximately 160 people.⁵⁰ Clanricarde never actually set foot on his family estate in Galway but his name remained infamous after the notorious Woodford evictions.⁵¹ In April 1914, the Connacht Tribune, under the banner, ‘Two Snapshots of the Loneliest Landlord Peer of the Realm’, published ‘sensational shots of the man behind the mask’, proclaiming: ‘The studies are as remarkable as they are pathetic, although throughout Ireland, little sympathy will be felt … Still standing aloof, defiant, possessing not even the relenting powers of the pharaohs of old. He has driven a coach and horses through all laws, human and Divine.’⁵² Upon his death in April of 1916, the Irish Independent contended that Clanricarde was, ‘probably, the most hated man in Ireland, and friendless, even amongst his own class’:⁵³ ‘Clanricarde was almost the last of his race, the race of absentee landlords, whose neglect of their duties produced much of the misery of Ireland and the distraction of England in the last two centuries.’⁵⁴ The Connacht Tribune, in a lengthy and unforgiving death notice stated, ‘Today, the people remain to inherit his acres, another sits on the throne from which he has been called to higher account and glory no longer guards Clanricarde’s grave.’⁵⁵

While the Clanricarde estate comprised a vast patchwork of farms scattered across the south and east of County Galway, there were four major portions of the estate which were perceived as distinct units. The Woodford and Derrybrien portions of the estate lay on the slopes and uplands of the Slieve Aughty Mountains and consisted of very poor agricultural land – being mostly scrubland, bog, wood and mountain. The Portumna and Loughrea portions of the estate, while of mixed quality, generally contained better agricultural farms and comprised a mixture of good and wet grassland, suitable for the grazing of cattle and sheep. Over half of the overall estate was made up of holdings not exceeding a valuation of £7 and many were held in intermixed plots with tenants’ holdings consisting of detached patches scattered among other farms.⁵⁶

The tenants’ struggle that began on the estate in the winter of 1886 lasted several decades and Clanricarde’s infamy contributed to political demands by the IPP for legislative reforms that gave new compulsory powers of purchase to the state in 1909.⁵⁷ In total, 186 tenants on the estate were evicted for non-payment of rent with 120 eventually reinstated in their old holdings or given new holdings; 66 of the evicted tenants were never re-instated.⁵⁸ The estate was the scene of a prolonged and bitter campaign of boycott and intimidation involving numerous bombings, several murders and continuous low-level warfare against the police, process servers, Clanricarde’s workmen and agents and the ‘Clanricarde planters’, who had taken possession of most of the 254 farms from which tenants had been evicted.⁵⁹

The tenants’ campaign centred around the northern planters who had been brought in to replace the evicted tenants and occupied enlarged holdings. Along with the Property Defence Association’s workmen, they were the subject of a widespread boycott and were unable to purchase any farm materials or food stuffs in the surrounding towns of Ballinasloe, Loughrea and Portumna. The planters were unable to farm their land effectively as they could not hire labour and shopkeepers would not serve them and only the assistance of ‘emergency men’ and the protection of the police prevented more drastic measures being taken against them.

Contempt for the planters was echoed by Galway’s MPs. In anticipation of legislation designed to address the issue of evicted tenants in 1904, Galway MP John Roche told the House of Commons that the government’s treatment of small tenants in south east Galway was reminiscent of, ‘what might be expected from a three card trick man on a race course’.⁶⁰ With regard to the evicted tenants, he claimed, ‘there would never be a settlement of the land question in Ireland until they were re-instated in their old homes and that there would never be peace in the country until the question of the evicted tenants was settled to the satisfaction of all concerned’.⁶¹ The grazing lands on the Clanricarde estate, from which the tenants had been evicted, was in the hands of ‘planters’, he told the house, ‘many of whom had never paid a penny of rent, although houses had been built for them at considerable expense. There ought to be no difficulty in getting rid of those people and in bringing about a settlement of the evicted tenants question.’⁶² While statements made under parliamentary privilege in the House of Commons need to be viewed with some circumspection, Roche stated:

