Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism.

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.

[4] In addition to the "Three F's" (fair rent fixity of tenure, and free sales), resolutions called for loans to facilitate tenant purchase of land and for breaking the landlord monopoly on local government.

[6] But, as in the 1850s, the "shared dislike for, or hostility to, landlords, and a common desire for improved tenurial terms" could not overcome the sectarian-aligned division over Irish self-government between the Repeal Association, or now in 1874 the Home Rule League, parliamentary candidates who adopted the tenant programme in the south and west, and the majority of the Liberals who championed it in the north.

This united practically in a single organisation all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements on the nationalist side of the increasingly frozen sectarian-political divide in Ireland.

It proposed that the objectives of the League were:[7] ... first, to bring about a reduction of rack-rents; second, to facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the soil by the occupiers [and that these] ... can be best attained by promoting organisation among the tenant-farmers; by defending those who may be threatened with eviction for refusing to pay unjust rents; by facilitating the working of the Bright clauses of the Irish Land Act during the winter; and by obtaining such reforms in the laws relating to land as will enable every tenant to become owner of his holding by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years.Parnell, Davitt, John Dillon and others then went to the United States to raise funds for the League with spectacular results.

Parnell together with all of his party lieutenants, including Father Eugene Sheehy known as "the Land League priest", went into a bitter verbal offensive and were imprisoned in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act in Kilmainham Jail for "sabotaging the Land Act", from where the No-Rent Manifesto was issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until "constitutional liberties" were restored and the prisoners freed.

[10] In reaction to such appeals, and to the Phoenix Park murders to which Parnell's unionist opponents sought to associate him, what limited Protestant support that the League had enjoyed in the north fell away.

The Land League had an equivalent organization in the United States, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars both for famine relief and also for political action.

[13] From 1879 to 1882, the "Land War" in pursuance of the "Three Fs" (Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale) first demanded by the Tenant Right League in 1850, was fought in earnest.

The Royal Irish Constabulary, the national armed police force, were charged with upholding the law and protecting both landlord and tenant against violence.

[citation needed] In October 1882, as its successor Parnell founded the Irish National League to campaign on broader issues including Home Rule.

This Act set the conditions for the break-up of large estates and gradually devolved to rural landholders and tenants' ownership of the lands.