The Garranjames Land League demonstrations of July 1881: labour, land and sand

Two mass demonstrations followed the politically motivated arrest of east Cork farmer Edmond O'Brien and Killeagh shopkeeper John Hyde in July 1881. The first illustrated the intention of Land League leaders to maintain and reinforce the cross-class alliance between tenants and labourers. The second dramatically highlighted the continuing use of sea sand as a fertiliser for grassland.^[1]  

Edmond O'Brien and Garranjames Edmond O'Brien was a substantial figure in the community around the roadside village of Killeagh and the nearby town of Midleton, where he was vice-chairman of the Board of Guardians that ran the local workhouse. Until county councils were established in 1898, the choice of Poor Law administrators provided the only form of popular election – by mostly male ratepayers – in rural areas, and the initials "P.L.G." were a badge of some status.^[2] The respect commanded by O'Brien was not surprising, for his 173-acre (70 hectare) farm at Garranjames was unusual for its size: census reports tabulated anything over fifty acres as a large holding.

Its size was explained by the fact that it was originally, in effect, a detached part of landlord demesne, a farm run directly from a nearby Big House to provide supplies for the family and servants. In Griffith's Valuation (1853) the occupant was named as Richard G. Davis. This was Richard Green Davis, land agent to the de Capell Brooke family of nearby Aghadoe House, who had prospered so mightily (his employers, it seems, were often absentees) that he was able to build his own impressive mansion, Dromdihy, in 1833.^[3] The Garranjames property was about two miles away, close enough to be farmed under the landlord's supervision. Although he was technically the occupier, Davis evidently did not reside on the land, but another member of the family, William Davis, farmed there around 1860.^[4] For a time, Garranjames was occupied and probably also owned by another local gentleman, Robert Harding Dring of Glengarra House, which was slightly farther away.^[5] Dring, who specialised in rearing sheep, gave up farming in 1869 and it was probably at this time that the tenancy passed to the O'Brien family.^[6] One local tradition is that John O'Brien, who was living at Garranjames by 1864, was installed by Davis as his agent.^[7] However, the O'Briens may have been on the ground for much longer, perhaps acting as farm managers for the gentry: a barn belonging to John Brien, "an industrious man", had been the target of an arson attack in 1823 believed to have been a reprisal for the eviction of a previous occupant.^[8] A Patrick Brien [sic] of Garranjames who won a prize at a Cork show for a thoroughbred stallion called Arthur in 1865 may have been the brother who would deliver a stirring address to the second protest demonstration in 1881.^[9] Edmond O'Brien was certainly the occupant by the late eighteen-seventies.^[10]

In 1889, O'Brien decided to quit farming. Gladstone's second Land Act, eight years earlier, had recognised that tenants possessed an element of ownership in the land they occupied, conferring upon them the right to sell their interest on the open market. The property included a comfortable five-bedroom farmhouse and the auctioneer insisted that the land was "exceedingly fertile and good". Since Garranjames had been described eight years earlier as "including about 30 acres of bog land", the claim that O'Brien had "expended a large sum in improving the Farm" suggests that he had invested in drainage.^[11] Although the sales prospectus praised the farm as "equally adapted for Dairy or Tillage purposes", O'Brien had concentrated on raising dry cattle with a side interest in dairying. Outbuildings included a dairy plus a "Cow-house for 25 Cows" which – to a modern reader – might suggest a very small dairy herd, but in fact it was relatively large for east Cork: 1871 statistics (i.e. post-Famine) indicated that across the county as a whole, farms of more than fifty acres (20 hectares) averaged only 10.1 milch cows.^[12] Edmond O'Brien had a little over one hundred acres (about 40 hectares) under grass in fields that formed "principally a rich, level flat": presumably there was the potential to support more than one milking cow for every four acres. The limiting factor here on the size of a workable dairy herd, as had long been the case, was the number of beasts that could be milked by the farmer's own family, a task traditionally assigned to his wife and daughters. When Mogeely's parish priest called a meeting to discuss the possibility of establishing a local creamery in 1887, O'Brien was initially enthusiastic, arguing that it would be possible to collect cream from 400 milking cows within a four-mile radius. However, within a few weeks his own local enquiries led him to doubt the practicality of the scheme. "He did not believe that there were cows enough in the neighbourhood to make it a success. Besides, this was chiefly a tillage district, and Ballylanders [in County Limerick] and other places where creameries were successful were dairy districts."^[13] Yet even if his neighbours were raising crops, Edmond O'Brien's Garranjames farm was mainly under grass. True, the 1889 auction did include a horse-powered threshing machine: eight years earlier, he grew 22 acres of oats. As Richard Dring had done before him, O'Brien kept one corner of the farm under turnips – nine to ten acres in 1881 – but this would have been for winter feed.^[14] Farm buildings included a cattle shed, as well as stables and piggeries. There are reports of O'Brien trading at local cattle fairs: the financial problems that he would encounter in 1886 coincided with a sharp fall in butter prices and a collapse in cross-channel livestock exports to Britain.^[15]

Edmond O'Brien was the tenant at Garranjames, but it not so easy to identify the landlord. Roger Green Davis in 1853 had held his land from the Reverend Francis Stawell, who owned 698 acres across County Cork.^[16] In 1881, O'Brien was paying his rent to Mrs Davis, the widow of William Davis who had farmed – probably briefly – at Garranjames. She died in December 1885, and it was R.H. Dring who seized two horses, five cows and a dozen sheep from the property to meet arrears of rent the following September.^[17] Lack of clarity over ownership of land is not unusual, given the complexities of sub-letting, and the encumbrances of mortgages and obligations to pay dowries and legacy payments to family members.^[18] Legal papers held in the Cork Archives Institute dating from 1914-15 refer to the Davis and Dring head rent from Garranjames, which suggests some inheritance arrangements or perhaps a marriage treaty between the two families.^[19] The fact that his landlords were local and operated on a relatively small scale almost certainly helped Edmond O'Brien to secure considerable reductions in his rent during the Land War.^[20]

Griffith had valued the Garranjames lands at £129 a year,^[21] but in the good years of the mid-seventies, Edmond O'Brien was paying an annual rent of £300. Given that the 1853 valuations, in the uncertain pre-Famine period, were generally assumed to be on the low side (although not by some Land League activists), and that cattle and butter prices doubled in the next twenty years, this was probably not exorbitant. Nonetheless, cattle prices collapsed in 1878-9, and this explained his adherence to the Land League. However, in the years that followed, O'Brien eased his own burdens through direct negotiation rather than by any reliance upon State intervention. Mrs Davis resided at Killeagh House, a handsome eighteenth-century townhouse which stands in the village street, a location that made her much more dependent upon the goodwill of her neighbours than was the case for a landowner in the fortress of his country mansion.^[22] As the widow of a younger son, she may well have relied upon the rent from Garranjames for a substantial part of her income but, lacking the deep pockets needed to fund prolonged confrontation, she was well advised to come to terms.  In effect, Edmond O'Brien was too big to fail. The eviction of so prominent a local personality for non-payment of rent would have been a massive and controversial enterprise. It would also have been difficult to find a new tenant with the capital to stock so large a property, and the incomer would have been boycotted in a wall of local hostility. Mrs Davis opted to settle: by 1881, O'Brien's rent was reduced to £230, with an additional twenty-five percent rebate on the half-year due that spring. Further reductions followed. In 1886-7, Killeagh was one of the early flashpoints in the Plan of Campaign, a policy of organised confrontation that forced many (but, sadly, not all) landlords to reduce their demands. On the de Capell Brooke and McKenna estates, concessions of thirty-five to forty percent were quickly gained.^[23] Edmond O'Brien presumably negotiated similar concessions from Dring. When the estate was advertised for sale in 1889, the auctioneer triumphantly announced that the annual rent had been pared down to £140, only slightly above the figure laid down in 1853.

Edmond O'Brien: Land Leaguer  County Cork farmers were generally prosperous in the years from 1870 to 1876: livestock and butter prices were buoyant, harvests were bountiful.^[24] The run of good years made it all the harder to adjust to the cold, wet summers that began in 1877. Crop yields in barley, oats and potatoes fell sharply, pushing tillage farmers into three years of severe problems. However, with his emphasis upon cattle, Edmond O'Brien was probably slow to feel the pinch. The heavy rains of 1877 produced lush pastures and bumper butter crops, although a shortage of turnips threatened the provision of winter feed. Worryingly, though, cattle prices began to decline in the second half of 1878 and then, as Donnelly put it, "[a]lmost everything went wrong with agriculture in the bitter year of 1879". Livestock suffered in an unusually harsh winter, but cattle prices did not rise in response to shortage of supply. Finding it difficult to pay their rents, farmers began to mobilise in resistance. In October 1878, a Tenants Defence Association had been formed in Mayo. The following spring, it began a series of protest meetings. In June, the movement gained the support of the rising force on the activist wing of the Irish parliamentary party, Charles Stewart Parnell. In October, the Irish National Land League was formally constituted in Castlebar. This narrative forms one of the legends of Irish history, the tale of peasants scratching a living in remote Connacht who defiantly energised the whole of Ireland to challenge the dominance of its landlords. It is less emphasised that the Mayo campaign group was almost immediately subsumed within a national organisation run from Dublin by experienced agitators, and that it quickly became the political vehicle for the demands of more sophisticated and (in good years) prosperous farmers especially across fertile Munster. The rhetoric of poor families defending their humble homesteads on the rock-strewn hillsides of Mayo would soon be echoed by a grazier from the green fields of Imokilly. Indeed, Edmond O'Brien was active and vocal a month before the formal establishment of the Mayo Land League. On 21 September 1879, he addressed "a large and influential meeting" at Dungourney, where he proposed a motion calling for rent reductions: "we, the tenant farmers of the united parishes of Mogeely, Dungourney and Clonmult, owing to three bad seasons coming in succession, the great decline in the price of farm produce, and dry stock, the losses sustained by disease in sheep, and the consequent stopping of credit, respectfully request our landlords to make such abatements as all those circumstances demand".^[25] The case was broadly presented to reflect the concerns of many different types of farmer and the tone was restrained. But a prominent local worthy, a Poor Law Guardian, had associated himself with a wider agrarian movement for redress. In November 1880, at a turbulent meeting at Shanagarry – to which we shall return – he moved the first resolution, which declared that "the present land system of Ireland is admitted to be bad and requires to be changed, and we pledge ourselves by every constitutional means in our power to advocate for a fair settlement of same, as between landlord and tenant".^[26]

For the next two years, the first phase of the Land War, Edmond O'Brien was active in the local agitation, serving as secretary to the Castlemartyr branch,^[27] but he was not the driving force behind the more dynamic Killeagh branch of the Land League. Its leading figure was unquestionably John Hyde, the Main Street publican, although he preferred to describe himself as Grocer and proprietor of a Best Irish Spirit Store.^[28] John Hyde was a characteristic Land League figure, a small-town shopkeeper who identified with the interests of his farmer customers and used his undoubted organisational skills to sustain a local protest movement. He described himself as "at an early age the victim of an eviction" carried out by Smith-Barry of Ballyedmond near Midleton, an experience that hardly inclined him to sympathy with landlordism.^[29] Typical, too, was the fact that he had invested in a thirty-acre farm a quarter of a mile from the town – small enough and close enough to be managed on a part-time basis. This enabled him to dabble in cattle raising and cash in at the local fairs, and was perhaps also intended to provide an eventual livelihood for one of his children. The local curate called him "a gentle and honourable man",^[30] but he was also a fiery speaker whose oratory probed the margins of restraint.  At the November 1880 Shanagarry rally, he defied an attempt to disrupt his speech by labourers recruited by a landlord (an episode discussed later), insisting that the Irish land system had been maintained "for seven hundred years at the bayonet’s point….  Everyone knew that the last three bad seasons placed the Irish tenant farmers, already weighted down by the crushing system of land tenure under which they groaned, on the verge of starvation", from which they had been saved only by "the charity of other nations".  To repeated cheering, he asked: "Were they continually to remain subject to such an oppression[?] Were they always to be slaves in the most abject degradation, with a subsistence almost unfit for the brute animal, in order to swell the purse of the absentee landlord[?]." "No! no!" the crowd shouted in reply.  "Now was their time to unite together hand in hand to crush the present system, and to show that they could not be put down by any Government or landlord clique while asserting their rights in an open and constitutional manner."  The crowd cheered this rousing sentiment too, but his remarks did carry overtones of the extremists who called for the hanging of the landlords, adding diplomatically that this must be done in a purely constitutional manner.^[31] By contrast, Edmond O'Brien was generally taciturn as a speaker. At a meeting to found a Land League branch in Youghal in January 1881, he confined himself to a three-word contribution to a discussion in which other speakers warned that Gladstone's proposals for Irish land reform would not go far enough. "Parnell's programme boys," was his succinct policy advice.^[32]

