Irish Land and Labour Association

[1] The Acts empowered to initiate schemes for building labourers' cottages with half acre allotments, the expenses of these to be met from local rates.

At the same time, Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) held the balance of power in the House of Commons.

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.

[5] 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.

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.

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.

[16] 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.

Modelling themselves on Davitt's concepts, the ILLA platform included demands for: 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.

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.

John Redmond's sedulous refusal to consider direct Parliamentary representation for the Land and Labour Association was but an instance of the propertied classes' obsession with maintaining their hold over national politics.

Amidst turbulent and occasionally violent scenes in Macroom on 10 May, their President D. D. Sheehan, standing on a strictly labour platform, defeated the local UIL candidate of the Irish Party on a second ballot.

This after an initial attempt by Joseph Devlin (representing the UIL National Directory), to exclude a number of ILLA branches from the convention.

[19] In this respect Sheehans' return on a labour-nationalist ticket as Mid-Cork Member of Parliament (1901–1918) to the House of Commons exposed the divide between rural labourers and the elitist nationalism of the UIL/IPP classes,[20] which was to deepen by the end of the decade.

Rural workers were quick to grasp the potential of local democracy for plots, cottages and direct labour on council road-works.

He followed this by campaigning vigorously for the greatest piece of social legislation Ireland had yet seen, orchestrating the Wyndham Land Purchase Act (1903) through Parliament.

The social effects of the Act were immediate The year 1903 alone saw a 33% drop in reports of intimidation, a 70% decline in boycotting cases, 60% fewer people needing police protection, and a 50% decrease in the number and acreage of grazing farms unlet or unstocked because of agitation.

A breakthrough occurred when a scheme was made public at "the largest labour demonstration ever held in Ireland" (Cork Examiner), a memorable rally in Macroom on 10 December 1904 addressed by William O'Brien.

[34] Credit was also claimed for an O'Brien ally, Thomas Russell, MP, the son of an evicted Scottish crofter, who had broken with the Conservatives in the Irish Unionist Alliance and was returned to Westminster from South Tyrone as the champion of the Ulster Farmers and Labourers Union.

[35][36] The so called 'Labourers Act' provided large scale funding for extensive state sponsored housing to accommodate rural labourers and others of the working classes.

The labourer-owned cottages erected by the Local County Councils brought about a major socio-economic transformation, by simultaneously erasing the previous inhuman habitations.

It is not an exaggeration to term it a social revolution, in a sense it was the first large-scale public-housing schemes in the country, a development neglected by historians, because the houses, rural based and more scattered, were not as evident as the urban tenements, that officialdom would not even look into.

Additional funding for the erection of a further 5000 cottages was won under the follow-on Labourers (Ireland) Act 1911, Sheehan making the concluding speech during the passage of the bill.

D. D. Sheehan maintained in 1921, that the labourers, as a result of these housing acts (particularly the landmark 1906 bill), "were no longer a people to be kicked and cuffed and ordered about by the schoneens and squireens of the district; they became a very worthy class indeed, to be courted and flattered at election times and wheedled with all sorts of fair promises of what could be done for them".

[43] In 1905, Dillon's loyal "Redmonite" ally and ILLA secretary J. J. O'Shee was tasked with forming a break-away 'party-subservient' organisation in answer to Sheehan's domination of the original one.

[44] A larger section, mainly in counties Cork, Limerick, Kerry and Tipperary, followed Sheehan who renamed it the 'Land and Labour Association' (LLA).

Century, though at a much slower rate, local government funding now largely focused on developing urban rather than hitherto rural housing.