The United Irish League (UIL) was a nationalist political party in Ireland, launched 23 January 1898 with the motto "The Land for the People". Its objective to be achieved through agrarian agitation and land reform, compelling larger grazier farmers to surrender their lands for redistribution among the small tenant farmers. Founded and initiated at Westport, County Mayo by William O'Brien, it was supported by Michael Davitt MP, John Dillon MP, who worded its constitution, Timothy Harrington MP, John O'Connor Power MP and the Catholic clergy of the district.Miller, David W.: Church, State and Nation in Ireland 1898–1921 pp.19–28, Gill & Macmillan (1973) By 1900 it had expanded to be represented by 462 branches in twenty-five counties.O'Brien, Joseph V.: p.112
Background In 1895 William O'Brien retired from Parliament and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in the wake of the Parnell split, by which the party became fragmented into three separate networks of local organisation—the Parnellite Irish National League, the Dillionite anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation and the Healyite Peoples Right's Association.Miller, David: p.17 O'Brien had become disillusioned with the internal party quarrels and its failure to rouse the people to a new sense of involvement with national goals. After O'Brien had withdrawn to the West of Ireland he experienced at first hand in his Mayo exile the plight of the peasant tenant farmers and landless labourers, their distressed hardship trying to eke out an existence in its rocky landscape. In contrast, the grazier ranches on the rich plains of counties Mayo, Roscommon and Galway were in the hands of local town shopkeepers, retired policemen, and other middle-class Irish elements. They were, according to O'Brien, the real infernal evils, the so-called grasslands-grabbers, from whom the small tenant farmers were obliged to rent land for their needs. O'Brien saw the necessity to tackle the owners of these grazing ranches. He wanted to have the lands redistributed, a new idea at the time.
The land agitations during the 1880s saw the introduction of the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act 1885, also known as the Ashbourne Act, which helped to eliminate the old cry of "land-grabbers" but since the 1890s the cry was supplemented by "grass-grabbers". O'Brien thus began to take the first steps in his new campaign of agrarian agitation that would ultimately establish peasant proprietorship. This prompted him to call for the introduction of a Land Bill with a provision for the compulsory purchase of untenanted grazier-ranches for distribution among tenants. The failure of the Conservative Government to provide for compulsory purchase under Balfour's 1891 Land Act, convinced O'Brien that something more than Parliamentary oratory was needed to encourage official circles to attend to the needs of the people.O'Brien, Joseph V.: p.107
Objectives The decline in population since the Great Famine had been accompanied by the conversion of previously cultivated land into large grazing ranches, so that in many areas most of the local population was still crowded on tiny, uneconomical holdings within sight of open, untilled fields.Miller, David: p. 18 At the very place in Westport where in 1879 Parnell once launched the Irish Land League, and in response to the near-famine of 1897–98, O'Brien established a new organisation, the United Irish League (UIL) in January 1898 under the banner of "The Land for the People". The League had as its prime declared object the breaking up of the large grassland farmers, by compelling them to surrender their lands voluntarily to the Congested Districts Board, established by Balfour in 1891, for redistribution among the tenants of smaller agricultural holdings. It was largely welcomed even among some of the clergy while the authorities on the other hand kept the new movement under close observation. Actually, O'Brien put more life into the country in the first six months of the League than the Nationalist party had aroused in years, after widespread agrarian agitation recommenced in 1898.
The clergy in the district around Westport and Newport, County Mayo promoted the League with considerable zeal, one parish priest called for a branch to hunt the grabbers and Scottish graziers out of the country. Elsewhere the clergy were in no hurry to sanction the League's agitation. Except for Archbishop McEvilly of Tuam, who expressed sympathy for the goals of its agitation.Miller, David: p.20 By September 1899 the League had spread to the extent that all six Connacht bishops expressed approval of attempts "to create peasant proprietorship with enlarged holdings in the west of Ireland".Miller, David: p.23 The Tuam provincial hierarchy's accommodation of the League up to 1900 reflected predominantly the genuine congruence of their social ideals with the stated aims of the movement.Miller, David: p.18
The League was equally and explicitly designed to reconcile the various parliamentary fragments by bringing them together in a new grass roots organisation around a programme of agrarian agitation, political reform, settlement of the Irish land question and pursuit of Irish Home Rule. William O'Brien was the prime mover, and the difficulty of the project can be gauged from the fact that the parliamentary leaders had very different opinions on the land question. Dillon regarded the unresolved land issue as an essential motor for the nationalist home rule movement. O'Brien championed the smallholders against the large graziers while Davitt, whose original idea had been state ownership and agrarian socialism, was not particularly enamoured by peasant proprietorship.Garvin, Tom: The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics: The Reconstruction of Nationalist Politics, 1891–1910 p.102, Gill & Macmillan (2005)
Though O'Brien claimed that his organisation had no political objective, he became intrinsically aware that to further their cause the three split factions of the IPP needed to be re-united. He strongly believed that only agitational politics combined with constitutional pressures, rather than physical force, were the best means of achieving its goals. It was O'Brien's and Davitt's hope that reunion could be forced on the party from the outside, by organising the country and transforming the Irish representation in Parliament through the election of "good men". Dillon became ambivalent about the new association, believing that it would lead to confrontation with the government and endanger the alliance with the Liberals. This marked the first significant strain in the O'Brien-Dillon relationship.
