Chapter 2: My Coming into Public Life and My Support for Isaac Butt

I was drawn into public life in a rather strange fashion. At the time the cattle plague^[1] threatened to ruin the graziers a very prominent able man in my neighbourhood, John Paul Byrne, J.P., who held many public positions in his time, and who lost his seat in the Dublin Corporation for voting against granting the Freedom of the City to Parnell and Dillon, attended in the Corn Exchange to canvass for support for a rate in aid scheme to compensate the graziers for their apprehended losses, and he got men to listen to him (he was an eloquent talker) on the ground that if cattle failed the graziers would be driven to tillage and would flood the market with cheap produce. I happened to be a listener, and when he had silenced or convinced his audience I quietly tackled him and asked some questions that he found it difficult to answer. So, to get rid of the trouble and to put me aside he laid his hand on my arm in a very patronising way and said: “My dear fellow, I am in a hurry and have no time to listen to you making a speech.” I was so annoyed that I retorted: “Well, if you do not listen to me now you will hear from me in the press.” Before I left Dublin that evening I wrote my first public letter and I have been scribbling on and off ever since.^[2] I had a good many notions on land reform jotted down when Mr. Butt^[3] published his Irish People and Irish Land,^[4] so I laid my own work by and determined to work through him, and I got to his side at the first opportunity.

After defending the Fenians in the Law Courts,^[5] Mr. Butt evidently turned his mind to consider, and to remedy if possible, the grievances and tyranny that drove such brave, single-minded men into revolt.^[6] He published two books, his Plea for the Celtic Race and The Irish People and Irish Land, which excited a good deal of public attention.^[7] He then called a public meeting or conference in the Rotunda^[8] to consider the land question, and he there started a new Tenants’ League.^[9] A. McKenna,^[10] a Northern journalist, was the only public man of note that appeared with Mr. Butt at that meeting. We had some remarkable speeches delivered by Father Quaide of O’Callaghan’s Mills, Mr. Byrne, a grazier, and Tom Bracken, a noted Fenian.^[11] I joined the League and made Mr. Butt’s acquaintance. There was a working committee or council appointed composed of any members who wished to hand in their names with the membership fee of one pound. I handed in mine. Mr. Butt got a free meeting room in Harrington Street from Mr. Tristram Kennedy,^[12] an ex-M.P. Some of the members took stock of my public letters, and I was pressed to attend all the weekly meetings, which I did, and Mr. Butt and I were on these occasions thrown together a good deal. I happened to be a more advanced land reformer than he was at that time, and I was driven to find arguments to justify my contentions. He commenced as a lease-holder, and I had some trouble to get him on to the three Fs.^[13] After the Fenian flag was pulled down,^[14] Sir John Gray^[15] in the Freeman’s Journal entered on a very active crusade against the anomalies and abuses of the established Church. This was probably inspired by the Government to prepare the way for the Disestablishment which followed in 1869.^[16] Gray then took up the agitation of the land question to prepare the way for a coming Land Bill. He called a conference in the Mansion House^[17] which was well attended by men from all parts of Ireland. Mr. Butt and a contingent from his League attended, and after a rather animated discussion, a platform was agreed upon. The few Farmers’ Clubs in Ireland were requested to hold meetings, but the Fenians attacked the farmers’ meeting in Limerick, and, as Sir John Gray stated years after, spoiled the land legislation of 1870.^[18]

