In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Paul Bew and Frank Wright The Agrarian Opposition in Ulster Politics, 1848-87 At what point did a pan-Protestant opposition to Irish self-government become inevitable? There exists a tradition in popular historiography which claims that the critical period is 1879-82, when Michael Davitt's National Land League failed to establish itself as a major force among the Ulster Protestant tenantry, the only important section of the nonCatholic population which might have embraced Irish nationalism. The Land League, so it is argued, won southerners to the associated causes of nationalism and agrarian revolution, while at the same time it left northerners cold. This same historiography goes on to assert that the tradition known as the Ulster custom (which gave tenants the right to sell the interest in their holdings when they gave them up, and which was allegedly the basis of northern prosperity and the greater privileges of northern tenants) was the obstacle to the expression of solidarity embracing both Ulster Protestant tenants and their southern Catholic counterparts.! Sophisticated modern scholarship is highly suspicious of this last notion , which certainly exaggerates the significance of the Ulster custom. As Barbara Solow observes, "There is nothing in the institutional arrangement called Ulster custom that guarantees a fixity of tenure."2 The alleged relationship between Ulster custom and superior economic con1 . John Healy, "Land as north's political dynamic," Irish Times, 22 July 1978, is a good summary of this popular historiography. 2. B. L. Solow, The land question and the Irish economy, 1870-1903 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 25. 192 BEW AND WRIGHT: Agrarian Opposition 193 ditions, though not without some foundation, must therefore be treated cautiously. Not only was the Ulster custom found in areas of the north which could hardly be described as models of agricultural prosperity, but aspects of the custom were found outside the province. A writer for the Irishman in 1875 was properly skeptical about the validity of drawing sharp contrasts between north and south: "The radical error of all orations on the important question of landholding is the assumption that a broad and deep distinction must be made between the province of Ulster and all the other provinces of Ireland."3 Though payments per acre were generally lower and usually made secretly in the south, tenants there did often sell the interest in their holdings. 4 Thus if the Ulster custom represented a degree of de facto security and capital accumulation among northern tenants, it cannot be supposed that there existed in the south, especially in the more prosperous parts, a uniformly contrasting situation. It is therefore not surprising that on the eve of the agitation of 1880-1 in the north, T. A. Dickson, one of the leading northern agrarian reformers, stressed the community of interest between the farmers of Ulster and those of Munster. 5 The collapse of agricultural prices, which threatened tenant-right values, had the effect of universalizing demands for rent reductions. Far from leaving the Protestant farmers of the north cold, the land war had important consequences in Ulster. Ulster liberalism became a substantial political movement, giving the Protestant tenant farmers the means and opportunity to further their interests by independent action within the metropolitan political system of the United Kingdom. Yet it did so at precisely the same moment when Parnell managed to make the hitherto emotive unity of Catholics in Ireland a practical reality for Catholics in the north. Parnell demonstrated to them that they could participate in a national movement, and finally undermined the practice of clerical accommodation with northern Liberal elites. Thus at the very moment when a type of unionism which contradicted the previously dominant pan-Protestant form of unionism began to mature, the ground was laid for the first home-rule crisis of 1886, which made sectarian head-counting the principal concern of northern political life. 3. Irishman, 23 Oct. 1875. This argument by the writer in the Irishman was based explicitly on George Sigerson, History of the land tenures and land classes of Ireland, with an account of the various secret agrarian confederacies (Dublin and London, 1871). 4. For an interesting discussion, see J. S. Donnelly, Jr., The land and the people of nineteenth-century Cork: the rural economy and the land question (London and Boston, 1975), pp. 210-18. 5. B.F.F., 29 Jan. 1880. The occasion of Dickson's speech was a meeting at Ballymoney of the Antrim Central Tenants' Defence Association. [18.116.239.195] Project MUSE...

Share