Both nationally and locally, Land League leadership faced the challenge of mobilising mass protest without unleashing anarchic violence. The difficulty in maintaining this balance and, indeed, the success of east Cork activists in walking the tightrope, was illustrated by an episode at the end of March 1881 that the authorities insisted on calling the Ballymacoda riot. A large force of police, including five mounted constables brought in from the city, descended on the village to seize cattle from a farmer who was in serious rent arrears. Ballymacoda was a potentially explosive area in which to use a display of force, for it was an Irish-speaking district with a strong nationalist tradition, dating back to 1798 and 1867. A large crowd hooted and groaned the bailiffs and their constabulary protectors, and engaged in non-violent obstruction which culminated in an attempt to surround and blockade the agents of the law. Eventually the police drew their cutlasses and charged into the crowd, injuring one of the protesters. The cattle were then driven to Youghal to be impounded and auctioned to enable the landlord to recoup his arrears. There they were met by a crowd of eight hundred people, led and marshalled by local Land League officials, among them Hyde and O'Brien. They used an ingenious device to contain the anger of their followers: two town bands played the Dead March from Saul to dramatise and satirise the driving of the impounded cattle through the streets. Nonetheless, some of the protesters sought to liberate the beasts, but – and the point is important – their leaders persuaded them "to let the law, unjust though it was, take its course", and so symbolise the evils of landlordism. John Hyde then gave the crowd some satisfying oratorical red meat, a speech that "dwelt strongly on the evils of absenteeism, when the landlords did not know of what was taking place on the farms of their tenants, whose entire property was being taken for the non-payment of a pauperising and destructive rent". For good measure, he also commented referred on "the want of trade in the once flourishing town", a theme that could be relied upon to appeal to the people of Youghal.^[33] The upshot of the episode was that John Hyde and Edmond O'Brien were among the couple of dozen people who were summonsed to appear before the magistrates at Castlemartyr early in May to face various charges of affray. It was so patently obvious that the two men had gone out of their way to contain the threat of trouble that the Crown dropped its charges and let them walk free.^[34]

Arrests Their liberty did not last long, for Edmond O'Brien and John Hyde were arrested on 11 July under an oppressive regime known as Coercion, the contemporary shorthand term for the suspension of civil liberties and the use of internment to remove activists from circulation.^[35] One of the lesser ironies of the fraught and turbulent events of 1880-2 was that the Chief Secretary for Ireland – the British cabinet minister who effectively ran the country – was a decent man who came from outside the privileged elite whose members governed Britain and owned Ireland. W.E. Forster was a businessman from the Yorkshire city of Bradford, a Quaker who had made a fact-finding tour of Ireland during the terrible winter of 1846-7 that had formed part of the relief work of Society of Friends. When he accepted the Irish portfolio in Gladstone's incoming Liberal ministry in 1880, Forster sincerely wished to work for the benefit of the people whose sufferings he had witnessed a third of a century earlier, and he certainly had no wish to be associated with repression. No doubt Ireland's problems were essentially bound up in two interlocking curses, the nature of its union with Britain and the ownership of its soil by a parasitic landlord caste. The endemic low-level terrorism that affected many rural districts was in large part a manifestation of these fundamental flaws in the political and social fabric but, from the perspective of a minister at his desk in Dublin Castle, the disturbed state of the country represented a primary challenge – not least because most 'outrages' were directed against vulnerable people who had the misfortune to be the collateral damage of the conflict generated by an unworkable structure. One of Forster's most searing experiences was his visit to the deathbed of a farmer who had been riddled with bullets, in front of his pleading wife, for the alleged crime of paying his rent.

The wider context of the local turmoil should also be noted. It was understandable that Forster felt a responsibility for the protection of vulnerable victims of community intolerance. We should also note that the British parliament at Westminster was the scene of a complex political ballet. Gladstone's Land Act of 1881 did make real and important concessions to Ireland's farmers, giving them security of tenure, the right to fair rents and the ability to sell their tenancies – a form of co-property-ownership that would soon leave many landlords clamouring for the British State to buy them out. Coercion enabled the Liberal government to claim that it was introducing necessary reforms from a position of strength, and thus reject that accusation of opponents that it was caving in to revolutionary violence. Parnell's Irish MPs were also engaged in elaborate theatre. They quietly pocketed the gains embodied in Gladstone's proposals while continuing to insist that they were inadequate, and intermittently staging confrontations in the House of Commons designed to provide a surrogate form of warfare against the English for the satisfaction of their more extreme supporters back home. The Irish MPs also used the right of backbenchers to question ministers in order to dramatise the injustices of Forster's arrests of the 'suspects', whose alleged offences mostly turned out to have existed only in the imaginations of police informers. It should also be emphasised that, in the spring and summer of 1881, the policy of repression was not aimed at Ireland's political representatives: while his Land Bill was battling its way through Parliament, Gladstone needed the Irish members at Westminster, however uncomfortable they might prove as allies in practice. One MP, John Dillon, was imprisoned between May and August for delivering an over-impassioned speech, but it was not until October, when the government dramatically seized Parnell himself and incarcerated him in Kilmainham, that internment became used in the hope of silencing the political leadership. By then, the Land Act was on the Statute Book.  

In a speech delivered early in 1881, Forster explained his reasons for asking parliament to authorise Coercion. He began by acknowledging that "Land League law is supreme" throughout rural Ireland, creating what he called "a real reign of terror across the whole country". Hence he was "forced to acknowledge that to a great extent the ordinary law is powerless [while] the unwritten law is powerful because punishment is sure to follow its infraction. Take away this power to punish for infraction of the unwritten law, and it will become an empty form." Forster acknowledged that some of the offenders were members of agrarian secret societies or veterans of the Fenian movement, but most of the trouble-makers were, in his assessment, simply bad people. (Quakers liked to be polite: he veiled his condemnation in a French phrase, 'mauvais sujets'.) Often, "the most powerful man in a particular district is a contemptible, dissolute ruffian and blackguard, who, his character being known by all his neighbours, is shunned by them all, but who nevertheless acts as the powerful and active policeman for the execution of the unwritten law…. It is these men who have struck terror into the heart of the districts in which their operations have been carried on, and we must strike terror into them in order that outrage may be stopped, person and property may be protected, and liberty may be secured." The obvious course was "to take power to arrest these men and keep them in prison in order they may be prevented from tyrannizing over their neighbours…. We cannot do it now because they have made themselves safe by the enormity of their crimes and the power which those crimes have enabled them to acquire. They know that they would be perfectly foolish to fear the law when no man dares to appear and give evidence against them. Do the police know the names of these village tyrants? Of course the police know them, and they themselves are perfectly aware of the fact." This last part of the analysis would quickly prove to be unfounded.

Despite desperate resistance from the Irish MPs, Parliament granted Forster the sweeping powers that he demanded. In June, he described the key element of his law-and-order strategy as "[a]rresting all those central and local leaders of the Land League who can be reasonably suspected of incitements to violence, and I think these arrests are telling" [i.e. making an impact]. He was wrong in his assessments of both cause and effect. A strategy of internment required people to lock away. A policy animated by the assumption that Land League officials were responsible for agrarian crime was likely to round up officials of the Land League, whether they were culpable or not. Thus Coercion contained the seeds of its own confusion.  On 11 July, Sir Joseph McKenna, MP for Youghal and an east Cork landlord, warned that "in all probability, for every guilty man arrested by the Government there were five or six innocent men."^[36] Six days later, Forster confided to a friend that his aim was now "to arrest right and left".^[37] By then, two hundred 'suspects' had been rounded up. Among them were Edmond O'Brien and John Hyde. Neither man remotely resembled Forster's imaginary picture of the local leader who was "a contemptible, dissolute ruffian and blackguard".

By dropping all charges against the two men in the Ballymacoda case back in May, the Crown had tacitly accepted that the local Land League officials had in fact acted responsibly in steering angry people away from violent confrontation. Nonetheless, on 4 July warrants were secretly issued for their arrest. For some reason, it took the Constabulary over a week to execute the warrants: perhaps they needed time to plan an intimidatory large-scale operation. It was not until the early hours of Wednesday 13 July that an RIC detachment left Youghal, reaching Killeagh before five o'clock, where they linked up with more police, who were probably from Midleton.  Mobilising a twenty-strong posse to seize a grocer, who was probably still in bed, seemed an exaggerated exercise in law enforcement. The party then moved on to Garranjames and arrested Edmond O'Brien, depositing both suspects on an early train from Mogeely to Cork's Glanmire terminus, the first stage of their transfer to Limerick Gaol, where they joined fifty other compulsory recipients of Forster's hospitality. The dawn raids and their efficient transfer meant that the prisoners travelled faster than the news of their arrest, giving no time to mobilise sympathetic demonstrations either locally or at Cork station.^[38]

The arrest warrants accused Hyde and O'Brien of "being reasonably suspected of having been guilty of maiming cattle". The levelling of such unlikely charges against a large-scale farmer and a prominent local entrepreneur contributed to the anger that the episode aroused:  east Cork had been relatively free of agrarian crime, and these were the first arrests to be made in the district. Nobody believed the allegations.^[39] The protest meeting called by the Killeagh branch of the Land League on 17 July was admirably restrained in its resolution that "the conduct of the authorities in arresting, upon such a charge, respectable men, who always, in public and in private, condemned the commission of outrages, is, unfortunately, not calculated to inspire respect for the law".^[40] Father John O'Riordan, the curate at Killeagh (who was also president of the Land League branch), praised "honest John Hyde, a man who would be incapable of injuring not alone any human being but the meanest creature that walked God's earth".^[41] He insisted that "all the acquaintances of both the alleged suspects knew them to be perfectly incapable of being accessory to any agrarian outrage".^[42] Speaking at Castlemartyr the following day, the curate of Dungourney, Father James Greene, insisted that Edmond O'Brien "emphatically and thoroughly condemned any sort of violence whatsoever, let it be offered either to human being or brute beast he was against it". The two detainees were "the flower of the flock".^[43] Further tributes came at a meeting of the Midleton Land League a few days later: "two more respectable men … could not have been arrested, and they always condemned the commission of such outrages as that with which they were charged." Hyde and O'Brien, it was claimed, would no more be guilty of maiming cattle than could Mr Forster himself.^[44] Cynics might object that Land League activists were bound to protest that their collaborators were blameless, but the fervour of the tributes, and the testimony of two (admittedly politicised) priests seems conclusive. So, too, was the fact that the community was prepared to mobilise in practical support. Farmers at the Killeagh meeting "volunteered to send men tomorrow to do Mr Hyde's and Mr O'Brien's farm-work". Here was the germ of two remarkable demonstrations of public support.

The Garranjames demonstrations

i: the need to maintain a cross-class alliance  Press reports following the arrests of Hyde and O'Brien do not throw much light on their replacements in the local Land League leadership, no doubt because it was not politic to draw attention to their identities. Nonetheless, the Reverend John O'Riordan appears to have acted as more than nominal president of the Killeagh branch, for he stepped in to mobilise the people and channel their anger with dramatic effect. Across rural Ireland, it was not unusual for the local curate to become active in tenant agitation. Like most Irish Catholic clergy, curates usually came from farming families and instinctively shared the feelings of their parishioners. As younger men, they had trained for the priesthood in Fenian times and were perhaps more open to nationalist ideas than their elders.  The more senior figure of the parish priest was left to exercise his influence in the background and, if the curate were tempted into indiscretion of speech or action, he could easily be disowned and reined in. However, Father O'Riordan was more than a token link between church and community. Born a few years after the Famine at Rathduff, about twenty kilometres north of Cork, he seems to have been marked out early for an impressive career: at his death in 1916, he had recently been appointed parish priest in the town of Macroom, an important posting. His administrative ability was reflected in his appointment as a Canon in the diocese of Cloyne, which probably means that he was involved in fund-raising for the completion of the massive cathedral at Cobh. He was an organiser, a leader and – an important qualification – a restraining force. "He supported every movement of the people to better their conditions," an obituary would note, adding: "in the stirring days of the Land League he was the man to rally them and instill in them that self-respect and adherence to high principle which has brought to the country relaxations of tyrannical rule and many ameliorative measures".^[45]  The rapidity with which the first Garranjames demonstration was organised, coupled with the fact that it took place on a Monday, suggests the use of the pulpit to mobilise participation from across the district through Sunday Mass.

In the aftermath of the shock arrests, Father O'Riordan and the local farmers would have had two immediate priorities and one underlying aim. The most pressing objective was to express the anger of the local community at the internment of two respected neighbours and to show that their arrests had anything but the "telling" effect that Forster imagined. However, it was equally important to channel protest into emotionally satisfying activities that would discourage acts of violence. "These almost indiscriminate arrests were calculated to add fuel to the flame in Ireland rather than to extinguish it," Sir Joseph McKenna had warned the House of Commons.^[46] Both at national and local level, the Land League needed to tread a careful course, mobilising outrage while containing anger. Yet, perhaps even more important, these immediate tactical concerns had to form part of a more fundamental strategy, the maintenance of a cross-class alliance in the countryside that would continue to bind agricultural labourers to the reformist campaign of tenant farmers – a campaign that was overwhelmingly intended for their benefit alone. The active and united support of the labourers was crucial to the policy of boycotting: it had been Captain Boycott's inability to persuade anyone to harvest his crops that had immortalised his name in the English language.^[47]

The 1881 census gives a snapshot of male agrarian muscle power across County Cork.^[48] In rounded terms, there were 25,000 farmers or graziers, plus another 12,500 relatives – brothers, sons, grandsons, nephews – working on the land, the census recognising here that most of the smaller tenancies were worked as family units. In addition, there were 22,600 men returned as cottagers or agricultural labourers, the overlapping classification reflecting the fact that most occupied small plots of land which provided varying degrees of fragile semi-independence through intensive potato cultivation.^[49] About a quarter of the farmers could not read or write, but the illiteracy rate dropped to one-eighth among the younger men, meaning that most farm households had access to the wider political world created by the newspapers. However, only half the labourers could read and write, leaving them more dependent upon oral networks for information and making it almost impossible for them to generate leadership from within their own ranks.^[50] Indeed, a mysterious – but very well attended – labourers' rally at Inch in September 1882 seems to have been the only attempt at a local independent initiative throughout the eighteen-eighties, and the organisation behind it was almost certainly drawn in to the wider coalition of Parnell's National League.

