Michael Davitt's egalitarian solution to land distribution has never been more remote, writes Diarmaid Ferriter
Michael Davitt died 100 years ago today in a Dublin nursing home at the age of 60. One of the wreaths sent to his funeral service at Clarendon Street Church was from the Jewish community in Ireland.
This was partly in recognition of his robust defence of their integrity in 1904 following sermons in Limerick in which the Redemptorist priest Fr Creagh incited hatred against them for coming to Ireland "to fasten themselves on us like leeches and to draw our blood".
Davitt's response, written in January 1904, included a protest "as an Irishman and as a Catholic, against the spirit of barbarous malignity being introduced into Ireland, under the pretended form of a material regard for the welfare of our workers".
Davitt's intervention in this ugly episode came after he had already denounced the pogroms being directed against Russian Jews, following a journalistic visit there in 1903, and at the beginning of another extraordinarily busy year.
For the next few months, he was in the United States, attempting, among other things, to dissuade congressmen from pursuing an Anglo-American arbitration treaty, on the grounds that it should not be signed in the absence of Irish independence. In June, he travelled to Russia for a second time to report on political and industrial unrest there.
Other political and journalistic crusades during his career incorporated visits to South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Poland and Hungary, where he advocated social reform, nationalism and labour rights.
His sixth and last book, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, was another notable event of 1904, a 700-page tome giving his account of the land struggle of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which has remained an important source for the history of that period. It is the best known of Davitt's books, a treatise on the issue most Irish people will remember him for: his quest to bring about the demise of the landlord class in Ireland and an equitable solution to the problem of Irish land ownership.
The activities of the last few years of his life, which included campaigning for the British Labour Party in the general election of 1906, and defending state-aided, secular education, encapsulate the many strands that punctuated his career as a social activist, journalist, historian and politician. So too, did his prison experiences which led to him being a passionate advocate of penal reform.
Born in Straide, Co Mayo, in 1846, his impoverished family emigrated to Haslingden in Lancashire in 1850 where, seven years later, he lost his right arm in an industrial accident.
The following decade he joined the IRB, and having become a full-time Fenian activist in 1869, was charged with treason-felony and sentenced to 15 years' penal servitude in 1870. Released seven years later, he returned to Ireland and embarked on the crusade for land reform with which his name will forever be associated, establishing the Irish National Land League in 1879. He also initiated the Ladies' Land League, the first political organisation in Ireland led by women.
In his 1981 biography, TW Moody observed that Davitt "was the best loved and most trusted of all the national chiefs of his day", but he also suggested that Davitt felt compelled, despite the complexity of his political life, to retrospectively present it as a self-consistent whole in his autobiographical and history writing.
1882 was a turning point in Davitt's career due to the formation of the Irish National League to replace the Land League he had founded, a development that marked the encroachment of Parnell's Home Rule Party on the land question. It was also the year in which Davitt made his first speech advocating land nationalisation, and he retrospectively dismissed the National League as a "purely parliamentary substitute for a semi-revolutionary movement". It is perhaps the greatest paradox of his career that, while regarded as a national icon and so closely identified with the struggling tenants he sought to champion, his solution to the land question was fundamentally at odds with the Irish love affair with private property.
The usurpation of his leadership by more conservative elements propelled him to campaigns further and wider and more radical, yet he remained loyal to the Home Rule ideal, having abandoned the Fenianism of his youth. He served as an MP for northeast Cork and south Mayo during the 1890s.
There was a certain uneasiness to all this; despite his more socialist beliefs about land ownership, and his labour sympathies, he believed it was necessary to maintain his association with the more conservative of his political contemporaries, but he was an uncomfortable parliamentarian and difficult to categorise politically.
His most recent biographer, Carla King, has accurately observed that "in a sense his career mirrors the interplay of forces that made up the 'Irish Question' in the late 19th century", and that "in the breadth of his vision as an Irish nationalist, social thinker and internationalist, Davitt may fairly be seen as a founding father of Irish democracy".
Some of his contemporaries were dismissive of his political contribution. James Connolly unfairly maintained he was "an unselfish idealist, who in his enthusiasm for a cause gave his name and his services freely at the beck and call of men who despised his ideals". He did much more than that; he managed, by holding together diverse groups and opinions, to set a new agenda and force a fundamental change in land policy, and by extension, in attitudes towards Home Rule.
He also aspired towards an inclusive nationalism.
He was an exceptionally generous man, who lived in relative poverty due to his inability to ignore the material needs of others. It is difficult to have anything but admiration for the devotion he displayed to so many causes, his relentless work rate, his capacity for campaigning and the fact that he was largely self-taught.
Recently, the opponents of the Corrib pipeline insisted their struggle is on a par with Davitt's. His legacy lives on in other ways, not least to demonstrate the fact that, in the 100 years since his death, Ireland has witnessed one of the greatest ironies of its history - the Irish social revolution of the late 19th century, in which the political and social power of the landlords was broken by their tenants, has been replaced by a native class of landowners and speculators, who sometimes exercise their domination of land and the property market in an even more invidious way than the most wretched 19th-century landlords.
The egalitarian solution to land redistribution Davitt sought has never been more remote. Many young Irish people cannot afford to buy houses, while their richer peers have become a landlord class in eastern Europe. Davitt's angry ghost should continue to haunt us.
Diarmaid Ferriter lectures in Irish history at St Patrick's College, DCU