United Irish League

The United Irish League (UIL) was a nationalist political party in Ireland. It was founded and initiated on 16 January 1898 at Westport, County Mayo by William O'Brien , initially supported by Michael Davitt. and John Dillon who worded its constitution.

Origin

O’Brien who had retired from parliament and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in 1895 in the wake of the Parnell split, experienced at first hand in his West of Ireland Mayo exile the plight of the peasant tenant farmers and landless labourers, their distressed hardship trying to eke out an existence in its rocky landscape. He became intrinsically aware that to further their cause the three split factions of the IPP needed to be re-united, believing strongly that only agitational politics combined with constitutional pressures rather than physical force were the best means of achieving objectives

Objectives

The League was explicitly designed to reconcile the various parliamentary fragments by bringing them together in a new grass roots organisation around a programme of agrarian agitation, political reform and Home Rule. William O’Brien was the prime mover, and the difficulty of the project can be gauged from the fact that the parliamentary leaders had very different opinions on the land question. Dillon regarded the land issue as an essential motor for the nationalist movement. O’Brien championed the smallholders against the graziers while Davitt , whose original idea had been state ownership and agrarian socialism, was not particularly enamoured by peasant proprietorship.

Achievement

Immediately the UIL took up the issue of land redistribution, which the Irish Land League had campaigned on two decades earlier, but had been sidelined after the IPP split into the declining Parnellite Irish National League (INL) and the anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation (INF). The League's first electoral target was for the county council elections under the new revolutionary Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898. which broke the power of the landlord ascendancy dominated "Grand Juries", for the first time passing absolute democratic control of local affairs into the hands of the people through elected Local County Councils, next to Home Rule a no more remarkable concession to popular rights and economic reconstruction.

The UIL performed extremely well, organised by John O'Donnell as its general secretary it threatened the position of the Parliamentary Party (IPP). As a result, it proved very popular and quickly gained support from tenant farmer its branches sweeping over most of the country, dictating to the demoralised Irish party leaders the terms for reconstruction, not only of the party but the nationalist movement in Ireland. The movement was backed by O'Brien's new newspaper "The Irish People" (Sept. 1899 -Nov. 1904).

Applied unity

Around 1900 O'Brien, an unbending social reformer and agrarian agitator, was the most influential and powerful figure within the nationalist movement, although not formally its leader. The period was one in which much political development occurred. His UIL was by far the largest organisation in the country, comprising 1150 branches and 84,355 members. The result of the rapid growth of his UIL as a national organisation in achieving unity through organised popular opinion, was to effect a quick defensive re-union under the leadership of John Redmond of the discredited IPP factions, largely fearing O’Brien’s return to the political field. The National League and the Irish National Federation, representing the two wings of the IPP, both merged with the UIL, the IPP adopting the UIL as its main support constituency organisation.

Ambivalence

This unity disturbed O’Brien as it resulted in most of the ineffective party candidates being re-elected in the 1900 general election, preventing the UIL from using its power in the pre-selection of candidates Dillon became ambivalent about the new association, believing that it would lead to confrontation with the government and endanger the alliance with the Liberals . This marked the first significant strain in the O’Brien-Dillon relationship. Within a few years Dillon was to tactically adjunct the UIL under the wing of the IPP manoeuvring it out of O'Brien's control.

uccess and estrangement

By 1901, the UIL claimed 100,000 members, O'Brien was at the height of his prestige and dominated the UIL maschine. UIL agitation by tenant farmers continued to press for compulsory land purchase and resulted in the calling of the December 1902 Land Conference, an initiative by moderate landlords led by Lord Dunraven on the one hand and William O'Brien and Timothy Harrington representing tenant farmers on the other hand. It strove for a settlement by conciliatory agreement between landlord and tenant.

After six sessions all tenant’s demands were conceded, O’Brien having guided the official nationalist movement into endorsement of a new policy of conciliation. He followed this by campaigning vigorously for the greatest piece of social legislation Ireland had yet seen, orchestrating the Wyndham "Labourers Land Purchase Act (1903)" through Parliament. The Act provided very generous bonus subsidy terms to landowners on sale, the Irish Land Commission overseeing the low interest annuities.

O'Brien's reconciliatory approach and achievement in solving the Land Question aggravated Dillon who generally disliked landlords, attacking the legislation and the "doctrine of conciliation", Davitt condemning both peasant land proprietorship and that the land was being purchased rather than confiscated from the landlords. O'Brien requested from Redmond that they be disciplined, which he refused. Alienated from the party O'Brien indignantly resigned in 1904 stopping publication of his "Irish People" newspaper, believing the IPP could not survive without him. Dillon in turn had his close Belfast ally Joseph Devlin nominated to succeed the O'Brien loyal John O'Donnell as General Secretary of the UIL, Devlin assuming its leadership depriving O'Brien of all authority. The ensuing breach with O'Brien never healed, the popularity of the UIL falling in due course nationwide into decline.

Divergence

O'Brien then turned to the Irish Land and Labour Association as his new political platform. Acting in the interest of unity he rejoined the IPP in 1907, left it finally in 1909, this time hounded out by Devlin’s UIL Molly Maguire baton troop wing of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. As a consequence of which O’Brien founded his new All-for-Ireland League. The UIL remained active as Devlin’s fisticuffs support organisation for the IPP up to rise of Sinn Féin after the 1914 outbreak of World War I. From 1918, it was restricted to Northern Ireland, and was defunct by the mid-1920s.

References

*Tom Garvin "The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics" (1991)
Gill & Macmillian (2005), ISBN 0-7171-3967-0
*Patrick Maume "The Long Gestation- Irish Nationalist Life 1891-1918"
Gill & Macmilliam (1999), ISBN 0-7171-2744-3
*Peter Barberis, John McHugh and Mike Tyldesley, "Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organisations"