John Hyde was indignant when a landlord's agent called Irish farmers "great schemers and low men" in their dealings with the labourers, but there cannot be much doubt that most tenants operated on so narrow a margin of survival that they did not, perhaps even could not, deal generously with their hired hands.^[51] Indeed, it was remarkable that the labourers generally supported the Land League since, as T.W. Moody put it, "they generally suffered more at the hands of the farmers than of the landlord". At the League's Dublin convention in April 1880, a delegate proposed that farmers should provide a three-room cottage and half an acre of land for each £50 of Poor Law valuation: the proposal was sidelined on procedural grounds.^[52] The official Land League position was that if the farmers gained, the labourers would benefit too. But some may have wondered whether a rising tide would indeed float all their boats.

While some agrarian reformers were dreaming of an Ireland rid of landlords, one of the hated oppressors experimented with a scheme to eliminate farmers. Peter Penn-Gaskell owned a small estate near the seaside village of Ballycotton. He lived in the United States, and Land Leaguers were initially welcoming when he crossed the Atlantic in July 1880 to investigate local grievances.^[53] He appears to have helped one family to emigrate in the hope of mending their fortunes, although it suited his critics to portray him as a cruel evictor. More alarming was his decision to partition the vacated land among the 'carberies', poor fishermen who rented one-acre plots – all they could spare the time to cultivate – from local farmers. Penn-Gaskell offered them smallholdings at lower rents, with unlimited tenure and the right of sale.^[54] The attempt to form a Land League branch at Shanagarry, in which John Hyde was conspicuous, was part of a strategy to re-impose farmer control on the disobedient fishermen. Unfortunately, the meeting that he addressed so eloquently was disrupted by the arrival of two hundred carberies, marching behind a banner inscribed with the ominously religious slogan "St Colman's Cloyne".^[55] A clash with hard-working fishermen was a public relations disaster for the farmers, and it is not surprising that one Land Leaguer claimed that there were "not half a dozen" carberies among the mob that had disrupted the Shanagarry meeting: "they were collected from the rag, tag, and bobtail of the district".^[56] However, the census did not recognise rag, tag and bobtail as a distinct social category. If the ranks of the carberies had indeed been swollen by fellow-travellers, then those reinforcements must have been drawn from the ranks of the cottagers and labourers. In fact, the stridently expressed grievances of the carberies continued to undermine the farmers' claim to victimhood.^[57]

The Shanagarry episode prompted a response from Parnell himself. The Mayo origins of the Land League had endowed the movement with much anti-grazier rhetoric. Just as in the outraged rhetoric generated by Scotland's Highland Clearances, where crofters had been evicted to make way for sheep, so it was denounced as outrageous that small farmers should be prised from the rocky hillsides of the west of Ireland to create space for cattle.^[58] Having based his analysis on the needs of Irish agricultural upon the fertile valleys of Wicklow, Parnell had been shocked by the poverty of Connacht when he had first encountered it in 1877. Groping for a magic solution, he had initially settled upon the nostrum of land drainage, the large-scale reclamation of bogland. However, in April 1880, he shifted his ground and began to talk of opening "large quantities of grazing-land, in the middle and eastern counties" and "facilitating the purchase of it by the western peasantry". "It is, in fact, not an emigration from Ireland to America, but an emigration from the barren hills of Connaught to the fertile lands of Leinster and Munster that we want." Although this article (published in the United States) actually came from the pen of his sister Fanny, its proposals reflected Parnell's own ideas – and also the fact that he had not thought very profoundly about the mechanisms required: how would the ranches be thrown on to the market and how could penniless cottagers (and evicted tenants) afford the purchase them? Given that he specialised in cattle-raising on his own Wicklow estate, Parnell was open to the charge of hypocrisy. He did in fact make allotments available at Avondale, and he invested £2,000 from his own straitened finances in a land purchase company, which failed before it could resettle a single farmer. In a rare public pronouncement, Parnell responded to the embarrassment of the Ballycotton carberies by talking of four or five million acres of "lighter grazing lands" which the Land League would eventually secure for the labourers.^[59] By implication, large grassland farms such as Edmond O'Brien's holding at Garranjames were now potentially to be seen not as the pride of Irish agriculture but as unjustifiable agglomerations of selfishness, part of the wider problem of unequal land distribution that needed to be eliminated. Hence the arrest of the two suspects posed a challenge for the local Land League leadership around Killeagh. O'Brien and Hyde held about two hundred acres between them. Their farms had to be depicted as a trust to be nurtured on behalf of victimised neighbours. 

As discussed below, in his address to a labourers' rally at Inch in September 1882, Edmond O'Brien acknowledged that there had been tensions between local farmers and labourers during the Land War.^[60] During the summer of 1881, in fact in the immediate aftermath of the Killeagh arrests, labourers' strikes broke out in the countryside west of Cork. A labourers' union had been active around Kanturk for a few years after 1869, but the flashpoints now were close to the city. Proximity to the urban market had led to the takeover of land formerly used for tillage in the Lee valley by dairymen "who use it for grazing purposes, and who of course need no labourers".^[61] However, the cattle farmers were vulnerable at one point in the year, when they required workers to cut and bale the hay. In Ireland's unpredictable climate, heavy rain could flatten the grass and wreck the crop that was needed for winter feed. Thus, for a short period in fine weather, farmers needed to hire a large number of hands. It was at this point that four hundred labourers in the Coachford area demanded improvements in pay and conditions. On 17 July, the day of the indignation meeting at Killeagh, there were rallies at Coachford and Ballincollig. The following day, which saw the first demonstration at Garranjames, groups of strikers fanned out from Ballincollig, visiting farms and persuading other labourers to walk off the job. Notably, the strikers demanded not just higher wages but more favourable terms for the occupation of cabins rented from farmers. Under clerical arbitration, the Lee valley dispute was quickly settled, with Land League officials pressing the farmers to make concessions. But unrest continued across County Cork, for instance around Dunmanway in early August.^[62] It is likely that Land League officials around Killeagh would have been aware of these tensions before the Lee valley workers walked off the job.

ii: saving the turnips   At the Killeagh protest meeting on 17 July, it had been the farmers who "volunteered to send men" to undertake necessary chores on the Hyde and O'Brien farms. The next day, they stage-managed a remarkable demonstration, and they did so by organising a memorable day out for their workers. It is difficult now to imagine just how uninteresting was the life of most ordinary people. While seaside towns were beginning to provide holiday facilities for middle-class people such as shopkeepers, the labouring classes had few, if any, relaxations. An example may illustrate this. Two weeks before their arrest, John Hyde and Edmond O'Brien (who were, of course, both loyal Catholics) acted as local ticket agents for a fund-raising exercise designed to help the nuns of Youghal's Presentation Convent "to pay off the debt on the Schools where the Children of the Poor are gratuitously educated". Patrons were invited to join an excursion by special train to Killarney, where a six-hour visit would give them a chance to glimpse the famous lakes. Third-class return tickets from stations in east Cork cost four shillings and sixpence.^[63] I have not traced a description of the outing, but it is unlikely that many labourers took part. By the early 'eighties, a farmworker might earn between nine and twelve shillings a week, and perhaps a little more at harvest time, always assuming that he could find continuous employment.^[64] It was in the highest degree unlikely that such a labourer could afford to spend half his weekly income on a day out by train. For a married man with three or four children, the sweet air of Kerry would remain an impossible dream. The first Garranjames demonstration, on 18 July, ingeniously embodied a political statement within a convivial outing, confirming the loyalty of the entire population to the cause of the suspects through what was essentially for most of them a token input of physical labour.^[65] Perhaps best of all, from the point of view of the parsimonious farmers, there were no transport costs and no refreshments were provided.

It is important to emphasise that the Killeagh Land League did not invent the device of mass protest through sympathetic farm work: the Cork Examiner called their imaginative protest "one of those remarkable demonstrations latterly no common in the country".^[66] (There would be a notable example in December 1881, when Parnell's neighbours showed their support for the imprisoned leader by ploughing his land at Rathdrum.^[67]) Early on the Monday morning, "hundreds of labourers… coming from the large surrounding district" crowded into Killeagh. The Examiner reckoned the crowd to be one-thousand strong, and noted that it included women as well as men. The Cork Daily Herald estimated the initial turn-out at fifteen hundred, rising to two thousand as others joined the demonstration from the hinterland when it reached Garranjames. "In fact every farmer and labourer within a radius of five or six miles from Killeagh put in an appearance".^[68] Reporters were impressed by the size of the attendance, given the short notice involved. Although farmers were clearly the driving force, it seems that the labourers were willing participants, although whether from political motivation or for the fun of an impromptu holiday it is difficult to say. On at least one local property, men walked off the fields of a Conservative and anti-Home Rule landlord, which probably cost them their day's wages. But the protest did receive support from a perhaps unexpected quarter. In response to a request for his opinion from a local Land League branch, James Howie, the Church of Ireland Dean of Cloyne, had stated that he considered that Griffith's Valuation represented "ample rent for any land around Killeagh". Although he lived at Barnabrow House, between Cloyne and Ladysbridge, he was also the rector of Killeagh, a living he had held for thirty years, and could thus be regarded as well informed about the resources of the neighbourhood.  He had graduated from Trinity College as far back as 1825, but it seems that he was still driving the ten kilometres to Killeagh every week to read the Sunday service. His Protestant parishioners were shocked to discover that their pastor held such unsound doctrines on the sacred subject of rent, and all but one of them resolved to switch their devotions to Castlemartyr. Edmond O'Brien was entertained by the notion of the Protestant social elite resorting to the tactic of boycotting, and even more amused when the gesture fizzled out after a few weeks.^[69] Dean Howie gave his labourers permission to join the Garranjames demonstration. So too did Castlemartyr's Protestant rector, the Reverend Robert Crofts Bolster, which perhaps explains why the outraged landlords of the parish of Killeagh did not stay faithful to him for long.

At about 9.15, led by the two Catholic curates, the crowd set off for John Hyde's farm on the edge of the village, where they turned their attentions to his turnip fields.^[70] This drills of seed had been planted in the spring, and by midsummer the seedlings needed to be thinned, to give the strongest plants space to flourish. Tedious work that involved a considerable amount of bending and kneeling, it was often given to children, who came cheap and operated close to the ground. On this occasion, sheer numbers made the task relatively straightforward. The labourers were organised into thirty-strong gangs, each supervised by a farmer – the local Land League machine was clearly well organised – and the nine-acre turnip ground was thinned in half an hour.^[71] Then the agrarian army formed up once again to march behind a Land League banner on to Garranjames and repeat the operation on Edmond O'Brien's farm. One reporter was fascinated by the picture of "a thousand men and women, marching after the little green banner, some in carts, some on horseback, and some on foot, stout, strong young men, old men, too; many well dressed, comfortably and cleanly, but some ragged, yet all filled with an enthusiasm which made itself known in the cheers occasionally given as the workers marched towards Mr O'Brien’s farm." More volunteers joined this cross-class demonstration at Garranjames, presumably late arrivals from Dungourney and Mogeely. Once again, thinning between nine and ten acres of seedlings took about half an hour, with some attention given to a field of "mangolds" (mangelwurzels), another form of winter feed for cattle.

The work now done, the Land League banner was planted in one of Edmond O'Brien's meadows where the crowd gathered to be addressed – and congratulated – by Father O'Riordan. He praised the two absent suspects and reminded the crowd of the injustice of their arrest. Above all, he urged everyone present "for the sake of the men in prison, for the sake of the cause in which all their hands were joined, and all their hearts beating in unison, to do no outrage, never to bring discredit on the cause of Ireland by actions would be condemned by those who were no longer with them." The language was perhaps unduly funereal, but Father O'Riordan's sentiments were loudly cheered, with some of his hearers responding to his denunciation of acts of violence with shouts of "We never did; we never will". His pleas were echoed by Father James Greene, who closed his remarks by reciting a rousing ballad from Young Ireland days, "We're Paddies evermore!" The refrain was a defiant proclamation of cross-class solidarity, although it would go out of fashion as a more solemn sense of self-identity permeated the national movement in the era from Parnell to Pearse.^[72] The proceedings then closed with brief words of appreciation from Edmond O'Brien's brother,^[73] and everyone quietly dispersed, probably returning to their usual places of work to put in a half-day shift.

iii: sanding the meadows The mass thinning of the turnips was followed by an even more remarkable demonstration six days later. For over a century, Munster farmers who lived near the coast had used sea sand as a fertiliser ("manuring" was the term used). The sand helped drainage and, since it was rich in the remains of shellfish, its calcareous content boosted crops of oats and barley, and provided a fillip for tired grassland. Excavating – literally, pillaging – sand from favoured locations along the coast was a large-scale enterprise: around Bandon and at Clonakilty in the eighteen-thirties, lighters dredged offshore, and as many as a thousand carts might be seen on the strand, their owners shovelling sand.^[74] The implications for coastal erosion must have been considerable, and the Garranjames demonstrations confirm that the practice was still prevalent in the later nineteenth century, even though lime produced in local kilns was easily available. Edmond O'Brien's practice of drawing sand from Garryvoe Strand, about eight kilometres to the south, gave his Land League allies the idea for a dramatic show of support.^[75] On the Sunday following the turnip rally, several hundred farmers from around Killeagh headed to Youghal Strand, where they filled their carts with sand before returning to form a "most imposing … procession covering more than a mile of road", with most of the carts "gaily decorated with green branches". The sand was distributed at convenient places around the Garranjames farm, the heaps being decorated with shovels decorated with bunting. The Killeagh farmers were joined by a second and more imposing contingent from the Cloyne area bringing sand dug at Garryvoe. They were greeted with a banner which proclaimed: "Cloyne, cead mille failthe" – one of the few references to the Irish language in the whole campaign, and something of a cliché.^[76] The Ballymacoda fife and drum band played stirring "National airs" throughout the day, and other Land League branches sent delegations and waved banners.