Expansion
Organised by John O'Donnell MP as its general secretary the UIL performed extremely well and threatened the position of the divided Irish Parliamentary Party. As a consequence, it quickly gained popular support among tenant farmer, its branches sweeping over most of the country, dictating to the demoralised Irish party leaders the terms for reconstruction, not only of the party but the nationalist movement in Ireland. The UIL platform included commitments to such themes as language revival and industrial development. The movement was backed by O'Brien's new newspaper The Irish People (Sept. 1899 – Nov. 1903). In it he declared that the new League was the people's organisation and that the people, and not the politicians, should be its base. Its organisation included an elaborate representative structure linked to a National Directory. This threat to the divided factions of the IPP began a reunification among MPs, led from above, to counter the UIL threat growing up from below.
The League immediately took up the issue of land redistribution, which the Irish Land League had campaigned on two decades earlier, but had been sidelined after the IPP split into the declining Irish National League and the Irish National Federation. The League's first electoral target was the county council elections under the new revolutionary Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898. The Act broke the power of the landlord ascendancy dominated "Grand Juries", for the first time passing absolute democratic control of local affairs into the hands of the people through elected Local County Councils. Next to full Home Rule a no more remarkable concession to popular rights and economic reconstruction.
The creation of the new councils had a significant effect on Ireland as it allowed local people to take decisions affecting themselves. The county and the sub-county District Councils created a political platform for proponents of Irish Home Rule, displacing Unionist influence in many areas. The enfranchisement of local electors allowed the development of a new political class, creating a significant body of experienced politicians who would enter national politics in Ireland in the 1920s, and increase the stability of the transitions to the parliaments of the Irish Free State.
The first local government elections under the Act were held in the spring of 1899 when the Leagues' candidates swept the field and Nationalist county and district councillors began to conduct the local administrative functions hitherto performed by landlord-dominated grand-juries. In some areas such as county Cork, where long standing trade union and labour traditions existed, the electorate tended to adhere to representatives of their allegiances. The depth of support for labour was particularly displayed in Mid-Cork, no doubt due to the growth of another organisation, the Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA), assiduously cultivated by D. D. Sheehan the then editor of the Skibbereen based newspaper, The Southern Star, who assured that UIL and ILLA branch reports were given weekly press coverage, crucial for the expansion and growth of the UIL in Cork.O'Donovan, John: Class, Conflict, and the United Irish League in Cork, 1900–1903 in SAOTHAR 37 pp.19–29, Journal of the Irish Labour History Society pp.20–21, (2012) The existence of these two organisations, the UIL centred on popular broad-nationalism, the ILLA based on 'labour nationalism' at first apparently corroborative of one another, would within a decade ultimately lead to self-destructive class-tensions, schisms and divisions.O'Donovan, John: pp.26–27
The UIL tactic at the time of setting the have-nots against the haves naturally appealed to the self-interest of the simpler peasants and was the main reason for the rapid spread of the movement. By April 1900 the League's listing showed 462 branches, representing between 60,000 and 80,000 members in twenty five counties. Within two years O'Brien's UIL was by far the largest organisation in the country, comprising 1150 branches and 84,355 members.Garvin, Tom: table p. 101
Party re-united
Around 1900 O'Brien, an unbending social reformer and agrarian agitator, was the most influential and powerful figure within the nationalist movement, although not formally its leader. The period was marked by considerable political development in which Davitt had been of great help during the crucial years of the League's existence, but in February, worn out and ill, he left for abroad. The settlement of the party leadership question now focused on the two most important men in Irish politics, O'Brien and Redmond. The initiative seemed to lie with O'Brien, yet Redmond had the prestige of being the Irish party leader. O'Brien was not in the true sense a politician, he possessed great popular gifts, but lacked that will to power which is the hallmark of the politician.