After the Church Act passed in 1869, the Act of Union was so infringed upon by the Church Disestablishment that many leading Protestants assisted Mr. Butt in founding the Home Government League in 1870.^[19] The Land Act of 1870 was a very halting measure, but its chief blot was that the majority of the occupiers could contract themselves out of its provisions.^[20] The landlords set to work to grant leases or to extend or to vary the terms of the tenancies, and in every case to force the tenants to contract themselves out of the act. The Duke of Leinster was amongst the first to propound the fateful “Leinster Lease.”^[21] All the legal ingenuity in the country was requisitioned to make this a model instrument for evading the Land Act. The authorities of Maynooth College led by Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin,^[22] were amongst the first to protest against this document. Inspired by Cahill, K.C., and Robertson of Naraghmore,^[23] a Scotsman, a Tenants’ Defence Association was started in Athy.^[24] Mr. Butt’s attention was at the time centered on the building up of the Home Rule League organisation, his Tenants’ League of 1868 having lapsed on the passage of the Land Act. I put myself at once in communication with the Kildare men and started a branch of the tenants’ organisation in Dublin. With the aid of Kelly of Donabate, Reilly of Artane, Grehan of Lahaunstown, and all branches of the reliable O’Neill family, John Fitzsimons, Tom McCourt and others, I got a fairly good centre started in Dublin. Mr. Butt at my request attended some of our meetings and after a little time it was decided to start a central Tenants’ Association for all Ireland and this grew to be a great rallying point for all the leading men of the time.^[25] We had annual conferences of many delegates from north and south, east and west. Mr. Butt threw himself into the work of land reform in the most determined way.^[26] He drafted land bills and had them discussed, and amended or altered, at the conferences before introducing them to Parliament. He worked the Home Rule question on Grattan’s lines but without the military volunteers. He struggled hard to get the natural leaders of the people, which in Ireland meant the landlords and the clergy, to rally round the national centre which he established, but they failed to come and the old man’s giant intellectual labours drafting bills and expounding Ireland’s grievances were wasted on a demoralised, denationalised, and divided people. He succeeded in so far that he drew the Irish parliamentary representation from under the British whips of English parties, but many of the men who professed to represent Ireland only meant to magnify their own personal importance and had no faith in their own professions. After seven years existence the great body of the members who formed the Butt Party only earned for themselves the soubriquet of “Nominal Home Rulers.”

The previous order of Parliamentary politics, as expressed by the Irish Catholic Hierarchy and Sir John Gray in the Freeman’s Journal, which the Butt movement supplanted, did not come publicly into line with Butt’s work until the Home Rule conference of 1873 and even then they were never really incorporated with it. A notable but still only a small section of Protestants, led by Professor Galbraith,^[27] joined in Butt’s demand for Federalism, and some of them dropped back soon to their old moorings with the Garrison Party.^[28] Still, whoever writes the history of that time will find a few outstanding men of deep national instincts who were not only sincere but uncompromising, staunch Irish nationalists, like Galbraith, the Webbs,^[29] McNeil^[30] and a few others.

Butt’s efforts to lead all the inhabitants of Ireland on the lines of nationhood was unique and herculean, and for a man of his age, stupendous. He appealed to the landlords to rally round him as they did around Grattan in 1782 on the national question. He appealed to the farmers and labourers to rally round on the land question. He appealed to the cities to rally round and claim the rights of free citizens, and he appealed to the Catholic Hierarchy to rally round him on the free education question. He drafted bills and expounded arguments on all these questions for all the people of Ireland, and he did all this work on such an exalted standard that Michael Davitt once exclaimed after going over Butt’s work, that it would be simply impossible for any man to find a phase of the Irish question which was not elucidated in a superior manner by Mr. Butt.

But the fates were against him so far as immediate success was concerned. Ireland was quiet, business was booming, and most people seemed to be so busy raising rents and taking lands and leases at inflated prices and making settlements on a universal credit system, that there was no real attention paid to public work. The landlords were opposed to his land agitation work. The people were doubtful about the bona fides of the landlords on the Home Rule question. The Protestant Home Rulers and the Catholic clergy were suspicious of each other, so without some special impetus the Butt movement could scarcely succeed even partially.

I got so close to Mr. Butt that I was invited to many of his private meetings, so I had an opportunity of seeing all the different sections under fire. I was so convinced that he was bound to fall under the weight of such an impossible task that I quietly urged him to retire, but his heart was so much in the work of his mission that he seemed to be incapable of contemplating retirement. The end came rather suddenly. His great brain gave way under the terrible strain of overwork, and his death occurred soon after in 1879.