During the past twenty years, more than half the number of planters upon the Clanricarde estate, after enjoying holdings made up of nine or ten holdings grouped together, had walked away without paying a penny of rent. One of these planters, a gentleman named Flower, got nine of these holdings, and a house was built for him on that farm costing about £400. He stopped there for about three or four years and during that time, not one four footed beast of any sort or description did he put upon the land. Mr. Flower paid no rent, and when he was pressed for it, being unable to pay, he thought the best thing to do was to clear out.⁶³

Under the terms of the Wyndham Land Act of 1903, tenants or their representatives who had been evicted over the previous twenty-five years were eligible to apply to purchase their original holdings. If they could not successfully regain their old farms, they were eligible for inclusion in the division of alternative estates, generally in the same locality from which they had been evicted. Despite these procedures, there were several problems that the evicted tenants from the Clanricarde estate faced. The allotment of Clanricarde evictees to plots of land on neighbouring estates was problematic due to the number of cases involved. Evicted tenants were resented by neighbouring tenants; they feared that evicted tenants from neighbouring districts would be favoured above sitting tenants, whilst sitting tenants expected that they would be prioritised in any land division. Martin Finnerty, a local UIL leader in south Galway, admitted before the Royal Commission on Congestion in 1908 that there had been a scheme proposed to bring evicted tenants from the Clanricarde estate onto an estate near Woodford, but ‘to say the least, the feeling would not be one of welcome’, as ‘the feeling in the locality is that farmers’ sons should be first’.⁶⁴

The problems faced by evicted tenants were addressed by the 1907 Evicted Tenants Act that gave the Estates Commissioners compulsory powers to acquire land for evicted tenants. However, compulsory purchase was limited and tenanted land, lands subject to land purchase annuities, or demesne land could not be included in any compulsory purchase.⁶⁵ These clauses, if sufficiently exploited by a determined landlord provided adequate loopholes to prevent the state from purchasing portions of estates by compulsion. Following the passage of the Evicted Tenants Act, Clanricarde endeavoured to prevent the application of the powers to the estate. As the Act passed into law, his agent summoned a meeting of the planters on the estate with the object of trying to get them to pledge that they would resist any legislation that might be introduced. Several planters told his agent Edward Shaw-Tener that they were ‘in fact delighted with the legislation’ and ‘would be very glad to take compensation and clear out’.⁶⁶ Shawe-Tener attempted to get the planters to sign a written pledge to resist any change in their status and when this failed, he attempted to split up the 3,938 acres of untenanted land by planting new tenants across the estate so that there would technically be no untenanted land and thus, the estate would be exempt from government legislation.⁶⁷ By 1908, following the successful passage of the Act, the remaining planters on the estate were reported to be protesting against the delay in compensating them caused by Clanricarde’s legal appeals.⁶⁸

The Clanricarde estate was among a number of properties that were the intended targets of the compulsory purchase clause of the government’s 1909 legislation which provided limited compulsory powers of purchase for the first time. The Portumna branch of the Clanricarde tenants wrote to the CDB in February 1910; the letter was accompanied by a memorial signed by 448 tenants, requesting that the compulsory powers of the 1909 Act be put into effect with immediate effect. In December, the CDB authorised its members to take all necessary steps to initiate proceedings for purchase and in 1912, sent a final offer of £269,115 to Clanricarde’s representatives. They received no co-operation from the marquis who unsuccessfully appealed the decision in the House of Lords with the court of appeal eventually fixing the final price at £228,000.⁶⁹ In December 1914, the House of Commons unanimously dismissed, without costs, a final appeal by Clanricarde against the sale. Following the purchase of the estate, ‘the unfortunate mystic, hated by his own class in Ireland’ was, the Connacht Tribune claimed:

