The Independent Irish Party (IIP) was the designation chosen by the 48 Members of the United Kingdom Parliament returned from Ireland with the endorsement of the Tenant Right League in the 1852 general election.
The League had secured their promise to offer an independent opposition (refusing all government favour and office) to the dominant landlord interest, and to advance an agrarian reform programme popularly summarised as the "three F's": fair rent, fixed tenure and free sale.
After further defections, thirteen independents survived the elections in 1857, but then split 1859 on the question of supporting a new Liberal ministry which, in 1860, made the first halting attempt to regulate Irish land tenure.
[1][2] Against the background of the distress caused by the Great Famine and by a fall in agricultural prices, Duffy believed that the demand for tenant rights could serve as the basis for a new all-Ireland movement and for a (potentially abstentionist) national party.
Together with the presence among them of so many sitting Repeal Association MPs, their determination to remove the Act's restrictions on a restored Catholic Church hierarchy heightened the suspicion that the League was being used for political purposes beyond its declared agenda.
But in the process two of the leading members, John Sadleir and William Keogh, broke their pledges of independent opposition and accepted positions in a new Whig-Peelite ministry of Lord Aberdeen.
While Aberdeen opposed to the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, his government gave no undertakings in regard to tenant-right policy[13][14] Significantly in a League debate in February 1853 MacKnight, wary of any sign of Irish separatism, did not support Duffy in condemning these desertions.
[15] The Catholic Primate, Archbishop Paul Cullen, who had been sceptical of the independent opposition policy from the outset, sought to rein in clerical support for the remaining IIP in the constituencies.
Within the Catholic Church, Moore had retained sufficient support from Cullen's rival, Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam, for his reelection in 1857 to overturned in the House of Commons on the grounds of "obtrusive" and "unseemly" clerical influence.
From 1879 it was organised by the direct-action Irish National Land League, led by the southern Protestant Charles Stewart Parnell, but from which tenant-righters in the north stood largely aloof.