Reporters claimed that six hundred carts arrived from Youghal Strand, and "over a thousand" followed from Garryvoe. Were these figures accurate? Crowd estimates were often exaggerated, but there were 411 townlands within the barony of Imokilly, many of which would have been large enough to contain at least three farms capable of supporting a cart. On the other hand, the claim that it would have taken Edmond O'Brien four years to collect as much sand by himself would suggest that he sent a cart to Garryvoe every day, which seems a tall order. What is clear is that the numbers involved were large enough to require firm organisation, which seems to have been provided under the direction of the two curates, along with a local farmer, William Coleman of Killeagh, and Edmund Fitzgerald, Master of the Clonmult Foxhounds. (His adherence to the Land League suggests that the pack was supported more by the farmers than by the gentry.)^[77] As with the thirty-strong gangs of turnip thinners, there must have been several dozen stewards working under the supervision of the organisers. As a result, the cartloads were "discharged in a brisk but orderly manner", the whole process occupying just a few hours.

There was one exception to the general mood of good feeling. Some carts were blocked from O'Brien's land "by the drivers of other carts on the ground that they were owned by farmers who paid their rents". The national leadership of the Land League had been forced to tread a careful path in the use of rent as a political weapon. It was one thing to support tenant farmers who simply could not afford to meet their legal obligations to the landlords, but it was another to go on the offensive and call for a national rent strike. In the early months of 1881, the inner circle around Parnell held back from invoking this nuclear option. On the one hand, they feared that it would unleash a national confrontation that would inevitably boil over into the violence that they sought to contain. On the other, they feared that it might fail: the farmers might desert them while the priests, whose participation had proved so useful at local level, would almost certainly stand aside. Even John Dillon, the most extreme member of the parliamentary party, hedged his bets when asked for his advice in February 1881. He suggested that, if local Land League organisers were arrested under the proposed Coercion legislation, their neighbours might withhold their payments in order to force their release, but he did not think it would be wise "to advise the people to anything like a general strike against rent".^[78] Father James Greene regaled the turnip-thinners with a story that suggested some such spontaneous reaction to the two arrests:  a redoubtable local woman who had told her landlord's agent "that she would not give him a farthing until he brought out John Hyde". (She was probably a widow who had inherited her husband's tenancy: widows in the Irish countryside needed to be strong personalities to survive.) However, since rent was usually due twice a year, few tenants would have had the opportunity (or the challenge) to make such a political gesture. The inference must be that most of the farmers participating in the Garranjames sand demonstration owed rent to their landlords, and were in arrears not as a political gesture but because they could not pay. The carts barred from participating were driven away quietly, and "[n]o further unpleasantness arose". Four days after he was arrested in October 1881, Parnell issued a bombastic manifesto which practically ordered the people of Ireland "to pay no rents under any circumstances to their landlords until the government relinquishes the existing system of terrorism". This gave Forster the excuse he needed to declare the Land League a banned organisation – an outcome that may have suited the Machiavellian Parnell, since he privately believed that the movement was "breaking fast", leaving him to prefer suppression to disintegration.^[79] Gladstone had hoped that his 1881 Land Act would usher in a new era of contentment in rural Ireland, but he was forced the following year to pass an Arrears Act, compensating landlords for unpaid and irrecoverable income from rents. That small breach in the harmony of the second Garranjames demonstration gives us a glimpse of the financial pressures that had driven the tenant farmers so solidly into the ranks of the Land League.

When the last cartload of sand had been unloaded, the speeches began. Father John O'Riordan took the lead, congratulating the participants "on the magnificence of their demonstration". He had travelled to Limerick during the week to visit the suspects in prison, where he found them "indomitable" in spirit and grateful for the attention given to their turnips. Having reinforced the connection between suspects and supporters, Father O'Riordan pressed home the message that the people should show their respect for Hyde and O'Brien by honouring their non-violent beliefs: "He hoped they would always show their detestation of outrages." In fact, their internment was a victory in itself "inasmuch as people who before were careless about the agitation had since joined it on account of the arrests". He was followed by P.P. O'Neill, a Land League official, who announced (in slightly patronising terms) that it would be his "pleasant duty to report to Dublin the result of the day's splendid proceedings". He did, however, hit upon a striking phrase, the declaration that they had "dug a grave for landlordism in the strand from which they brought the loads". O'Neill was concerned to maintain the cross-class alliance that the demonstration had embodied. "He believed Mr O’Brien had always been very liberal with his labourers," adding that "if he himself thought the farmers would not treat their labourers well he would never have joined the Land League". A voice from the crowd gave a glimpse of the workers' utopia: "The farmers should pay no more rents but give them to the labourers."  With that happy thought, the gathering quietly dispersed.

iv: the later demonstrations The second Garranjames demonstration was repeated, on an even larger scale, on Wednesday 10 August, when carts driven from up to fifteen miles around deposited sand on John Hyde's much smaller farm.^[80] The first contingent to arrive, from Youghal, stretched along nearly two miles of road. Ballymacoda followed, in a procession a mile and a half long, while the farmers of Cloyne occupied two and a half miles of highway. They were all accompanied by local bands, and carts were decorated with green branches. Once again, the organisation was faultless, a one-way system ensuring that carts entered the farm by one gate and departed by another. As before, Father O'Riordan addressed the crowd – estimated at between one and two thousand – when the work was completed. By now there may have been an undercurrent of suspicion that the two young clergymen were unduly prominent in the protests, for he began by announcing that "he had not at first intended to come to this demonstration at all", in order his absence might prove that these magnificent displays originated in "the good will of the people themselves" and were "quite spontaneous". (He was, in fact, shortly to be moved to another parish, and it may have been fear of his bishop that had led him to hesitate before becoming even more deeply involved.) Once again, there were hints of strains in the cross-class alliance that was so vital to rural solidarity: there had recently been a dispute over harvest payments in the Cloyne district. Father O'Riordan acknowledged that "great efforts had been made to create disunion between farmers and labourers, but, thank God, those efforts had failed." But when he urged the farmers "to be as good as they could to their labourers and servants", a heckler interjected: "They are not doing that".  The curate urged the working men to "remember that the farmers had not been so well off and therefore [they] ought not to make any demand that is not a fair and reasonable one". His message, that unity would lead to utopia, was asking the labourers to take a great deal on trust.^[81] To Father James Greene's appeal, "let not the farmer be too tight", someone shouted: "Too tight he is, Sir." Greene closed by pointing out that the crops were ripening, and he hoped that the countryside would rally round to place Hyde's harvest in the haggard.^[82] There was laughter when someone shouted: "And the money in his pocket." The interjections seem to have been good-humoured in a sardonic way, but they were undoubtedly warning shots that reflected an undercurrent of distrust.

The suspects' crops were duly harvested in a fourth demonstration of sympathy, on Wednesday 25 August. Like the delivery of sand to John Hyde's farm, it made less impact on the wider scene than the two July protests, which had the newsworthy attraction of novelty. This time, only about two hundred workers were mobilised, mostly labourers armed with scythes, although some machinery was brought in as well. At about nine o'clock in the morning, the Killeagh Land Leaguers started reaping twenty-two acres of oats at Garranjames. Two hours later, reinforcements arrived from Conna, the Bride valley village twenty kilometres to the north. They had been cheered on their march by the local brass band, whose members were much admired when they dumped their instruments to join in the work. Edmond O'Brien's crops were saved in about four hours, at which point the assembled volunteers were provided with refreshments (perhaps home-brew) served from the farmhouse – the only occasion during the four demonstrations when this happened. After a break for relaxation, the workforce formed up and marched to John Hyde's farm, where they arrived at about six o'clock in the evening. The Conna band led the way, followed by the men carrying their scythes and marching three abreast (both the back roads from Garranjames to Killeagh are very narrow), then the machinery and horses, with women and children bringing up the rear – the whole making "a splendid sight". Hyde's seven-acre barley crop was harvested in an hour and a half. On this occasion, it seems that there were no speeches, perhaps because the numbers involved were smaller or maybe in recognition of the fact that this would be the last major expression of communal solidarity that would be required for some time. One indication of a changing mood was that the local press felt able to name half a dozen local activists, although Father James Greene was still regarded as the key organiser.^[83] With their harvest work complete, the participants gathered in the village street, where the Conna band positioned itself in front of John Hyde's premises and serenaded its absent owner. There was some exuberant cheering for the suspects before the musicians headed for home and the crowd quietly dispersed. The Killeagh Land League demonstrations of the summer of 1881 closed on a peaceable note.^[84]  There was a minor postscript a week later, when a steam-powered threshing machine was borrowed from a nearby property and used to process John Hyde's crop into 300 barrels of barley. "As Mr Hyde is highly esteemed and respected by all in the district, as soon as it became known that his corn was to be threshed, the farmers and labourers from all parts of the parish flocked into Killeagh to assist in doing the work." Since news and people mostly travelled on foot, this impression of spontaneity (and its implication of cross-class harmony) may have been a piece of 'spin'. It is difficult to believe that state-of-the-art machinery would have been mobilised without as assured workforce in place to makes its operation worthwhile.^[85]

In mid-September, Edmond O'Brien and John Hyde were reported to be "in the best of spirits" in Limerick Gaol.^[86] This may have been a piece of propaganda, since they could hardly have relished their continuing incarceration. Then, on the morning of Friday 18 November, both men were released.^[87] Forster personally examined the cases against the various suspects, which says something for his commitment but very little for the integrity of a system that lacked any fail-safe mechanisms. With Parnell and most of the Irish Party leadership locked up in Kilmainham by the end of October, no doubt it seemed safe to free lesser local leaders. The two men were never brought before a court, nor was any evidence ever produced or cited to justify the charges of cattle maiming on which they had been arrested. They received neither apology nor compensation for the four months they had spent behind bars. Edmond O'Brien was reported to have been pleased with the volunteer work at Garranjames, even claiming – perhaps it was a joke – that he was £200 better off as a result.^[88] But the news of John Hyde was not so light-hearted, for he became seriously ill in the first half of December. The medical explanation was perverse to the point of insult: it was claimed that his constitution had become accustomed to a warm prison cell, and his sudden exposure to the cold moist November air had brought on a cold, which developed into erysipelas, a painful skin infection accompanied by high fever.^[89]

From the 1881 Land Act to the Plan of Campaign The Ireland into which Edmond O'Brien and John Hyde walked free was a changed country. The passage of Gladstone's Land Act had made major concessions to the tenant farmers. Parnell and his associates, interned in Kilmainham, sought to discourage applications to the new Land Courts for reductions in rent, preferring to use test cases to see how the unprecedented machinery would respond. But in Cork there was something of a rush to the courts. Over the next four years, roughly one fifth of the tenant farmers across the county secured, on average, rent rebates of about one-sixth. Others, like Edmond O'Brien, also benefited by direct negotiations with landlords who were now ready to come to terms. Until the summer of 1884, harvests were good, and cattle and sheep numbers increased. 'Outrages' – politically motivated rural crime – fell away sharply.^[90] In October 1882, Parnell formed the National League, the successor organisation to the now defunct Land League.^[91] However, it would be almost eighteen months before a branch was formed in the district around Killeagh.

By contrast, the 1881 Land Act did virtually nothing for the labourers.^[92] A token provision aimed at better housing proved inadequate, and Labourers' Acts for Ireland followed in 1882, 1883 and 1887, each a testimony to the shortcomings of its predecessor and the reluctance of farmers to comply with requirements to provide decent cottages for their employees.^[93] At a meeting in Dublin on 21 August 1882, Parnell and Davitt launched the Irish Labour and Industrial Union. Its declared aim was to unite rural and urban workers, and it emphasised the need for better housing as well as the extension of the right to vote more widely among adult males, an issue that was coming back on to the British political agenda and which would generate a sweeping Reform Act in 1884. The new organisation was quickly subsumed within the umbrella of the National League, which was announced in mid-September and formally launched a month later: Parnell's biographers have ignored its existence.^[94] Yet within two weeks of its establishment, the Irish Labour and Industrial Union held a rally at Inch, near Killeagh, reportedly attended by four thousand labourers. More surprising was the Edmond O'Brien's admission of that "he had not the slightest intimation of the meeting being held, until by a mere chance he heard of it the previous day".^[95] The organisers, whose identities were shadowy – there were apparently no priests present – had succeeded in mobilising twice the number of people in the highest estimates for the Garranjames and Hyde demonstrations, and apparently without anyone in the former Land League leadership knowing about their plans. Nonetheless, the prestige of Edmond James was a useful addition to the meeting, and he was voted its chairman. This apparent concession to the local political elite was in fact a tactical gain, for it meant that O'Brien was compelled to utter benign sentiments about the needs of the labourers and at least go through the motions of urging his fellow farmers to act generously. "What they wanted to do now was to be able to live more comfortably than they had lived before. The farmers up to this time could not be blamed in a great many instances for the way in which they had treated their labourers, but now it should be expected, when there was some independence amongst them that they would treat their labourers much better than they had done heretofore."  Cheers from his audience presumably endorsed the appeal for future generosity rather than the excuse for past meanness. "He had known himself even within two or three years that very slight concessions made to the labourers made them as comfortable as a great many farmers, and, though the latter thought at first that they were sacrificing something, still those that made the concessions were just as well off as before they made them." The applause of the crowd worked its magic, and the normally cautious O'Brien proceeded a little further, advising the farmers "though they might consider it a sacrifice at first – to give this little concession to the labourers, and in six months they would be just as well off as if they had kept it to themselves." Naturally, he also urged the labourers "not to be too persistent in their demands" and repeated the standard appeal of farmers' leaders to abstain from any violent act that might give the authorities an excuse to crack down on the neighbourhood.