A standing menace to the peace with 52,000 acres including the town of Loughrea and other villages that he has never visited. Between 1879 and 1883, 239 families were evicted, and his agent Joyce even went to court to clear his name of the stigma. At a time when nearly all the landlords of Galway were endeavouring to do their duty to the people, Clanricarde was issuing processes and ejectments and preparing the way hard and fast for another campaign.⁷⁰

Clanricarde’s agent Edward Shaw-Tener spent the year in advance of the outcome of the appeal to the House of Lords, pursuing back rents and going to the courts for notices of eviction against tenants across south Galway.⁷¹ The issue of outstanding rents was inherently problematic and in September 1915, the police noted, ‘A certain amount of tension exists at present amongst the tenants on the Portumna portion of the Clanricarde estate. They have in the last few days been called upon by the CDB to pay one year’s rent, due last May. They consider this a hardship as they expected they would not have to pay any rent until the purchase annuities.’⁷²

The impending division of a large estate frequently generated a new phase of organisation within communities as the potential for conflict between tenants over competing entitlements began to loom. The decision of the House of Lords was greeted with jubilation in east Galway where the tenants had been organised on the basis of their local UIL cumainn, as well as the much larger, ‘Loughrea Clanricarde Tenants Committee’ and the ‘Portumna Clanricarde Tenants Committee’. January 1915 saw a new phase of organisation as new tenants’ committees were formed within the districts of Portumna, Killimore, Eyrecourt and Laurencetown prior to the CDB beginning the process of division.⁷³ Outstanding issues included the status of town tenants in relation to the distribution, the position of evicted tenants and their eligibility for inclusion in the division, and conversely, the status of the planters who had taken evicted farms on the estate. A group of tenants had been withholding rent in anticipation of a successful outcome for the CDB in the courts, and at Derrybrien, a combination withholding rent were placed under notice of eviction; the agitation subsequently collapsing when the majority of tenants decided to settle.⁷⁴

While the agitation on the Clanricarde estate demonstrated the potential longevity of such agrarian campaigns, the agitation on the Clonbrock estate illustrates the inherent complexities involved in agitations on large estates encompassing numerous disparate districts and communities. Such agitations inevitably involved a range of separate distinct conflicts against individual graziers who rented land from the landlord on different parts of the estate. These complex campaigns were often pursued with different levels of commitment by separate groups of tenants, and the level of co-operation between various groups across large estates varied.

In 1914, the Clonbrock tenants in east Galway refused to accept their landlord’s initial offer of sale to the CDB and were determined not to settle until the landlord had been stripped of all his land and the graziers who rented from him forced into giving up their leases.⁷⁵ Throughout the campaigns, tenants refused to accept any offers short of their full demands and were prepared to maintain their campaigns over a number of years rather than opt for a quick settlement. The complexities of these campaigns necessitated enormous organisational work, as portions of the estate were spread across many districts, with numerous graziers leasing farms of varying size and quality. Full co-ordination between tenant groups could not be guaranteed and the complexity of organising a united campaign in such circumstances militated against a cohesive estate-wide campaign. The complex web of farms, graziers and tenants involved highlights the convoluted nature of such campaigns and in February 1914, an Estate Commissioners meeting of tenants on the Clonbrock estate at Kilconnell was attended by delegates from the districts of Fohenagh, Ahascragh, Kilrickle, Mullagh, Killure, Quansboro and Cappataggle.⁷⁶ At the Quansboro estate in Mullagh, a large meeting was attended by ninety-nine tenants to discuss the terms of sale of grassland farms in the Abbeygormican and Gurtymadden districts; these consisted of five non-resident grass farms leased by a number of different graziers. The Mullagh UIL leaders advised tenants not to sign any agreement until they got all the grassland on the estate and the tenants unanimously agreed to a united policy.⁷⁷

