James Daly

James Daly (1838, in County Mayo, Ireland – 21 January 1911, at his residence on Spencer St., Castlebar, County Mayo ) was an Irish nationalist activist best known for his work in support of tenant farmers' rights and the formation of the Irish National Land League.

Beginnings Daly was a conservative Catholic man from a comfortably-off Mayo farming family. He served from 1869 on the Castlebar Board of Guardians and as a guardian for the Litterbrick Division in Ballina union.

Daly took up the emerging political cause in the West to establish tenant farmers' rights against largely absentee landlords and participated in the meeting in Louisburgh, County Mayo in 1875, convened to establish a local tenants defence association.

From May 1876, Daly and Alfred O'Hea supported Matt Harris's Ballinasloe Tenants Defence Association.

In February 1876, together with Alfred O'Hea, he purchased the Mayo Telegraph, renamed The Connaught Telegraph in 1878, and became sole owner in 1879 on O'Hea's death. The Connaught Telegraph became the early publicity vehicle for what was initially a Mayo-based land movement.

On 26 October 1878, the Mayo Tenants' Defence Association (or Mayo Farmers' Club) was formed at Castlebar, with Westport barrister J. J. Louden as chairman and Daly as secretary. The local MP, John O'Connor Power, attended, giving the support of the "advanced" faction of the home rule movement to the growing land movement. This support was reinforced by Parnell himself when he joined Daly, O'Connor Power, James Kilmartin and Matt Harris at the Ballinasloe Tenants' Defence Association meeting on 3 November 1878. or 'Father Burke', who had inherited a property with 22 tenants, all in arrears, had increased rents and had taken legal steps to evict them. Burke is then said to have backed down after the mass meeting and decreased rents.

The historian T. W. Moody disputes this theory, claiming that this view is based on Michael Davitt's faulty recollection before the 1889 Times-Parnell Commission and his 1904 The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, repeated by Sheehy-Skeffington in 1908; and that no contemporary accounts of the events mention a Canon Bourke as an issue. Moody claims that, in fact, Geoffrey James Bourke, the canon of Tuam Cathedral had nothing to do with the 'Bourke Estate', and that the tenants' dispute, if indeed there was one, would have been with the absentee landlord, his nephew Joseph Bourke; that Daly himself denounced the whole story and Davitt for his 'crass ignorance' of Mayo affairs and in fact the rents on the Bourke estate had been fixed in 1855 for 31 years and hence there could not have been any rack-renting; that Canon Bourke in fact supported the land movement and was on the platform and seconded John Dillon's resolution at the July 1879 Claremorris meeting; and remained to his death a much respected parish priest. John Cunningham refers to 'Professor Ulick Bourke' as 'President of St Jarlath's', and quotes the fenian activist Mark Ryan's description of how Professor Bourke actively supported the 1868 election campaign of George Moore, a 'fenian sympathiser' and tenant right supporter.

Lead up to the 20 April 1879, Irishtown meeting For many months the agriculture sector had been in recession due to bad harvests and cheap imports. The law as it stood was considered by many to unfairly favour landowners over struggling tenant farmers, leading to landowners evicting "unprofitable" tenant farmers and turning the land over to grazing. The traditionally somewhat conservative tenant farmers were becoming desperate for relief and willing to listen to aggressive nationalists who linked economic with political oppression in their messages and raised the question of who morally owned the land.

For Daly, by 1879 the time for action was right. He was expressing impatience in the Connaught Telegraph with achieving anything for the tenants, either through constitutional means or John Devoy's 'New Departure' (an 'unholy alliance' between pragmatic Fenians prepared to delay their resort to force, and radical Home Rulers). Delay could mean desperate men resorting to another failed uprising which he abhorred. Parnell was positioning himself to take over the Home Rule League after Isaac Butt died, and a growing land campaign would give him an issue for the coming election. Daly was not a Fenian but was prepared to accept any meaningful assistance short of violence from them. The current climate of the New Departure offered a perhaps short-lived opportunity to combine Fenian mass mobilisation and muscle, with activism within the constitutional system provided by Parnell and O'Connor Power, with Michael Davitt the key man in both camps.

