President McAleese did a good's day's work on Thursday last when she visited the town of Haslingden near Manchester, where Michael Davitt spent 20 years of his life after his family emigrated there from Mayo in 1851. This year is the 160th anniversary of Davitt's birth in 1846 and the centenary of his death in 1906. Over his 60 year life he was successively a Fenian, founder of the Land League, prime creator with Parnell of the New Departure in 1879-81 which brought together advanced nationalists, the land agitation and parliamentary struggle and in his later life a tireless parliamentary reformer, labour activist, internationalist, journalist and historian.
Davitt was well described by his biographer, the late Prof. T.W. Moody, in the following terms: "He shed no man's blood. He was the best loved and most trusted of all the national chiefs of his day. His work for British and Irish Labour has never been recognised. All men, especially Irishmen, have reason to honour his memory." Davitt's role was obscured in independent Ireland by his untimely death, his opposition to political violence, his break with the IRB in the early 1880s and with Parnell in 1890-1 and the lingering suspicion of his radicalism among conservative secular and clerical leaders.
He is just as well worth commemorating this year as the leaders of the 1916 Rising. President McAleese vividly recalled the hardship endured by the Davitt family when they arrived in Haslingden after being evicted from their tenant farm. This plebeian background coloured his whole life and attitudes, from the time he lost his arm in a cotton mill at the age of 11, through his enthusiastic self-education in his teenage years, his involvement in the Fenian movement during the 1860s, his imprisonment on arms charges in the 1870s, to his remarkable involvement in the Land League agitation from 1879. The techniques of social struggle he helped invent then - rent strikes, passive resistance, the "boycott" of landlords and their agents, social ostracism - became part of the repertoire of social change throughout the world over the next century, influencing Gandhi and many others.
Davitt wanted to see the famous Land League slogan - "The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland" - expressed through land nationalisation, not peasant proprietorship. That was not to be, as he soon realised. His very success guaranteed that the subsequent national revolutionary movement initiated in 1916 took place within a framework of social conservatism laid down by the land revolution of the previous generation. This historical irony should not obscure Davitt's enduring appeal as a towering figure in the Irish people's search for freedom.