The Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA) was a progressive movement founded in the early 1890s in Munster, Ireland, to organise and pursue political agitation for small tenant farmers' and rural labourers' rights. Its branches also spread into Connacht. The ILLA was known under different names—Land and Labour Association (LLA) or League (LLL). Its branches were active for almost thirty years, and had considerable success in propagating labour ideals before their traditions became the basis for the new labour and trade unions movements, with which they gradually amalgamated.
Background Following the early formation of the Tenant Right League in 1850, which first demanded the adoption and enforcement of the Three Fs to aid Irish tenant farmers, namely fair rent; fixity of tenure; free sale; all of whom lacked these rights, the first ineffective Irish Land Acts of 1870, 1880 and 1881 followed. By giving priority to farming interests, the Acts severely restricted labourers' cottage building, generally in the hands of landowners. The additional half-heartedness shown towards labourers' housing by the Acts was symptomatic of the fact that rural labourers had been little involved in the Irish Land League's Land War waged on behalf of small tenant farmers by Michael Davitt and William O'Brien from 1879 to 1882 in the poorer regions of Connacht and Munster, where conditions were especially severe. Together with Charles Stewart Parnell and his party lieutenants, they went into a bitter verbal offensive and were imprisoned in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act in Kilmainham Jail for "sabotaging the Land Act", from where the No Rent Manifesto was issued calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike which was partially followed. Although the League discouraged violence, agrarian crimes increased widely.
In 1881, nearly 75% of Irish people lived in rural areas. About 38% of these comprised the agricultural workforce, of which nearly 70% were agricultural labourers, 25% of these forming a class of 'landless' labourers, an estimated 60,000 in number, together with their families amounting to nearly a quarter of a million of the rural population, struggling to survive in the squalor of 40,000 one room 'cabins' (together with their animals if they could afford them). Their simple twin demand was for a decent home and a small piece of land. The Land League was thus forced to also address labourer's issues.
The first phase of Irish Tenant and Labourers (Land Purchase) Acts from 1883 to 1906 began with the 1883 Land Purchase (Ireland) Act, which was cumbersome, as was the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act 1885 or Ashbourne Act. Both had to be amended in 1886 but nevertheless were a tentative start to land purchase under which initially 25,867 tenants were turned into owners of their farms.Sheehan, D.D.: Ireland since Parnell p. 103, Daniel O'Connor (London) (1921) The Acts empowered to initiate schemes for building labourers' cottages with half acre allotments, the expenses of these to be met from local rates. They were therefore unpopular and few were built, as both the empowered Guardians and local farmers were themselves the ratepayers.McKay, Enda: The Housing of the Rural Labourer, 1883–1916 SAOTHAR, Vol.17 p. 17, Irish Labour History Society (1992) The Acts were further overshadowed by two events: first, due to falling prices for agricultural produce and bad weather tenants could not pay their rent and united in the Plan of Campaign to withhold excessive rents. At the same time, Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) held the balance of power in the House of Commons. Their key concern in 1886 turned to Gladstone's First Irish Home Rule Bill, which was subsequently defeated.
Although Parnell had become converted to the labourers' cause whilst in Kilmainham Gaol, after he became leader of the IPP their cause fell victim to his distancing himself from the Plan of Campaign in the interest of pursuing Home Rule. Then further by his fall from power in 1891 and the ensuing Party split, aggravated by the rejection of the Second Irish Home Rule Bill by the House of Lords in 1893. Not least, from the middle of the 1890s less than 1,000 cottages a year were being built for small tenant farmers or privileged labourers.
Origins
Acting in response to specific local needs, be it housing, land or employment, steadfast local spirits sustained Trade and Labour Leagues in parts of Counties Wicklow, Kilkenny, Laois, Kildare, Roscommon, Tyrone and Tipperary. However, it was not until the formation of the Knights of the Plough, a farm labourers' body founded by Benjamin Pellin, a small land-owner in the William Thompson tradition, at Narraghmore, County Kildare in June 1892,Lane, Pádraig G., The Land and Labour Association 1894–1914, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, Vol.98, p. 91, 109, (1993), Cork City Council Library Lane, Fintan: Benjamin Pelin, the Knights of the Plough and Social Radicalism, 1852-1934 Ch11 pp. 176–200, in Casey, Brian (ed.): Defying the Law of the Land: Agrarian Radicals in Irish History, History Press (2013) and of the National Labour League in Kanturk in January 1893, that the required organisation of the labourers began to take shape.Lane, Pádraig G.: p. 91
The rural area of North Cork around Kanturk and Duhallow had been since the 1860s a centre of labourer agitation and strikes, forming a number of early trade unions. In 1869 P. F. Johnson founded the Kanturk Labourers' Club (the first organised body to represent agricultural labourers) as well as the Irish Agricultural Labourers' Union (IALU) 1873 also in Kanturk, but these faded by 1875 due to lack of support from the nationalist home rule directory.
