[3] The last great social and agrarian campaign of the home rule movement, the Ranch War (1906 and 1909), was largely led and organised by Ginnell from the central office of the United Irish League.

The strategy that Ginnell pursued was the Down's Policy, or cattle driving, a proceeding designed to harass the prosperous grazier interests, whose 'ranches' occupied large, under populated and under worked tracts.

[4]Ginnell's cattle drives began to tail off after the summer of 1908, and the agitation was finally dissolved with the passage of a 1909 Act by the Liberal Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell that allowed the transfer to the Land Commission of farmland by compulsory purchase, which was hailed by the national movement as an historic victory.

In reality, the Ranch War involved an implosion within sectors of the Irish Party, as its leadership had not facilitated the working of the Wyndham Land Purchase Act in the first place because John Dillon and his like wanted conflict above victory.

[3] In 1917, he campaigned to try to ensure the election of Count Plunkett in the Roscommon North by-election in which he defeated the IPP candidate on an abstentionist platform.

[6] After spending a year as a republican campaigner in Chicago, he was appointed the Representative of the Irish Republic in Argentina and South America by de Valera.

He carried out his propaganda work here to distribute copies of the Irish Bulletin and to provide the Sinn Féin version of the conflict during the War of Independence.

De Valera later appointed him a member of his "Council of State", a twelve-member body set up to advise him on the deteriorating situation in the civil war.

He ordered Robert Briscoe and some of his friends to take possession of the Consular Offices in Nassau Street, New York City, then in the hands of the Free State Government, to obtain the list of the subscribers to the bond drive organized to aid the struggle in the War of Independence.

At the time, a court case was ongoing to decide on who had the right to the funds: the newly-installed Provisional Government or de Valera, as one of the three trustees among the anti-Treatyites.