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Michael Davitt

1846–1906

 

The title of one of Davitt's six books, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, encapsulates the work of his life and his influence in Irish history.  He dedicated himself to making the Irish the owners of Ireland.  His career covers the whole spectrum of Irish politics, from revolutionary action to parliamentary debate.

      Davitt was the son of a small Mayo farmer, born on 25th March 1846, who saw his family evicted from their smallholding at Straide in 1851 and forced to immigrate to industrial Lancashire in England.  He went to work at a very early age.  At the age of eleven, in 1857, he lost his right arm while working in a cotton mill.  However, he never let this disability restrain him in anything he wanted to do.  He might have lost his arm, but he was far from incapacitated.

      He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1865 - they were strong among the Irish workers of the north of England - and became an organizing secretary of the IRB by 1868.  The year before, in February 1867, he was one of the party of Fenians who attempted to seize Chester Castle, a preliminary to the general Fenian uprising in March.

      In May 1870 he was sentenced to fifteen years in jail with penal servitude for arms trafficking - which meant breaking stones in Portland.  Through the agitation of Isaac Butt and CHARLES PARNELL [5] he was eventually released on ticket of leave (a form of release conditional on not re-offending) in 1877.  He invited Parnell to join the IRB (on the train from London to St Helen's in Lancashire, of all places), but Parnell wisely declined.

      Davitt then left for America, and there, with other former Fenians like JOHN DEVOY [43], he worked out the so-called New Departure policy, which aimed at gaining for Ireland the twin achievements of self-government and land reform.  It would also give a new direction to many Fenians, taking them from furtive rebellion to constitutional activity.

      Davitt returned to Ireland in 1878, but he found the IRB still dedicated to revolutionary action and Parnell equally reluctant to take up the challenge of land reform.  But he brought Parnell to speak in Westport, and this was the beginning of the Land League, with Parnell as president, and of the Land War.  This mean political and social turmoil in Ireland during 1879 and the following year, at a time when agriculture was passing through a difficult period in Ireland, with crop failures and new famine.

      This ended with the Land Act of 1881, which gave Irish tenants fair rents, fixity of tenure, and free sale.  The league, however, also wanted tenant ownership, and this was resisted.  The leaders were jailed.  Davitt was arrested and returned to penal servitude in 1881, having broken his ticket-of-leave pledge.  Released again in May 1882, just after the Kilmainham Treaty, he was arrested yet again for a seditious speech in 1883.

      Davitt's followers saw his political slogan, 'Land for the People' as a small-farmer proprietorship, while what Davitt meant was the actual nationalization of the land.  Davitt was influenced by the American theorist Henry George, but his notion was not popular.  Davitt this lost his leading role in politics, but he continued in public life.  He was elected MP for Meath in 1882, for North Mayo in 1892, and for South Mayo in 1895.

      He and Parnell saw the Land War as a step on the road to securing home rule, and ultimately independence.  But the fall and death of Parnell left the Irish party divided and impotent.  Davitt was never again to be quite at the forefront of Irish politics.  His role became that of a sort of freelance nationalist and democratic reformer working for Irish independence and social justice through constitutional means.  He was widely known as an MP throughout Ireland and Britain and all over the world.  The last twenty-four years of his life were striking and active.

      He went on to visit Australia, writing Life and Progress in Australia (1898).  He was delighted with what he saw there, and with the country's progressive political developments, so different from the state of affairs at home.  He left Parliament in 1899.  During the Boer War, like many other Irish people, he identified with the Boer stand, visiting South Africa and publishing The Boer Fight for Freedom (1902).  He was disappointed that the Irish Americans had not made more of this situation when they might have aided the Boers, some of Britain's most resolute opponents.  He also made further visits to the United States in 1901 and 1902.

      Unlike many Irish patriots, Davitt was a man of international interests.  In The Crime of Kishineff (1903) he exposed the contemporary massacres of the Jewish population of the capital of Bessarabia, north of Odessa.  He visited the city on behalf of the Hearst papers in America.  The sufferings of the Jews aroused his every sympathy, and the book, one of the best he wrote, is a passionate plea for Zionism.

      'When in Palestine, nearly twenty years before,' his first biographer Frank Sheehy-Skeffington noted, 'he had been greatly impressed by that country, and imbued with the idea that something should be done to preserve its unique character ... But when he saw the evils endured by the Russian Jews, he came to the conclusion that the root of their sufferings was the fact that they possessed no national home; and the suggestion that they should be allowed to settle in Palestine, the original home of their race, appealed to him irresistibly.'  His experiences there made him not only 'a convinced believer in the remedy of Zionism' but an effective opponent of anti-Semitism in Ireland, Britain, Russia and elsewhere.

      His most famous work, however, is none of the above, but Leaves from a Prison Journal (1884), a chilling account of his life as a prisoner of the Queen, which has achieved the status of an Irish classic.

      He died in Dublin on 31st May 1906.  Though he had requested no ceremonies, huge crowds visited the church in Dublin where his body rested before it was taken to Mayo for burial at Straide.  As a model of what an Irish patriot should be, Davitt comes high on the list, both as a man of courage and a man of conviction.