Later that month, a grazing farm at Abbeygormican had all its stock driven off and police arrested twenty-five men who were subsequently charged with riot and returned for trial.⁷⁸ The arrest of the Abbeygormican cattle drivers did not deter the agitators and the following month at Lonmore near New Inn, stock was driven off the grassland farm of Joseph Colohan with a second drive taking place at Toormore in March leading to the arrest of five men.⁷⁹ Colohan was one of the biggest graziers in the east of the county with large grazing farms at Ballyeighter, Killure, Toormore and Bellvue, and later in the month, his stock was driven at Bellvue with ten men bound to the peace.⁸⁰ The agitation on the Clonbrock estate spread to nearby farms, and in April, fifty men armed with sticks drove sheep off the grazing farm of Thomas Finn at Poppyhill, situated eight miles from Loughrea.⁸¹ As the men involved in the dispute were brought in chains to Galway jail, a party of 170 Irish Volunteers lined the railway platform to cheer them and jeer at the police. In June, the Poppyhill portion of the estate was given over to the agitators on their own terms while the agitation on adjoining lands continued. In August shots were fired into the home of a grazier who was holding a farm of 185 acres at Poppyhill. He had previously surrendered fifty acres to the agitators in 1914 but the tenants were holding out for the entire farm and the Lonmore farm at New Inn and the Abbeygormican grazing farm at Gurtymadden remained under constant police protection.⁸²

January 1915 saw a significant victory for the tenants as Colohan had his police protection lifted after surrendering his farm to the CDB, and in April, the Seagriff portion of the estate was sold to the CDB, ‘signalling another major victory for the local people’.⁸³ The final victory for the tenants was announced in November 1915 when the Estates Commissioners acquired 900 acres of grazing land on the Clonbrock estate at Aughrim.⁸⁴ The Toormore farm of 115 acres occupied by Joseph Colohan, which was driven several times during the previous four years, was included in the division with Colohan allotted a farm of 130 acres in lieu.⁸⁵

The complexities of the agitation on the Clonbrock estate demonstrates the range of groups, districts and tactics involved in tenant campaigns on very large estates constituting a complex array of localised disputes against different graziers on dispersed farms. Some graziers were more determined than others and by applying pressure to the most vulnerable and varying their tactics where necessary, tenants could successfully intimidate graziers into giving up their tenancies, while ensuring that farmers were discouraged from taking leases on newly vacated farms. A successful agitation on one estate could also spread into neighbouring districts. Following the success of the Clonbrock agitation, a public meeting held in July 1915 saw several hundred tenants vow to embark on a similar agitation on the Lawrence and Pollock estate, until, the meeting declared, the landlord and the grazier, ‘were driven from their midst’.⁸⁶

‘Worse than the blacks of darkest Africa’: neighbourly disputes

Violent feuds between tenants over land were characterised by the readiness of organised factions, often bound together by ties of extended kinship, to resort to extreme violence in disputes with their neighbours. Competitive agitations can be classified into two categories: disputes within localities in advance of a division of land by the state where one or more parties was perceived by others as making an unfair claim for inclusion in a division; and disputes between parties following a division of land to the dissatisfaction of one or more parties who believed they had been treated unfairly.⁸⁷

The Dunsandle estate had been the seat of the Daly family located between Loughrea, Athenry and Craughwell. The Dalys had been the dominant political faction in the county during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but with the social and political transformation of Ireland in the latter half of the century, the family’s influence had waned.⁸⁸ Following the death of William Daly, the Dunsandle estate was sold to the Estates Commissioners with large portions of Riverville and Bookeen district divided among the tenants.⁸⁹ Discontent over the manner in which the estate was divided led to a bitter and lengthy feud between organised factions bonded by kinship and a shared conviction they had been discriminated against by the Estates Committee who were alleged to have favoured members of their own extended families in the allocation of land. Between 1913 and 1919, seven of the ten-man Dunsandle Grazing Land Committee were wounded in gun attacks, while during the same period, seven former members of the Kilconieron and Killimordaly Estates Committee, plus two of their supporters, remained under constant police protection.⁹⁰ That so many people in such a small area were accompanied by a constant police patrol and that even these drastic measures failed to prevent attacks attests to the level of violence an unsatisfactory division of land could provoke.