There is no reason to doubt Edmond O'Brien's goodwill towards the working population, but his appeal for kindness was remarkably vague. The organisers were ready to fill the vacuum, with resolutions demanding political rights and calling upon farmers to give "to their labourers a plot of land not less than half an acre". John Hyde managed to get in on the act, contributing a speech of rousing generalities in which he declared that "were it not for the labourers people in high positions could not sustain them [i.e. their high positions]… If the farmers did not stick to the people and keep them at home, they would be by-and bye without labour."^[96] These were conventional, even trite and certainly patronising, sentiments, and perhaps some present wondered how Hyde's words might fix the leaking thatch on their cabin roofs. In the event, Davitt's attempt to build a workers' alliance at national level seems to have been short-lived, but the ease with which a labourers' organisation could conjure up a mass meeting in an out-of-the-way corner of east Cork probably served as a reminder to the farmers' leaders that they could not take for granted their control of a continuing cross-class alliance in the countryside.

The absence of a National League branch in east Cork, so active an area during the first stage of the Land War, was evidently regarded as a problem by the Parnellite leadership in Dublin, who presumably turned to the energetic John Hyde to fill the gap early in 1884. It was probably in a field on his farm just outside Killeagh that a platform was erected on Sunday 2 March for an outdoor meeting later that day, last-minute preparations being dictated by fears that the gathering would be banned. A detachment of magistrates and police arrived in the village and a government note-taker was present during the proceedings, but – somewhat to the surprise of the organisers – their meeting went ahead. The attendance was "large and enthusiastic" but Edmond O'Brien, who was voted chairman, seemed disappointed by the numbers, claiming that a recent clash between police and protesters at Castlelyons had discouraged the faint-hearted.^[97] In fact, numbers were boosted by contingents drawn from a wide area from Shanagarry to Ballymacoda and as far away as Conna and Tallow.^[98] One by-product of this disparate coalition is that no fewer than three village bands accompanied the various local groups, "which, if they did not add to the harmony, all events enlivened the proceedings".

With his usual resourcefulness, John Hyde had sought to orchestrate letters of support intended to provide inspiration and a sense of wider solidarity. He had even requested a blessing from Parnell himself but, unfortunately, the Chief was notoriously casual in dealing with correspondence. He replied a few days too late, explaining that he had not responded to Hyde's request because he did not "receive it in time to send you a letter of the kind you desired for your meeting, which was, I trust, a very successful one". His east Cork admirer was forced to ask the local press to publish this retrospective endorsement.^[99] However, he struck rhetorical gold with the missive that he elicited from Father John Savage, the curate at Inch. As Land League oratory indicated, English was the working language of the Killeagh district, but many people still spoke Irish, and its phrases permeated the more modern form of speech. When Hyde described Fr Savage as their "sagart arún", most locals would have understood that the curate was being called a beloved priest, in a warm context of traditional values.^[100] The esteemed cleric regretted that he was "prevented by Ecclesiastical Laws from attending", but he did not seem conscious of any prohibition upon the expression of his views in more permanent written form. He supported the formation of a National League branch in "this patriotic parish (which can boast of being one of the foremost in the fight of the past few years for Ireland’s liberties, and had the honour of sending two of her brave young men to graduate at Forster’s University, Kilmainham)". (The imprisonment of O'Brien and Hyde was acquiring mythic status: local activists had been locked up in Limerick Gaol; Parnell and the national leadership were incarcerated in Kilmainham.) Fr Savage was confident that there were "no backsliders or renegades to the National cause" in the parish. "We have not now, thank God, to begin the fight; on the contrary, we may look upon it as almost won. Landlordism has been brought on its knees. The bubble of Orange bombast and bragadoccio is exploded." (The reporter's spelling and Fr Savage's grammar made this an awkward sentence.) "Rotten Whiggery and rank Toryism have been buried in Cork," where a Parnellite candidate had just secured a notable by-election victory. "What is now wanted is to keep up the steam, and keep our powder dry till we rout those false and lazy nominal Home Rulers, and give our noble leader [Parnell] such a following at the general election as shall make him and his party all powerful in the House of Commons."^[101]

Fr Savage evidently did not define Irish nationality in any inclusive spirit, and he was certainly raising expectations to levels that Parnell's party at Westminster would find difficult to satisfy. Locally, he insisted, "very few parishes suffered half so much from rack-renting and ruinous law costs. As sure as each gale [rent] day comes round, so sure will follow a shower of writs, especially from one or two landlords who hold land in this parish. Fifty years ago this parish was able to support and maintain from 10,000 to 11,000 people, and to-day 2,000 can with difficulty live there."^[102] The explanation for this depopulation was obvious: "the land is principally fit only for tillage, and the rents, for the most part, were fixed when tillage paid well, and when labour was cheap" (an analysis that might have puzzled farmworkers who believed that they were still poorly paid). He reckoned that land values had fallen to barely one quarter of pre-Famine times. While most agrarian activists accorded almost sacred status to Griffith's Valuation, Fr Savage broke shocking new ground by dismissing this Magna Carta of the eighteen-fifties as an inappropriate yardstick for determining rents thirty years later. "It was pitiful to see the hard fight some of those poor tenants are making, striving to pay old debts consequent on impossible rents, and at the same time trying to keep body and soul together. Cold and unenviable, indeed, must be the Irishman that could daily witness such scenes and hard struggles unmoved, and that would not be stirred up to do something to right those wrongs, and try and bring peace and prosperity to a bleeding and impoverished  country." Lest his stirring words might be misinterpreted, he closed with the standard clerical homily on the need to avoid violence, although his invocation of peaceful protest did perhaps contain some element of ambiguity. "Be sober and well-conducted. Give no encouragement to crime, and at the same time be firm in the demand for your just rights."^[103] Rousing Nationalist sentiments of this kind from a priest would have made it difficult to organise the labourers in any organisation intended to challenge farmer leadership.

The meeting to launch the National League branch duly ratified pre-packaged resolutions insisting that the Irish people had the right "to legislate on their own domestic affairs in their own country". The elimination of loopholes in the 1881 Land Act was also called for, but the overall target had now moved to a higher level: "the creation of a peasant proprietary is the only settlement of the land question which the tenantry of Ireland can regard [as] satisfactory and final". The announced intentions of the British Prime Minister, Gladstone, to widen the franchise to include labourers was welcomed,^[104] but recent Westminster legislation to improve their housing was dismissed as "not likely to meet the intentions  of its framers": cheaper government loans were required, and less bureaucracy in applying for them. But there was something almost perfunctory about the discussion of a policy platform, and the meeting settled down to receive what were in effect its marching orders from the National League's principal Munster organiser. Like John Hyde, John O'Connor was a grocer and publican, with a background in the ranks of the Cork City Fenians. During the first phase of the Land War, he had transferred his allegiance to Parnell's confrontational constitutionalism, duly serving time in Kilmainham for his outspoken views. It was signalled to the Killeagh meeting that the National League intended that O'Connor should be sent to Westminster as the next member of parliament for County Cork, as part of the clean-out of moderate representatuves that Fr Savage called for. In the event, at the next general election, Parnell imposed him upon Tipperary: when the Home Rulers of the Premier County purported to choose a local candidate, Parnell simply summoned a second convention and ordered his followers to fall into line.^[105] Not surprisingly, Killeagh listened deferentially as this emissary from headquarters laid down the party line in some detail. Only once was there an interjection. When O'Connor touched upon the need for Parliament to do more for the labourers, a heckler was cheered when he demanded: "They must have a house and half acre free." John O'Connor dominated the meeting, but the normally taciturn Edmond O'Brien managed to have the last word. Several times during the meeting, farmers were urged to inconvenience their landlords by sabotaging effete rural pursuits, in particular blocking the squirearchy's favourite tally-ho! sport of chasing foxes by refusing access to their land. In formally closing proceedings, O'Brien "expressed a hope that no Irishman who had a spark of nationality in him would allow one landlord scoundrel to ride over his land". 

By August 1884, bad weather and a poor harvest presaged a difficult winter for Cork farmers, and hard times once again made life hard for those whom they employed.^[106] One sign of strains in the cross-class alliance was an unusually well-attended meeting of the National League branch in Killeagh on Sunday 7 December. Indeed, so many people turned up – an "immense multitude" from a wide hinterland – that the proceedings had to be conducted in the street, where two local bands tried to relieve the midwinter gloom. It was no surprise that John Hyde opened the proceedings – it would have been virtually impossible to hold a Nationalist gathering in the village without his ebullient oratory – but much less predictable was that he was followed by Michael Kidney, a labouring man. Indeed, the two speakers earnestly advocated a joint message, that they must be "all united and faithful to each other in order to further the great cause which they had before them, and all to pull together as one man, and to be firm in demanding redress for the many grievances under which they at  present laboured". In place of the usual stage-managed resolutions, there seems to have been a wide-ranging discussion of the best way to respond to two challenges – first, the reluctance of landlords to concede rent rebates and, second and of considerable significance, "[t]he opposition of some farmers and  landlords to the erection of labourers’ cottages  on their lands."^[107]

The large catchment area that supported this meeting was evidenced by a decision to hold the next fortnightly meeting at Mount Uniacke, five kilometres away, as a more central point. A branch of the National League based on Mogeely also covered a wide sweep of countryside: in July 1885, it "achieved a measure of peasant proprietary", having erected its own meeting place at Dungourney, six kilometres away. Edmond O'Brien presided there as Leaguers proceeded to impose their own form of social discipline. "A man named Thomas Walsh, who had been expelled some months since for voting against the Nationalist candidate, came forward and expressed his sorrow for what he had done". He was readmitted after promising that he would not repeat his offence, although it was not explained how his rebellion had been detected in a secret ballot. An egg merchant who begged forgiveness for having made purchases from a land grabber was also readmitted to society. The episodes may sound amusing but the control exercised by the National League was evidently no laughing matter for its victims.^[108] But if the farmers' organisation was enforcing its will through the threat of intimidation, the forces of law and order were prepared to resort to crude trickery. Speaking at a public meeting in County Waterford, Edmond O'Brien warned of a curious attempt to entrap activists in the coils of Coercion. Early in May 1885, he had received a mysterious package containing a list – apparently printed as posters – of the names of landlords and their supporters. It came from an unidentified 'Vigilance Committee', formed as part of an operation "to get rid of all parties who had made themselves obnoxious in Land League times". The envelope enclosed "a letter stating that as he had made himself prominent during the Land League movement, he was requested to have all these documents posted up in conspicuous places". His suspicions were further aroused when, two days later, he noticed half a dozen policemen standing near the gates of his Garranjames farm, sent there, he assumed, to arrest him on some charge of sedition if he displayed one of the posters. He had since heard that similar packages had been sent to other activists, and he warned anyone receiving them "not to be hoaxed into posting up these foolish documents".^[109]

The year of the great Home Rule debate, 1886, was also a time of great distress in rural Ireland.^[110] Even the large O'Brien farm found it a challenge to meet its rent obligations, and in September the landlord, R.H. Dring, seized two horses, five cows and a dozen sheep in compensation for arrears of twelve months.^[111] Edmond O'Brien's brother Robert was evicted from his farm at Conna for failing to pay a half-year rent instalment due to a landlord who was a Protestant clergyman.  It seems that he was subsequently reinstated, although not before he had exchanged blows with a contemptuous neighbour who was described as "an importation from Bandon", a thinly coded term for an Orange thug.^[112] John Hyde also suffered the loss of five cows, seized in a pre-dawn raid on one of the shortest days of the year, 22 December 1886. Hyde's dispute with his landlord, Colonel Alcock Stawell, was perhaps as much political as financial, since Stawell's tenants had demanded a thirty percent rent reduction, ten percent more than the Colonel was prepared to concede.^[113]

In the east Cork countryside, what might be called the era of the Garranjames demonstrations was moving into a new phase, which would become formally known from late October 1886 as the Plan of Campaign. In fact, the strategy had been outlined a year earlier by two of Parnell's more outspoken lieutenants, John Dillon and T.M. Healy. Their advice was simple: if landlords refused to grant rent rebates, tenants should pay the reduced amounts that they had offered into the hands of trustees, who would, if necessary, use the funds to resist evictions.^[114] In October 1885, after the refusal of a twenty percent reduction that they demanded, tenant farmers at Mount Uniacke entrusted the reduced amount to their patriotic curate, Fr John Savage, who held the cash on their behalf until a deal was agreed with the landlord in January 1886.^[115] In the autumn of 1886, the rent strike spread to the McKenna and Ponsonby estates: McKenna quickly came to terms, but the battle between the Ponsonby tenants and a landlord syndicate that bankrolled the hapless owner became one of the tragedies of the second phase of the Land War.^[116] One of Edmond O'Brien's brothers an evicted Ponsonby tenant who was sentence to six months' imprisonment in 1890 for "unlawful assembly" on the estate: James O'Brien's crime was attempting to plough his own fields.^[117] From the beginning of the agitation, Edmond O'Brien took part in organisation to raise funds for the support of the evicted tenants and, in 1891, he was described as one of the "Ponsonby campaigners".^[118] At cattle fairs in Youghal, Killeagh and Midleton in 1889 and 1890, he was subjected to close shadowing by police that amounted to harassment designed to impede him in the conduct of ordinary and legitimate business.^[119] John Hyde also remained active in agrarian agitation until his unexpected death.^[120] A month later, his lively rhetoric received a posthumous disapproving mention during the proceedings of the Parnell Commission, a British government judicial investigation that attempted to prove links between Home Rulers and terrorists.^[121] He would have appreciated the honour.