Davitt was in Mayo at the time investigating land issues, assisted by and briefed by his cousin John Walshe. He is generally credited with having the vision to extend the scope of tenant land protests from the local to a coordinated national context. Davitt and a group of Fenians including John Walshe and P.W. Nally of Balla met with Daly and his local organizers, Fenian tenant farmers James Daly and Daniel O'Connor of Irishtown, and schoolteacher J.P. Quinn and two shopkeepers from Claremorris, Thomas Sweeney and John O'Kane. No reporters attended the meeting. Power called on me when he returned to London to give an account of it. From what he said I realised that a new portent had arisen out of a leaden sky. He related that footmen in legions and horsemen in squadrons gathered round him to demand reductions of rent. The horsemen, he declared, were organised like cavalry regiments. The police were powerless, and Power foreshadowed that Ireland was on the verge of a movement which would end a dismal chapter. Yet his meeting was unnoted, save by a local weekly, the Castlebar Telegraph, owned by James Daly.

King-Harman, M.P. (afterwards Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Ireland), who read that paper, came upbraidingly to Power in the House of Commons. He and his class watched the trend of politics as stockbrokers do the money markets, for £ s.d. to them was the kernel of the Land question. When Parnell heard of the success of the Irishtown meeting, he asked Davitt (who had been told to "boycott" it) to get up a second gathering there the following Sunday. At the second demonstration fresh speeches were made which attracted universal attention.

Davitt afterward explained that he would have attended Power's meeting only that he "missed the train." He was a lofty and generous character, yet James Daly, who helped at both gatherings, coined the jibe that Davitt would be "father of the Land League if he had not missed the train." Power refused to come to the second meeting, but the fire they kindled spread into a blaze which inflamed all Ireland. T. W. Moody points out that Healy's comment about Davitt missing the train appears to come from Alexander Martin Sullivan's 'New Ireland', p 434 and is otherwise uncorroborated; likewise his quoting of Daly's quip about Davitt is otherwise uncorroborated. However, it does appear that Daly and Davitt held differing views of their relative importance to the early land war. Moody points out that Daly's January 1881 account of the Irishtown meeting in the Connaught Telegraph claiming that Davitt was not involved until the June Westport meeting is untrue; similarly Davitt's July 1882 account left Daly out and claimed he himself was solely responsible, yet he told the 1889 Times-Parnell Commission that he (Davitt) was not responsible; then in his 1904 'Fall of Feudalism', when he was free to reveal all, he failed to give Daly any due.

The "Gurteen three" On 2 November 1879, Davitt addressed a land meeting at Gurteen, County Sligo, declaring of landlord-tenant relations : "the time has come when the manhood of Ireland will spring to its feet and say it will tolerate this system no longer". Daly stated that "if anyone was evicted it was the duty of his fellows to assemble in their thousands and reinstate him the next day." James Bryce Killen ended his speech by wishing that "everyone at the meeting were armed with a rifle". The newspapers of the day throughout the western world were full of the trial of Davitt and his two colleagues for an allegedly inflammatory speech he had given at Gurteen, Co. Sligo. They were known as "The Gurteen Three" and the collapse of their trial spelt the end of feudal landlordism in Ireland.

Later years Daly was not comfortable with the centralised control of the land movement and what he perceived as a drift away from the West, the real area of need, and also was concerned about use of physical force in pursuit of its aims. He returned to local politics and left the Land League. He sold the Connaught Telegraph to T.H. Gillespie in 1888 and became a full time farmer. He continued in local Government and served on Mayo County Council and Castlebar Urban District Council. Remaining a force in local politics, he supported the United Irish League and was President of the Connacht '98 Council.

Retrospective Gerry Adams used the occasion of his Michael Davitt Centenary Lecture, 15 June 2006, to claim that land reform in the west of Ireland has since regressed.