The nature of the division process favoured by the Estates Commissioners differed from that of the CDB and the Dunsandle dispute highlights the inherent flaws in the workings of the Estates Committees whose unsatisfactory handling of the division of estates contributed to feuding. In divisions carried out by the Estates Commissioners, ‘impartial’ farmers were selected to sit on committees that decided on the allocation of plots based on the criteria of need and ability. As previously discussed, in the Athenry region, the police alleged that secret societies worked hand in hand with both the UIL and the Estate Committees, favouring local organised factions in their allocations of land. Serious problems frequently arose when the deliberations of committees were perceived to be unfair or impartial, and due to the nature of the committee system, violent discontent inevitably arose between neighbouring families.

The police concurred with the view that the division at Dunsandle was unjust and noted that violence, ‘is likely to continue until there is a proper division of the lands by the Estates Commissioners or the CDB’.⁹¹ The sheer volume of violent incidents connected with the dispute illustrates the passions provoked by hunger for land between longstanding neighbours. When violent disputes arose, the poor were more vulnerable to the violence of their neighbours than strong farmers; as for tenants who travelled bye-ways on foot or by cart, the eyes of their neighbours were rarely averted and jealousies and resentments could explode at any time.

A dispute similar to the Dunsandle feud existed on the Pollock estate on the Galway–Roscommon border near the village of Creggs; it demonstrated that the clergy were not exempt from the ire of the rural poor when a division of land was deemed unsatisfactory by members of the community. Friction arose in the area after a division of the Pollock estate at Skehard with tenants divided into two factions, one under the Parish Priest Canon Geraghty and one under the farmer William Naughton.⁹² The latter group believed the parish priest had been improperly favoured in the distribution made by the Estates Committee with both sides resorting to violence and intimidation against members of the opposing faction.⁹³ As in the Dunsandle dispute, the fairness of the division was questionable, with the Canon managing to lease 300 acres of land from the estate, prompting the Glenamaddy Board of Guardians to call for an inquiry into the sale.⁹⁴ The police concurred with this view noting, ‘three large farmers who purchased their holdings on this property some years ago have been requested to surrender portions of their lands for division among the local people. The priest pretended he wanted to keep the land to re-divide it but kept it for himself.’⁹⁵

Outrage at the division led to repeated drives of the Canon’s stock and in May 1914, 300 men and women accompanied by a fife and drum band drove cattle as far as Glenamaddy.⁹⁶ Constant police protection became necessary to protect the farm and twelve men were subsequently prosecuted for riot.⁹⁷ Following the incident, a meeting of Skehard tenants was held at Kilbegnet chapel where the Canon explained to an assembled crowd that he only agreed to take the land in order that it might then be divided up among the local poor but, ‘in order to live in peace and concord, and God knows I desire both from the debts of my soul, I have agreed to leave the settlement of this unfortunate misunderstanding to the tenant’s solicitor and to mine’.⁹⁸ Pending the division, Canon Geraghty continued to assert his legal ownership of the land and his entitlement to set the farm to grazing and the situation remained tense until the CDB repossessed the priest’s farm later in the year.⁹⁹

While violence against members of the clergy was rare, jealousy over land could provoke violence against the most vulnerable by relatives and neighbours. In March 1915, the house of John Kelly, an 80-year-old farmer from the Ballinderreen district in south Galway was attacked with gunfire.¹⁰⁰ Nine shots were fired into the cottage and Kelly died from his wounds. The estate on which he lived was in the process of being divided by the CDB and he had previously surrendered twenty-three acres, obtaining six acres from the CDB in return. The police noted, ‘It was probably thought that he still held the twenty-six acres or someone coveted the six he received in exchange.’¹⁰¹ Three men were remanded in Galway jail for trial; however, the police believed, ‘there is a difficulty in getting evidence, as even the relatives of the deceased may be described as hostile’.¹⁰² A week after the murder, the Bishop of Galway Dr Thomas O’Dea addressed a public letter to Father Walsh of Ballinderreen to be read out at all masses in the parish. Anticipating a lack of co-operation with the police, the Bishop condemned the perpetrators as:

Outlaws worse than the blacks of darkest Africa. If any of your people know the perpetrators of this shocking crime, they should at once hand in their names to the police and give evidence against them in court. I repeat that I hold your parish responsible until they show that they are Christians by protesting publicly the horror that they feel at such an outrage perpetrated in their midst.¹⁰³

A similar case only a month later bore parallels to the murder of John Kelly with widespread intimidation and the violation of taboos on the use of violence against the vulnerable. At Loughgeorge, in the parish of Claregalway, the house of Mrs Fox, a widow with a large family of young children, was fired into and her 13-year-old son wounded.¹⁰⁴ Mrs Fox had been in financial difficulties following the death of her husband and was in danger of having to sell her small plot of land. To relieve the situation, it was arranged that the eldest of the Fox daughters would marry a neighbouring farmer who agreed to provide financially for the family with the small farm constituting a dowry. According to the police, the arrangement ‘did not suit the views of certain neighbours who expected, through her difficulties, to eventually secure the lands for themselves’.¹⁰⁵ Mrs Fox had earlier received a series of threatening letters and a local farmer with thirty acres was arrested and charged with the shooting. The arrested man was a cousin of Mrs Fox’s late husband and had hoped to come into possession of the farm after the death of his cousin. During the trial, a neighbour who had initially claimed to have seen the accused fleeing the scene gave evasive answers to evidence and retracted his initial statements. The case subsequently rested on circumstantial evidence including Mrs Fox’s son’s testimony that he had recognised his cousin as the gunman on the night he was shot. Following the withdrawal of the key witness, the accused was released due to lack of evidence.

Power and the poor

In the years preceding the rise of militant republicanism, a tradition of violence and an alternative moral code existed in the rural countryside; it represented sophisticated and longstanding mechanisms through which the seemingly powerless exerted influence over landowners. Far from being anarchic, isolated or random, the rituals of violence employed by collectivities of the poor reflected the long traditions and coda of land agitation and reflected the widespread contempt for petty landlordism. The rural poor in the west of Ireland faced two separate and distinct economic phenomena in relation to land: the dominance of the grazing system that excluded the poor from renting grassland farms in areas where land was profitable, exacerbated by the inadequacy of plots distributed among tenants in areas where land was economically unviable. The widespread sympathy for agitators among the community, the difficulty in prosecuting those involved and the violent disdain for large landowners among the rural poor can be understood in this context.

The saliency of land hunger and the ability of the rural poor to sustain lengthy campaigns of intimidation was an enduring feature of rural society in Galway in the early years of the revolution. Both the rural UIL and the inherently respectable leadership of the IPP provided political and practical support to the groups involved despite the prevalence of agrarian violence and widespread coercion. The prevalence of agrarian violence before the rise of the republican movement, the elaborate and clandestine nature of tenant organisation and the passions that land hunger unleashed were symptomatic of a rural society in which particular forms of violence were tolerated and even admired.

In the Galway countryside, violence worked but the factors that compelled collectivities to reject integration with wider national associations and choose clandestine modes of organisation were complex, multiple and ultimately unclear. The temptation to view agrarian violence as irrational or anarchic is too simplistic and in the context of transitional peasant communities worldwide, the modes of resistance used by the rural poor represented rational survival mechanisms employed by communities that found themselves excluded from the capitalist market for land.¹⁰⁶ These agrarian campaigns conformed to the modes of reaction to economic crisis and exploitation observed in other contemporary transitional peasant societies as the rural poor found themselves excluded once land became a commoditised resource rather than a right.¹⁰⁷ The forms of association, violence and moral justification used by collectivities formed part of an historical continuum of agrarianism and the ferocity, persistence and widespread nature of violent agitations constituted the historical residue of more primitive economic conditions.