Michael Davitt and Athy's National League

Athy Town Commissioners held a special meeting on 3rd July 1885 to consider the motion: ‘that an address be presented by Athy Town Commissioners to Mr. Michael Davitt on the occasion of his visit to Athy on Sunday 5th July as founder of the Land League.’ The motion was passed but only after the defeat of an amendment that the address be given to Davitt and the members of the Irish Parliamentary Party. Davitt’s visit to Athy was to attend a public meeting in the Market Square organised by the Athy and Barrowhouse branch of the Irish National League. The League inaugurated three years earlier by Charles Stewart Parnell replaced the Land League which itself had been founded in October 1879 and modelled on the Land League of Mayo which Davitt had founded following a meeting in Irishtown, Co. Mayo. The President of the Athy and Barrowhouse branch of the National League was local general practitioner Dr. P.L. O’Neill. The meeting was addressed by several members of parliament including James Leahy and Art O’Connor, while the local parish priest Fr. James Doyle was one of several Catholic clergy men to speak. Interestingly Denis Kilbride who would be the first tenant evicted in March 1887 at the start of the Luggacurran evictions was also scheduled to speak at the Athy meeting. The address of welcome presented to Michael Davitt was signed on behalf of the Town Commissioners by Michael Doyle, Chairman and John Muldowney, Town Clerk. I visited the Michael Davitt Museum in Straide, Co. Mayo last week approximately 25 years after my first and only previous visit which I made in the company of the late Frank English. The Museum which was then located in a room in the local community centre is now to be found in the nearby restored pre penal Straide church located next to the 13th century Abbey of Straide. The museum is a wonderful example of what can be achieved by a small community in recording and remembering the achievements of one of their own. For it was amongst the rural community of Straide that Michael Davitt was born during the height of the Great Famine. He was 4½ years old when the Davitt parents and their four young children were evicted from their home. Of that event Michael Davitt wrote several years later: ‘we were one morning thrown out on the roadside and our little house and home pulled down ….. the remnants of our household furniture flung about the road, the roof of our house falling in and the thatch taking fire’. The Davitt family left Ireland by boat for Liverpool and walked 50 miles to Haslingden, a mill town in Lancashire. When he was nine years of age Michael Davitt started work in a local cotton factory and two years later his right arm was crushed, resulting in its amputation. It was against this background of trauma and hardship that Michael Davitt developed his skills as a social reformer. His advocacy for an alliance between the Irish and British working class was reminiscent of the attempts by Cork born Feargus O’Connor to keep Irish issues before the leaders of the Chartist Movement in the 1840s. His involvement with the Land League is well known, but perhaps less so was his strong advocacy of secular state education in Ireland and his support for the Labour Representative Committee in England which would later change its name to the Labour Party. He opposed the treatment by the English of the Boers and resigned his parliamentary seat in the House of Commons in 1889 in protest at the outbreak of the Boer War. Michael Davitt wrote extensively and his collected writings from 1868 to 1906 were published in eight volumes some years ago. They were introduced by Carla King whose magnificent book ‘Michael Davitt and the Land League 1881-1906’ was published by U.D.C. Press five years ago. Davitt who overcame many difficulties to become involved in land and labour issues also found time to visit Russia on three occasions to investigate anti-Jewish pogroms and civil unrest, as well as visiting Finland, America, Egypt and Poland. He was as Carla King described in her book ‘an attractive and symbolic figure for many of his contemporaries in late 19th century and beyond. His story of suffering and self-sacrifice of a childhood eviction and boyhood in industrial exile gave expression to the trials of many others who shared similar experiences.’ Michael Davitt was possibly one of the greatest Irish patriots of the late 19th century and it is fitting that his deeds and his memory are remembered with such an extensive display of Davitt photographs, documents and artefacts in his own place of Straide. Just a few yards from the Davitt Museum Michael Davitt, the father of the Land League, is buried. Thanks to the helpful museum staff who allowed me to photograph the Athy Town Commissioners address of welcome and whose friendly welcome for myself and several other visitors in the museum that morning was very much appreciated.