Killeagh would prove one of the strong points in the agrarian conflict throughout the late eighteen-eighties. Crucially, cross-class solidarity was maintained: indeed, the landlord combination that defended the Ponsonby interest seems to have made no attempt to divide labourers from farmers.^[122] There was a dramatic example of unity early in March 1887. Two years earlier, Killeagh had acquired a new parish priest, the Reverend Edmond Murphy, known to all as Father Ned. Born in the decade before the Famine, he was a fervent exponent of tenant grievances.^[123] It was a measure of the increased intensity of the Plan of Campaign that the turbulent curates of the early 'eighties were now succeeded as leaders of local agitation by parish priests, Ned Murphy at Killeagh and Daniel Keller at Youghal. Landlord representatives responded to Fr Murphy's decision to act as trustee and treasurer for the hard-pressed Ponsonby tenants by starting bankruptcy proceedings against him in order to force him to hand over the cash that he held. On Saturday 5 March word circulated that official messengers, escorted by a party of police, were heading for Killeagh to serve the necessary court documents. By prearranged signal, chapel bells were rung at three places – Killeagh and presumably also at Inch and Mogeely – and vast numbers of people swarmed into the village to block the process servers from approaching the parish priest's house. The human wall was maintained until after midnight, when the documentation would expire.^[124] Killeagh even became a byword for resistance even at Westminster. Four local shopkeepers were prosecuted and imprisoned under Coercion legislation in 1888 for allegedly conspiring to deny services to the policemen brought in to intimidate the Ponsonby tenants. In reality, there was every reason to assume that the people of Killeagh, individually and collectively, had determined to boycott the oppressors, and the crimes of conspiracy and suspicions of intimidation existed only in the minds of the authorities.^[125] The convictions were set aside on appeal although, unfortunately, not until the accused had served part of their sentences with hard labour in Cork Gaol.^[126] The 1890-1 Irish Party Split caused no ripples in Killeagh, where people seem to have regarded the ousted leader as a fallen idol. James O'Brien called a well-publicised public meeting in September 1891 to form a Parnellite organisation dedicated to the Chief's rallying cry of Independent Opposition during the Split. His hero-victim status was not enough to get the movement off the ground. Indeed, he was the only person who turned up.^[127]

This is an exploratory essay, and it leaves many intriguing questions for others to pursue. The solidarity of the Killeagh community in support of the Ponsonby tenants is impressive, despite – or, perhaps, because of – the ever-increasing prospect that their struggle would fail. The  dissenting comments from labourers that were occasionally heard and sometimes addressed by farmer spokesmen during the first half of the eighteen-eighties seem to have fallen silent during the Plan of Campaign. Perhaps legislative activity did result in some slight improvement of the living standards of the cottagers, although their day-to-day wages must have been placed under strain with so many tenant farmers evicted from their holdings and in no position to employ labour. All this calls for further investigation.  It would surely also be useful to explore the lives of the priests who took such a vocal part in the land campaigns. They certainly did not preach charity or understanding towards the landlord class in general and, indeed, were often notably fiery in their comments. A collective biography might assess more deeply the role of the Famine and the influence of Fenianism in their childhood and training. It would also be tempting to take the story forward, to explore the connections between the struggle for the land and the war for independence that followed a quarter of a century later.^[128]

However, this study has for its focus the two Land League demonstrations at Garranjames in July 1881 that dramatised local anger at the arrest of Edmond O'Brien and John Hyde. The thematic, almost theatrical, ingenuity of the events, the first concentrating on turnips, the second on the massive delivery of sea-sand, succeeded in catching attention, so that they were reported even on the far side of the world.^[129] Lacking novelty, the sequels in August were less widely reported, even though the delivery of sand to John Hyde's farm was probably organised on an even larger scale than the earlier operation at Garranjames.^[130] The demonstrations were useful in publicity terms, but perhaps their most important function was the reinforcement that they contributed to social cohesion. It was by no means as obvious as Land League speakers asserted that labourers shared the interests of farmers. There were warning signs – in the special circumstances of Ballycotton during the early 'eighties and the massive but unforeseen manifestation of Davitt's farming and factory union at Inch in September 1882 – that the rural working class was capable of asserting its own priorities. At almost every rally, some heckler would demand better housing or express, perhaps with mordant humour, a sense of weary distrust in the farmers who paid them such niggardly wages. The Garranjames demonstrations were intended to be taken as evidence of spontaneous cross-class unity, but they may also be interpreted as staged performative exercises, organised and stewarded by farmers, but designed to combine a pleasant excursion for their labourers with just enough token work input to ensure that they felt committed to the cause of the suspects and the concessions for which they fought. The waving banners and the tuneful bands at Garranjames formed part of two of the many episodes of Ireland's Land War. Recovering them helps in the rediscovery of the nation's past.

ENDNOTES  Many of the farms and houses mentioned in this essay still exist, but they are of course private property.

^[1] J.S. Donnelly, jr, The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork … (London, 1965), is, of course, the basic source for farming methods and agrarian issues in this period, and is cited as Donnelly. I limit references to specific points. Garranjames is officially spelt Garranejames, and was so recorded in Griffith's Valuation and successive census reports. I use here the popular version usual in newspaper reports.

^[2] I have not traced the date of Edmond O'Brien's first election to the Midleton Board of Guardians, but he was a member by 1879. In 1881, the Land Leaguers had only recently captured overall control of the authority: Cork Weekly Herald, 2 April 1881.

^[3] Unroofed in 1944, Dromdihy (also spelt Dromdiah) was for long a gaunt and imposing memory overlooking Killeagh, but it was rescued and restored in the 2020s. One unusual feature was that Davis installed showers: https://theirishaesthete.com/2023/04/24/dromdiah/ and https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/20829001/dromdihy-house-dromdihy-killeagh-co-cork. 

^[4] William Davis of "Garren James, Killeagh, county Cork" exhibited a prize bull at the Cork Agricultural Show in 1860 and 1861, and was presumably the Mr W. Davis of Garranjames who attended a ball in Cork in 1861. Farmer's Gazette, 28 July 1860; Southern Reporter, 15 April, 1 August 1861. He died at Killeagh in May 1868, aged 43, which suggests that he was a son of Richard Green Davis. Cork Examiner, 15 May 1868. His widow later lived at Killeagh House. (He had problems with corns, and recommended a bunion remover in Youghal: Cork Daily Herald, 6 August 1861.)

^[5] https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/20906610/glengarra-kilcounty-co-cork. Dring was the landlord at Garranjames in 1886. In 1889, he advertised for a Protestant servant at Glengarra. Cork Constitution, 8 February 1889.

^[6] The land was described as "an excellent Sheep Farm, and has been for many years in the hands of the Proprietor" (Cork Daily Herald, 6 November 1869). Dring auctioned his stock and farm equipment in November 1869. He sold 151 sheep, plus "[a] very promising 2-year-old Filly, and a year old Colt". 14 acres were under turnips (for winter feed), about the same area as would be cultivated by Edmond O'Brien. Dring only auctioned ten stock (dry) cattle, but may have raised other beasts for meat: local fairs at Castlemartyr, Killeagh and Midleton made it easy to sell cattle. Southern Reporter, 29 October 1869.

^[7] Cork Examiner, 25 October 1864, where John O'Brien is styled 'Esq.' He had subscribed to the fund to erect a school at Castlemartyr.

^[8] Various sources e.g. Galway Weekly Advertiser, 25 October 1823. James O'Brien and his wife Margaret Foley emigrated from Garranjames to the United States in 1850. Their twelve-year-old son John worked first on an uncle's farm in Massachusetts and then in a textile factory, where he encountered and resisted the anti-Catholic prejudice of the Know-Nothing movement. Appointment to an organising post in the Temperance movement was a step towards studying for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1868 and became parish priest at East Cambridge, Massachusetts five years later. When his admirers celebrated the fortieth anniversary of his ordination in 1908, it was clear that he still identified with Garranjames as his birthplace. His parents seem to have maintained a family connection with Killeagh, and it is likely that he was a relative (perhaps a cousin) of Edmond O'Brien. Souvenir in Honor of the Triple Anniversary of the Rev. John O'Brien (East Cambridge, Mass., 1908).

^[9] Southern Reporter, 3 August 1865. There were 4,533 people called O'Brien in County Cork listed in the 1901 census. With variant spellings of both the surname (O'Brien and Brien) and confusion of forenames (Edmond, Edmund, Edward), they are not easily identified. Edmond O'Brien's brothers Robert and James both farmed locally, and were victims of eviction in 1886-7 and 1890.

^[10] Cork Daily Herald, 3 April 1879, reported his sale of fat cattle at Killeagh fair.

^[11] Cork Examiner, 26 January 1889. I have also used here the report in the Cork Examiner, 19 July 1881, which may be also consulted online through the useful summary in New Zealand Tablet, 16 September 1881. This weekly magazine covered Irish affairs in some detail, and can be searched without charge via the National Library of New Zealand's PapersPast site, https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals

^[12] Donnelly, 171.

^[13] Cork Examiner, 18 January; Cork Weekly Herald, 5 February 1887. Irish butter was believed to be losing ground (and price) in the British market, particularly to competition from Denmark, because so many small producers resulted in problems of uneven quality.

^[14] Cork Examiner, 27 August 1881.

^[15] Donnelly, 308-12.

^[16] https://landedestates.ie/estate/2599. The Reverend Francis Stawell died in 1866, leaving an estate of almost £90,000: https://www.willcalendars.nationalarchives.ie/reels/cwa/005014887/005014887_00170.pdf. The Stawell family were based at Kilbrittain, west of Cork. The family also owned the farm rented by John Hyde on the outskirts of Killeagh.

^[17] New Zealand Tablet, 16 September 1881; Cork Examiner, 18 September 1886. The defaulter was identified as Mr John O'Brien, probably an error but perhaps an indication that a son had taken over active management of the farm. Rebecca Davis died on 24 December 1885, aged 67. I hope the news a few days earlier of Gladstone's conversion to Irish Home Rule was not the cause. Cork Constitution, 28 December 1885.

^[18] The complex burdens of the Avondale estate in County Wicklow explain much about the early career of Parnell: Ged Martin, "Charles Stewart Parnell: Economics and Politics of a Building Trade Entrepreneur": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/263-charles-stewart-parnell-economics-and-politics-of-a-building-trade-entrepreneur.

^[19] https://cork.adlibhosting.com/ais6/results.

^[20] U. H. Hussey De Burgh, ed., The Landowners of Ireland… (Dublin, [1878]), 118, 137. The representatives of Roger Greene [sic] Davis controlled 2,253 acres, valued at £796 (which seems low). Robert Dring held 866 acres, worth £515, and Simon Dring of Glanmire (possibly his son) 1,029 acres valued at £629. De Burgh omitted holdings of less than 500 acres, which probably explains why neither William nor Rebecca Davis appears.

^[21] Searched via https://griffiths.askaboutireland.ie/, the url being too complex to cite. The land was valued at £120, ten shillings, and the house at £8, ten shillings.

^[22] https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/20829011/killeagh-house-main-street-killeagh-gardens-killeagh-co-cork.

^[23] Sir Henry de Capell Brooke conceded a 35% reduction as early as February 1887: L.M. Geary's authoritative study of the Plan of Campaign does not even regard his estate as formally involved. Sir Joseph McKenna agreed to a 20% abatement soon after, but other concessions doubled the effective value to his tenants. McKenna was in a particularly difficult position: he was a Parnellite MP, if an increasingly isolated survival from earlier times, and his estate was in financial difficulties. Donnelly, 335, 337, 348-9: L.M. Geary, The Plan of Campaign 1886-1891 (Cork, 1986), esp. 169. The de Capell Brookes were projected as ideal landlords. In 1891, a complimentary dinner was given to the heir, who visited Killeagh from England, with the pro-tenant parish priest Fr Ned Murphy in the chair. An address praising the family was presented. The message was that de Capell Brooke was not Ponsonby. Irish Times, 3 September 1891, and sufficiently newsworthy to be reported in New Zealand Tablet, 4 December 1891.

^[24] Donnelly, 251-75.

^[25] Cork Weekly Herald, 27 September 1879.

^[26] Cork Examiner, 8 November 1880.

^[27] He was as secretary of the Castlemartyr Land League at the time of his arrest, but branch seems to have been less active than Killeagh: Cork Daily Herald, 14 July 1881.

^[28] Flag of Ireland, 20 August 1881 (the online British Newspaper Archive uses this title, but the paper was actually United Ireland at the time). Hyde's unexpected early death in 1888 was regarded not just as a personal loss to his home district but as an organisational blow to the local Land League, of which he was secretary. Cork Constitution, 5 September 1888. Hyde and O'Brien were both described as young men by a local priest in 1884.

^[29] Cork Examiner, 8 November 1880. The eviction of the Hyde family had apparently taken place in 1864. 