The most successful organisation was later the Kanturk Trade and Labour Association established in 1889O'Connor, Emmet: A Labour History of Ireland 1824–1960 p. 52, Gill and Macmillan (1992) with the assistance amongst others, of a young man as its secretary, D. D. Sheehan who had experienced eviction with his family at the height of the Land League's Land War in 1880, when his father followed William O'Brien's "Pay No Rent" manifesto, their farm taken over by a "land-grabber" who paid their rent arrears. The Kanturk Association spread to other districts under a new title, the Duhallow Trade and Labour Association, in which Michael Davitt also became involved, until it broke up under the Irish Party's "Parnell split" in 1891.
It was realised on all sides, that the 1884 enfranchisement of the labourers had been insufficient in itself to wrest solutions to grievances from the state and the rural upper- and middle-classes. The control exercised over the implementation of the labourers' acts by conservative elements in rural society had had a ruinous affect. This finally brought the labourers' bodies together to gain political muscle. It became the raison d'être for calling a labour convention at Limerick Junction, County Tipperary on 15 August 1894,Lane, Pádraig G.: p. 91Lane, Fintan: pp. 189–192 at which the Irish Land and Labour Association was created and officially launched, its founders D. D. Sheehan as chairman together with a young Carrick-on-Suir solicitor J. J. O'Shee as its secretary.Maume, Patrick in: McGuire, James and Quinn, James (eds): Dictionary of Irish Biography From the Earliest Times to the Year 2002; Royal Irish Academy Vol. 7 O'Shee, J. J. p. 846; Cambridge University Press (2009) It was formed to agitate on behalf of small tenant farmers and agrarian labourers, as a follower organisation to Michael Davitt's and Michael Austin's 1890-founded Irish Democratic Trade and Labour Federation, setting forth its broad but short-lived achievements.Sheehan, D.D.: p. 67
Sheehan founded the Association to pursue tenant-farmer and labourer's grievances as a labour lobby within the nationalist movement, demanding radical changes to the inadequate Irish Land Acts. With labourers "as strangers in a strange land, without influence and without rights" it was to be expected that obstructions placed in the path of the labourers' welfare by landowners and farmers would invite bitter recrimination at the new Associations meetings.Lane, Pádraig G.: p. 91 The Association would prove itself to be the most enduring of the labour groups.O'Connor, Emmet: p. 53 Agrarian agitation was unique in that it was an all-Ireland agitation. Ulster tenant-farmers and labourers equally demanded rights, their movement the Farmers and Labourers Union led by T. W. Russell. The Irish Trade Union Congress passed a motion in 1896 which recommended that in every parish in Ireland, a branch of the ILLA be founded.O'Brien, Rónán: A Divided House: The Irish Trade Union Congress and the origins of the Irish Labour Party p. 22, in Making The Difference?' The Irish Labour Party 1912–2012, The Collins Press (2012)
Programme The passing of the revolutionary Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898, a "grass roots home rule" Act, totally reorganised the old aristocratic landlord "Grand Juries", eliminating their power by transferring it to Local County Councils elected by tenant farmers, town traders and labourers. The creation of the new councils had a significant effect on Ireland as it allowed local people to take decisions affecting themselves. The county and the sub-county District Councils also created a political platform for proponents of Irish Home Rule, displacing Unionist influence in many areas. The enfranchisement of local electors allowed the development of a new political class, creating a significant body of experienced politicians who began to take local affairs into their own hands. This coincided with William O'Brien founding the United Irish League (UIL), the wide expansion of the agricultural co-operative movement established earlier by Horace Plunkett and Sheehan becoming both President of the ILLA and editor of the Skibbereen based The Southern Star newspaper. He assured that the ILLA as well as the UIL were given weekly press coverage of their branch reports, particularly crucial for the expansion and growth of the UIL in Cork.O'Donovan, John: Class, Conflict, and the United Irish League in Cork, 1900–1903 in SAOTHAR 37 pp. 19–29, Journal of the Irish Labour History Society p. 20, (2012) ISSN 0332-1169
The Act was immediately recognised by the labourers, who for the first time held both active and passive electoral franchise, as a means to achieving their interests and facilitating those who desired to help them on local county councils. The prospects offered by the Act of radically overhauling the socio-economic distribution of political power in the countryside was not lost on the labourer movement. The ILLA took resolute steps to both organise the voting power of the labourers and to see to the 'proposal of labour candidates'.
Modelling themselves on Davitt's concepts, the ILLA platform included demands for: – land for the people – houses for the people – work and wages for the people – education for the people – state pensions for old people – all local rents shall be paid by the ground landlords.
Its strategy was to achieve these through political and parliamentary leverage, pressure of the press and public agitation rather than by physical-force means or trade union action.
Objectives The name of the association was somewhat anomalous, as it strived to represent and pursue the twofold interests of small tenant farmers and rural agrarian labourers. Both were a deprived and down trodden class supporting each other in their common plight, tenant farmers paying excessive rents or suffering eviction, labourers "compelled to live in hovels not fit to house the brute beast of the field" (Sheehan's later House of Commons speech). The objectives of the ILLA were therefore to achieve tenant land purchase, new and improved housing, welfare working conditions and access to land holdings for rural labourers.