This support was reinforced by Parnell himself when he joined Daly, O'Connor Power, James Kilmartin and Matt Harris at the Ballinasloe Tenants' Defence Association meeting on 3 November 1878.
The historian T. W. Moody disputes this theory, claiming that this view is based on Michael Davitt's faulty recollection before the 1889 Times-Parnell Commission and his 1904 The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, repeated by Sheehy-Skeffington in 1908; and that no contemporary accounts of the events mention a Canon Bourke as an issue.
[3] Moody presents Canon (alternatively he calls him Fr) Ulick Joseph Bourke, president of St Jarlath's College, Tuam, as a separate person who in fact was "far from unsympathetic to the fenians" and served on the committee of the Irish National Land League from its formation in October 1879.
The traditionally somewhat conservative tenant farmers were becoming desperate for relief and willing to listen to aggressive nationalists who linked economic with political oppression in their messages and raised the question of who morally owned the land.
He was expressing impatience in the Connaught Telegraph with achieving anything for the tenants, either through constitutional means or John Devoy's 'New Departure' (an 'unholy alliance' between pragmatic Fenians prepared to delay their resort to force, and radical Home Rulers).
Parnell was positioning himself to take over the Home Rule League after Isaac Butt died, and a growing land campaign would give him an issue for the coming election.
The current climate of the New Departure offered a perhaps short-lived opportunity to combine Fenian mass mobilisation and muscle, with activism within the constitutional system provided by Parnell and O'Connor Power, with Michael Davitt the key man in both camps.
The Connaught Telegraph's report of the meeting in its edition of 26 April 1879 began:- Since the days of O'Connell a larger public demonstration has not been witnessed than that of Sunday last.
At 11 o'clock a monster contingent of tenant-farmers on horseback drew up in front of Hughes's hotel, showing discipline and order that a cavalry regiment might feel proud of.
Nally, H. French, and M. Griffin, wearing green and gold sashes, led on their different sections, who rode two deep, occupying, at least, over an Irish mile of the road.
led on by Mr. Martin Hughes, the spirited hotel proprietor, driving a pair of rare black ponies to a phæton, taking Messrs. J.J. Louden and J. Daly.
On passing through Ballindine the sight was truly imposing, the endless train directing its course to Irishtown – a neat little hamlet on the boundaries of Mayo, Roscommon, and Galway.
"Advanced" land-reformer and Home-Ruler John Ferguson's resolution stated the goal of the Land War: That as the land of Ireland, like that of every other country, was intended by a just and all-providing God for the use and sustenance of those of his people to whom he gave inclination and energies to cultivate and improve it, any system which sanctions its monopoly by a privileged class, or assigns its ownership and control to a landlord caste, to be used as an instrument of usurious or political self-seeking, demands from every aggrieved Irishman an undying hostility, being flagrantly opposed to the first principle of their humanity – self-preservation.
Michael M. O'Sullivan, teacher at a Catholic College and early tenant right activist from Galway, is said to have drawn the greatest audience response :- .
All right-thinking men would deplore the necessity of having recourse in this country to scenes such as have been enacted in other lands, although I for one will not hold up my hands in holy horror at a movement that gave liberty not only to France but to Europe.
He was a lofty and generous character, yet James Daly, who helped at both gatherings, coined the jibe that Davitt would be "father of the Land League if he had not missed the train."
[3] Daly was chairman of the Westport meeting on 8 June 1879, addressed by Parnell and Davitt which finally gave national political impetus to the Land Reform movement.
"James Daly organised the presentation of Mayo evidence which strongly influenced the Bessborough Commission to recommend radical revision of the tenurial system, and thus provided Gladstone with immediate justification for the 1881 Land Act.
"[9] On 2 November 1879, Davitt addressed a land meeting at Gurteen, County Sligo, declaring of landlord-tenant relations : "the time has come when the manhood of Ireland will spring to its feet and say it will tolerate this system no longer".
Their arrest led to mass protest meetings, Parnell used it to launch a propaganda drive in Britain and the United States, and the authorities failed to achieve a conviction.
President Mary McAleese has spoken thus of the incident :[10] The newspapers of the day throughout the western world were full of the trial of Davitt and his two colleagues for an allegedly inflammatory speech he had given at Gurteen, Co. Sligo.
Daly was not comfortable with the centralised control of the land movement and what he perceived as a drift away from the West, the real area of need, and also was concerned about use of physical force in pursuit of its aims.
Gerry Adams used the occasion of his Michael Davitt Centenary Lecture, 15 June 2006, to claim that land reform in the west of Ireland has since regressed.