^[30] Dublin Weekly Nation, 23 July 1881.

^[31] Cork Weekly Herald, 13 November 1880.

^[32] Cork Weekly Herald, 8 January 1881.

^[33] Cork Weekly Herald, 2 April 1881.

^[34] Cork Constitution, 10 May 1881.

^[35] Since 1914, the term 'internment' has generally been used to describe the confinement of individuals on grounds of national security, usually without any criminal allegation against them. O'Brien and Hyde were both arrested on specific charges, although without any cited evidence to back them up. The term was occasionally used for the imprisonment without trial of Irish activists in this period, and it seems appropriate here.

^[36] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1881/jul/11/protection-of-person-and-pro-perty-3

^[37] T.W. Reid, Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster (2 vols, London 1891), ii, 323, 330.

^[38] Cork Daily Herald, 14 July 1881. It seems that Limerick Gaol was not designed to hold large numbers of political detainees: 'suspects' were supposed to be treated as remand prisoners, for instance being exempt from wearing prison clothing. On 14 July, Tim Healy complained that the suspects held at Limerick were forced to associate with ordinary criminals. Overcrowding perhaps explains why Hyde was later transferred to Clonmel Gaol. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1881/jul/14/protection-of-person-and-pro-perty-2.

^[39] "Both of these men hold large farms, and are very well to do." Cork Weekly Herald, 23 July 1881.

^[40] Cork Examiner, 18 July 1881.

^[41] Cork Weekly Herald, 30 July 1881. Fr O'Riordan called Hyde "a gentle and honourable man": Dublin Weekly Nation, 23 July 1881.

^[42] Cork Daily Herald, 18 July 1881. (The various reporters present evidently recorded different segments of Fr O'Riordan's comments.)

^[43] Cork Daily Herald, 19 July 1881.

^[44] Cork Weekly Herald, 23 July 1881. Another speaker at the Midleton meeting praised Edmond O'Brien for his "uprightness and honour".

^[45] Cork Weekly Examiner, 8 July 1916. The Reverend Timothy O'Regan of Coachford provided a particularly juicy example of the political eloquence of a curate at a meeting of striking farmworkers in Macroom, whom he addressed as "Fellow labourers", describing himself as "a slothful labourer in the vineyard of the Lord". He could not be described as an admirer of the landlord class. Cork Examiner, 1 August 1881. Fr O'Regan further broadened the definition when addressing that the Land League convention in Dublin in September: "Who were Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien? Were they not labourers?"  Coachford mobilised in late October in response to rumours that he was about to be arrested. Cork Examiner, 1 August; Londonderry Standard, 20 September; Cork Weekly Herald, 29 October 1881. A native of Inniscarra, he was moved to Freemount (near Mallow) in 1884, and died there, aged 48, in 1895. An obituary praised his commitment to political issues: "there was no public meeting within an available distance of his residence that he did not attend": he was a witness to the shootings at Mitchelstown in 1888. Cork Examiner, 22 March 1895. Canon Daniel Keller, the celebrated parish priest of Youghal who was imprisoned during the Plan of Campaign, also came from Inniscarra, although he was 8 years older. These clerical networks call for closer investigation.

^[46] Speaking on the evening of 11 July, two days the before arrest of Hyde and O'Brien, McKenna was referring to the policy of repression in general: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1881/jul/11/protection-of-person-and-pro-perty-3.

^[47] Finlay Dun, a pro-landlord visiting correspondent sent to Ireland by The Times in 1881, described the life of a typical labourer on a tenant farm that was part of the well-run Devonshire estates around Lismore, County Waterford. "Although generally well housed, often rent free, the condition of the labourer is susceptible of considerable improvement. Those living in cottages on the farm receive 3s. 6d. to 4s. per week; turn out at 6 a.m. in winter, at 5 a.m. in summer; have breakfast in the farm kitchen, usually of potatoes and milk; have the same for dinner, varied perhaps, by occasional stirabout [porridge]; continue work until 5 p.m. in winter, and 7 p.m. in summer, and return home to supper. Besides these wages, they have three barrels, or about 15 cwt, of coals, and make something by feeding a pig and some poultry; while the women of the family have occasional work among the root crops or hay at 6d. to 8d. per day, and in harvest earn 1s. 6d. to 2s. One of their chief grievances is the high price of £5 to £6 per acre charged by the farmer for the use of land manured and prepared for the potato crop, the cottager finding and planting his own seed." F. Dun, Landlord and Tenant in Ireland (London, 1881), 63.

^[48] Census 1881, Munster, 287 (https://archive.org/details/op1251356-1001/page/286/mode/2up).

^[49] The precise figures were: farmers and graziers, 24,876; male relatives, 12,564; cottagers/ labourers, 22,626.

^[50] The illiteracy percentages were: male farmers, 26%; younger male members of farm families, 12.6%; cottagers /labourers, 47.9%.

^[51] Cork Weekly Herald, 23 October 1880. A dispute over unpaid rent on a slum cabin entertained landlord magistrates at Tramore, County Waterford: Ged Martin, " The farmer landlord and the labourer tenant: a County Waterford sidelight on Ireland's Land War, 1882"  https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/294-the-farmer-landlord-and-the-labourer-tenant-a-county-waterford-sidelight-on-ireland-s-land-war-1882.

^[52] T.W. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-1882 (Oxford, 1982), 340-1, 375-6.

^[53] Dublin Weekly Nation, 17 July 1880.

^[54] The story is complex and was not clarified by Land League propaganda: Cork Weekly Herald, 23 October, 20 November 1880; Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-1882, 423-4.

^[55] Cork Constitution, 8 November 1881. In a further bizarre twist, the land agent who mobilised them, Thomas Walsh, had been one of the Fenians who raided Knockadoon in 1867. He was sarcastically described as "the hero of Kilclooney Wood".

^[56] Cork Weekly Herald, 20 November 1880.

^[57] In December 1882, the Ballycotton carberies complained that farmers were paying £1 in acre in rent but subletting at £4. Short and insecure tenure meant that the fishermen fertilised their potato grounds with seaweed, which enabled the farmers to raise grain crops in succeeding years. Donnelly, 239.

^[58] In the bigger picture, the moral issue was less clear-cut than land reformers asserted. A booming industrial population in Britain (and around Belfast) needed to be fed: thousands suffered from their clearance to make way for meat production, but millions benefited.

^[59] F.S.L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1977), 263-4; P. Bew, Enigma… (Dublin, 2011), 38-9; Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-1882, 423-4.

^[60] Cork Examiner, 4 September 1882. Inch is about  8 kilometres north of Killeagh. The two communities shared a Land League branch.

^[61] Donnelly, 236-9; Cork Examiner, 5 December 1881.

^[62] Cork Examiner, 18 July, 2 August 1881; Cork Weekly Herald, 23 July 1881. The Gaelic Athletic Association, founded three years later, institutionalised inter-county hurling rivalry. In the 20^th century, it was said that the archetypal Cork farmer wanted to see two aims achieved by the beginning of September: "Tipperary bate and the hay saved."

^[63] Widely advertised, e.g. Cork Daily Herald, 21 June 1881. The excursion was planned for Sunday 26 June.

^[64] Donnelly, 235-9.

^[65] Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 95, noted the holiday aspect of early Land League meetings. The same point was made about major events in O'Connell's Repeal campaign by Oliver MacDonagh in O'Connell… (one-vol. ed., London, 1991), 513.

^[66] Cork Examiner, 19 July 1881.

^[67] Illustrated in N. Kissane, Parnell: a Documentary History (Dublin, 1991), 53.

^[68] Cork Daily Herald, 19 July 1881. This report made clear that the demonstration was overwhelmingly male, adding as an afterthought that "Women also lent their aid."

^[69] Cork Weekly Herald, 12 February 1881. For Dean Howie, see J.H. Cole, Church and Parish Records of the United Diocese of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross (Cork, 1903), 218-19, and 207-8 for R.C. Bolster (helpfully digitised by Cork City Libraries as https://digital.corkpastandpresent.com/Documents/Detail/church-and-parish-records-of-the-united-diocese-of-cork-cloyne-and-ross-by-rev.-j.h.-cole/103437). In 1903, there were 75 Protestants in the Church of Ireland parish of Killeagh, probably residing in the wider area. The Duke of Devonshire's agent at Lismore, F.E. Currey, argued that, for Cork and Waterford, Griffith's Valuation was "an uncertain and irregular test of rent … usually under the fair letting value". He criticised the inconsistent methodology used by different surveyors, and pointed out that farm prices had risen by 25 to 50 percent since its completion. Dean Howie's trust in Griffith was evidently not shared. Dun, Landlord and Tenant in Ireland, 56. As noted below, Fr John Savage, the curate at Inch, regarded Griffith as unreliable in the other direction.

^[70] Descriptions taken Cork Examiner, Cork Daily Herald, 19 July; Cork Weekly Herald, Weekly Nation, 23 July 1881.

^[71] If the estimate of 1,500 people is correct, each worker would have thinned about 30 square yards (25 square metres) of ground. If the drills were 18 inches apart (45 cms), each person would have been responsible for about 60 yards (55 metres) of seedlings. This would have been fast work.

^[72] "The hour is past to fawn or crouch / As suppliants for our right; / Let word and deed unshrinking vouch / The banded millions' might; / Let them who scorned the fountain rill, / Now dread the torrent's roar, / And hear our echoed chorus still, / We're Paddies evermore!" Attributed to John O'Hagan, 1843.

^[73] This was probably Patrick T. O'Brien, who had been elected as temporary secretary of the Killeagh Land League branch at the previous day's protest meeting.

^[74] D. Dickson, Old World Colony…  (Cork, 2005), 217, 220, 226, 292; Donnelly, 27-8. Lewis's Topographical Dictionary (1837) is packed with references to the sand trade along the Cork coast. Not long after the Garranjames demonstration, the authorities attempted to stop the practice at Youghal Strand, perhaps because it was valued as a holiday destination.  In 1891, a notice from the County Surveyor warned: "Any person or persons taking Sand, Gravel, or Shingle off the Sea Shore between the Road at Redbarn and the Youghal Lighthouse, will be Prosecuted." Cork Examiner, 19 December 1891. This seems to have been a recent policy initiative: in 1911, Youghal Urban District Council stated that no sand, gravel or shingle had been removed from the foreshore under its control for twenty years. UK Parliamentary Papers, 1911, 5709, Royal Commission on Coastal Erosion, iii (ii), 47.

^[75] Accounts taken from Cork Examiner, 25 July; Cork Weekly Herald, 30 July 1881.

^[76] Fr Greene ventured an "Erin Mavourneen" at another meeting, again a sentimental fragment.

^[77] William Coleman was possibly the 57-year-old, bilingual farmer returned at Killeagh in the 1901 census. Edmund Fitzgerald was Master of the Clonmult Foxhounds. He died as the result of a hunting accident in 1889, aged 55.

^[78] F.S.L. Lyons, John Dillon… (London, 1968), 46.

^[79] Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 171-5; Bew, Enigma, 86-8.

^[80] Cork Daily Herald, 11 August 1881.

^[81] "Let the farmers and labourers keep united, and let no power sever that union. They were sailing in the same ship, either they would go down together or enter together the haven of prosperity (cheers). If the farmers and labourers pulled well together they would go on making quick strides towards prosperity, and he hoped he would live to see the day when every farmer and labourer in the country would have decent habitations to live in, would have decent dresses, and decent fare, and educated children growing up about them who need not have to fly to foreign countries, but who would live at home in happy homes of their forefathers. May they all live to see that day."

^[82] A haggard is an Irish term for a stackyard for storing crops, usually close to the farmhouse. Greene used the variant pronunciation "haggart".

^[83] Fr O'Riordan was removed to Midleton at about this time, perhaps because he had become too politically active.

^[84] Cork Weekly Herald, 27 August 1881. 22 acres is about 9 hectares; Hyde's barley crop covered about 2.8 hectares. The four-hour work period at Garranjames probably started with the arrival of the contingent with Conna, since the combined workforce did not reach Hyde's farm until 6 in the evening.

^[85] Advocate (Melbourne), 12 November 1881, quoting Cork Herald, n.d.

^[86] Flag of Ireland, 17 September 1881.

^[87] Dublin Daily Express, 21 November 1881.

^[88] Dublin Weekly Nation, 26 November 1881.

^[89] Cork Weekly Herald, 17 December 1881. The bizarre medical explanation sounds like special pleading to excuse the authorities. The suspects in Limerick Gaol would have encountered the cold November air in the exercise yard, and it is surely more likely that John Hyde's health was adversely affected by his four months' incarceration in an institution packed with the casualties of society and their germs. (Parnell's health was certainly damaged by his imprisonment in Kilmainham.)

^[90] Donnelly, 290-307.

^[91] Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 235-7. Parnell had been released early in May 1882. The suggestion that Parnell secretly joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood at this time is contested by Ged Martin, "Did Parnell swear the IRB oath? a sceptical review": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/336-did-parnell-swear-the-irb-oath.

^[92] M. Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland… (London, 1904), 368-9: "Nothing had been done in the land act of 1881 for this large class."

^[93] Donnelly, 240-2.

^[94] Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-1882, 542-3, and cf. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 235-8.

^[95] Cork Examiner, 4 September 1882, reporting meeting on Sunday 3 September.

^[96] "The lieutenant in the army did not plough, yet without the ploughman he could not carry on the process of his warfare. So also he who ploughed the briny ocean could not go on without the ploughman." There may be an echo here of "the tar who ploughs the water" from the recent popular operetta, HMS Pinafore (1878). W.S. Gilbert himself mocked the popularity of "the airs from that infernal nonsense, Pinafore".

^[97] This seems to have been the sole occasion of a challenge to Edmond O'Brien's primacy in local Nationalist circles. A "clique" (as he dismissed them) of hecklers objected that, as member of the Board of Guardians, he had supported the interests of Lord Midleton, the town's unpopular landlord. The episode remains obscure and I have not traced the details. Midleton's cattle market had been relocated from the traditional Fair Green at the north end of the Main Street. It seems that it was rumoured that the move had been prompted by fears that the existing site was too close to the local fever hospital. O'Brien had voted with landlord representatives to deny this. If Nationalists were to participate in local administration – a right that they demanded – then issues would surely arise in which their perception of community needs (in this case, the discouragement of a potential threat to public confidence in the security of the hospital) would coincide with landlord interests. Midleton's Fair Green is now a car park; the site of the fever hospital is occupied by a supermarket.

^[98] Cork Constitution, 3 March; Cork Weekly Herald, 8 March 1884.

^[99] Cork Examiner, 6 March 1884.

^[100] Irish still lacked a standardised written form. The reporter phonetically captured Hyde's tribute as "soggarth aroon".

^[101] Gentlemanly Home Rulers who fruitlessly played the Westminster political game were dismissed as 'Whigs'.   At the previous general election, in 1880, 63 Irish MPs were elected who were pledged to some form of Home Rule, but only 24 were out-and-out supporters of Parnell and his policy of disrupting the House of Commons. Others later gave partial support. Parnell was elected chairman of the parliamentary party in 1880 by 23 votes to 18, the limited participation reflecting the low intensity of commitment within the caucus. Parnell ruthlessly transformed this relatively nominal position into a dominant party leadership. At the next election, in 1885, backed by a broader franchise that included male labourers, he eradicated the moderates. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 123-5.

^[102] The population of the Protestant parish of Killeagh (including residents of all denominations) fell from 2,815 in 1841 to 2,007 during the Famine decade and continued to decline to 1,194 in 1881 and 1,083 in 1891.  Census of Ireland, 1851, Munster (Cork), 88; 1891, Munster, 186. Catholic parish boundaries were usually different. In 1890-1, Richard Dunne, the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, revisited his homeland. Travelling through his native county of Tipperary and on into Cork, he recorded that "my heart bled at the extreme emptiness of the country". At Mogeely, "the marriages registered in the Catholic Church [which then also served Castlemartyr] in the years 1839, 1840, and 1841 were, respectively, 69, 74, and 72 in number. The present parish priest assured me that during the last six years they never exceeded seven per annum." This, of course, was not simply the product of a fall in population: marriage at a much later age became the norm in post-Famine times. Priests teaching in the schools visited by Archbishop Dunne informed him that "fully 80 per cent of the children before me would spend their twentieth birthday out of Ireland, generally in America. It seems a terrible thing to think that a few idle and comparatively worthless men, such as are the majority of the Irish landlords, should be able to say: 'The Irish people shall not stay in Ireland; they must go elsewhere; we wish so.' Ay, and what is more, that these men should be able to enforce this monstrous dictum." Freeman's Journal (Sydney), 9 May 1891, via Trove, the National Library of Australia online newspaper archive.

^[103] In the next two years, Reverend John Savage became prominent in the opening stage of the second phase of the Land War. In October 1885, he became the key player in what would become a precursor for the Plan of Campaign of the following year. Refused a requested rebate, tenant farmers at Mount Uniacke paid the reduced amount to Fr Savage, who held the cash as trustee until a deal was agreed with the landlord in January 1886. He also took part in negotiations for a reduction in rents on the estates of Sir Joseph McKenna. He did address public meetings, at Ballynatray in May 1885 and at Knockanore in February 1886, where he delivered what might best be termed a boisterous speech on land issues. Both venues were in County Waterford, and he perhaps assumed that he was safe to orate, having crossed into the next diocese. It is possible that his superiors ordered him to desist, as he was apparently moved from Inch to Conna, where his subsequent involvement in the Plan of Campaign was relatively minor. Donnelly, 320; Cork Weekly Herald, 23 May; Cork Constitution, 21 October 1885, 25 January; Cork Weekly News, 6 February; Waterford News, 26 February 1886. He died as curate of Conna in 1891, an obituary in the Cork Daily Herald (13 April 1891) describing him as "soggarth aroon". He had been ordained in 1869, making him another member of that outspoken post-Famine generation ("He was always a supporter of the National movement"). He was at Conna by early 1888, when he spoke at a Nationalist meeting, taking care to base his remarks upon a pastoral letter of the Bishop of Cloyne. Journalists present did not report the passage that he read out, but it is possible that his diocesan's pronouncement did not closely tally with Fr Savage's rousing conclusion that "the Irish people, acting peacefully and constitutionally, would pull down those tyrants who are now bullying and trampling them. Ireland and her people were being robbed and outraged and insulted: there was not a nation in the world that would not stand up and fight against such tyranny as that". Cork Examiner, 13 February 1888.

^[104] In his habitual opaque prose, Gladstone speculated that broadening the franchise in Ireland might "establish a dual current in the constituencies" (i.e. split the farmers from the labourers). This was an example of his occasional tendency to self-delusion. A. Jones, The Politics of Reform 1884 (Cambridge, 1972), 21.

^[105] https://www.dib.ie/biography/oconnor-john-a6598; Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 252. He was a native of Fermoy. Lyons does not clearly distinguish between this John O'Connor and a namesake with a similar pedigree.

^[106] Donnelly, 313-14.

^[107] Cork Weekly Herald, 13 December 1884.

^[108] Cork Examiner, 22 July 1885.

^[109] Cork Weekly Herald, 23 May 1885. Edmond O'Brien was speaking at a demonstration at Ballinatray on the Blackwater (although not on the Holroyd-Smyth estate) where the National League branch was felt to be in need of reinforcements. The list compiled by the so-called 'Vigilance Committee' named potential victims across a wide range of east Cork and west Waterford, which suggested that it was the work of some organisation with access to detailed records.

^[110] Donnelly, 316-30.

^[111] The seizure may have been symbolic, since Dring would probably have found it difficult to sell his prey.  Cork Examiner, 18 September 1886. The farm was identified as Garranjames but the occupant was described as Mr John O'Brien. Given the prominence of Edmond O'Brien locally, it seems unlikely that this was a mistake: the property may have been managed by a son. Edmond O'Brien was clearly the tenant at the time of the 1889 auction.

^[112] Cork Weekly Herald, 30 July, 13 August 1887: the eviction had happened "some time ago". George Daunt was noted for his "hatred of everything National" and for describing his neighbours as "papists" when he was "in the elation produced by over indulgence in liquor". The two men travelled on the same train from Cork to Mogeely, apparently in separate carriages, and only encountered one another when they dropped into the  public house in the village. Robert O'Brien had specialised in horse-breeding, which made him especially sensitive to Daunt's sneer: "Robert, all you have now would not buy a horse". O'Brien's allegation of assault came to court but the two parties seemed ashamed of their over-reaction and the matter was remitted to the arbitration of two unnamed local clergymen, apparently an unusual example of ecumenically induced compromise. Later reports of horse fairs indicate that Robert O'Brien was reinstated on his farm. Its name, 'Sunlodge', suggests an upmarket enterprise.

^[113] Dublin Daily Express, 23 December 1886.

^[114] Geary, The Plan of Campaign 1886-1891, 8-9; Donnelly, 318-20.

^[115] Donnelly, 320; Cork Constitution, 21 October 1885, 25 January 1886.

^[116] Donnelly, passim; Geary, The Plan of Campaign 1886-1891, esp. 109-14.

^[117] Freeman's Journal, 23 January; United Ireland, 1 February 1890. As James O'Brien was escorted from the Youghal courthouse to the station on his way to prison, a large crowd followed singing 'God Save Ireland'. He seems to have been the tenant wrongly named as Edmond O'Brien who was evicted in 1890 from a twenty-acre Ponsonby holding for non-payment of five-and-a-half years of rent. Evening Irish Times, 23 April 1890.

^[118] Cork Examiner, 25 July 1887, Cork Weekly Herald, 11 July 1891. Edmond O'Brien took part in a delegation of support to Jasper Pyne, the Nationalist MP for West Waterford. To avoid arrest under Coercion, Pyne had barricaded himself in the upper floors of Lisfinney Castle near Tallow, hauling up necessary supplies provided by admiring supporters. His self-imposed martyrdom was the subject of much mirth in Britain. He disappeared from a cross-channel ferry in November 1888 and was assumed to have drowned. Cork Weekly Herald, 26 November 1887; https://www.waterfordmuseum.ie/tallow-an-outline-history/2/.

^[119] Cork Weekly Herald, 17 August 1889; Dublin Weekly Nation, 21 June, 4 October; Dublin Evening Telegraph, 10 November 1890.

^[120] Flag of Ireland, 6 December 1886; Cork Examiner, 12 February, Freeman's Journal, 7 March 1887; Cork Weekly Herald, 25 February, Cork Examiner, 7 May 1888. Dr Charles Tanner, an eccentric Parnellite MP, joked about the co-operation between a Hyde and a Tanner at a February 1887 rally in Youghal: Flag of Ireland, 19 February 1887.

^[121] Parnellism and Crime..., i (London, 1888), 287. The mention came in the opening speech to the enquiry by the Attorney-General, Sir Richard Webster.

^[122] It may be worth speculating on the reasons why no landowners seem to have attempted the Penn-Gaskell strategy of dividing the land of evicted tenants into small-holdings for labourers. First, such subdivision was not in their long-term interest. It made more sense for landlords to collect rents of £20 from each of 5 substantial tenant farmers rather than payments of £2 a head from fifty sharecroppers. If the smallholders had rebelled, the logistics of clearing them would have been considerable. Second, fishing gave the Ballycotton carberies an alternative source of income, even if precarious. As 'An Irish Farmer' explained to readers of The Times (9 January 1886): "If a labourer lived in a palace and had no work he could not live… A good house and half an acre rent free, or even three acres, will not keep a man unless he has work." (The reference to 'three acres' was an allusion to a contemporary English radical slogan, 'Three acres and a cow'.) Third, while labourers had no chance of living in palaces, it was no longer possible for either landlords or farmers to abandon them to live in hovels improvised from branches covered with sods of turf, the kind of housing common in the Famine era. By the later 'eighties, clean and watertight cottages were required (even if resisted by many farmers), which was enough to rule out the mass manufacture of smallholdings. Lastly, rural solidarity (whether voluntary or constrained) would have made it very difficult to recruit settlers in the numbers required, while outsiders would have found it impossible to function in the face of communal hostility.

^[123] A torchlight procession celebrated the 50^th anniversary of his ordination in 1912. On that occasion, Fr New Murphy recalled memories of Daniel O'Connell's Repeal campaign, although his claim to have heard the Liberator speak was probably a confusion: he could only have been a small boy, and the details do not add up. In 1912, Home Rule was back on the political agenda, and he rejoiced that "the day was at hand when they would reap the harvest of Irish prosperity", adding that "he hoped, please God, to live long enough yet to see realised the aspirations of the generations of patriots whom he had seen pass away." At his death in 1920, during the War of Independence, he too was hailed as "a true old 'Sagart a ruin'", a perhaps unfortunate transcription. The list of family mourners at his funeral suggests an east Cork background, although he had apparently lived as a child in or near Macroom. Irish Independent, 24 April; Cork Free Press, 29 December 1912; Cork Weekly Examiner, 2 October 1920.

^[124] Cork Weekly Herald, 12 March 1887, also reported in New Zealand Tablet, 3 June 1887, one measure of the impact of the episode.

^[125] An English Liberal politician explained the point, with specific reference to Killeagh: "Where boycotting is the result of a deliberate conspiracy of an association, who by intimidation compel a whole neighbourhood to refuse supplies to the person under their ban, it is highly criminal and cruel. Where, however, it is the result of a general popular feeling, roused to indignation by the harsh action of an individual, but without concert or direction, it is certainly not criminal. We may deplore it, and we may deplore equally the harsh action which has led to this popular feeling, but it certainly is, and ought to be, the right of tradespeople to refuse to deal with any person, without alleging a reason for the refusal." G. Shaw Lefevre, Incidents of Coercion… (London, 1888), 152.

^[126] Irish Times, 15 June 1888. Gladstone who, as Prime Minister in 1881-2, had been responsible for interning so many Irish activists, now waxed indignant because two local magistrates had exceeded their authority under Coercion legislation in dealing with the Killeagh case. A.W. Hutton and H.J. Cohen, eds., The Speeches and Public Addresses of the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone ... x (London, 1892), 79. John Hyde was not one of the four men prosecuted in the summer of 1888, but stress associated with the case might have been a contributory cause of his death in September, presumably from a heart attack.

^[127] Cork Constitution, 11 September, Cork Weekly Herald, 26 September 1891.

^[128]  The Kent family of Castlelyons constitute one such link: see the prosecution of Thomas Kent under the Coercion legislation, Cork Weekly Herald, 19 April 1890. He would be executed by firing squad at Cork Barracks on 9 May 1916 for his part in the family's resistance during Easter Week.

^[129] Widely reported in the Australian press, e.g. Advocate (Melbourne), 17 September (turnip thinning) and 24 September 1881 (sand). Newspapers in Queensland, Victoria and New Zealand also reported the events.

^[130] But the Melbourne Advocate (12 November 1881) did report the threshing of John Hyde's crop early in September.