[1]: 143–144 Supporters argued that by granting farmers a degree of security and by allowing them to at least share in the benefits of their own improvements to the land (clearing, fencing, drainage etc), the tenant right was the key to Ulster's relative prosperity.
[2] Against this background, and with additional distress of the enveloping Famine that bore down on those still able to sustain themselves in rising Poor Law rates, otherwise loyal Protestant farmers interpreted the omission of the tenant right from the act as an existential threat.
[4]: 294 also provoked new tenant protection societies (commonly under the guidance of local Roman Catholic clergy) in the south for whom an extension of the Ulster Custom was a minimum demand.
[5] The Young Ireland veteran Charles Gavan Duffy was persuaded by the initiative of James MacKnight, editor of the Londonderry Standard, William Sharman Crawford MP, a progressive County Down landlord, and group of radical Presbyterian ministers, that there was a basis for a national movement.
[7] Together with Frederick Lucas, former Quaker and founder of the progressive international Catholic weekly, The Tablet, and John Gray, owner of the leading nationalist paper, the Freeman's Journal, Duffy and MacKnight issued writs for a national tenant-right convention.
Duffy recalls "upwards of forty members of Parliament, about two hundred Catholic and Presbyterian clergymen, and gentlemen farmers, traders, and professional men from every district in the country" answering "the call".Reserved, stern Covenanters [Presbyterian traditionalists] from the North, ministers and their elders for the most part, with a group of brighter recruits of a new generation, who came afterwards to be known as Young Ulster, sat beside [Catholic] priests who had lived through the horrors of a famine which left their churches empty and their graveyards overflowing; flanked by farmers who survived that evil time like the veterans of a hard campaign; while citizens, professional men, the popular journalists from the four provinces, and the founders and officers of the Tenant Protection Societies completed the assembly.
[5] Of the 48 pledged MP who from 1852 were to sit at Westminster as the Independent Irish Party only one had been returned from Ulster: William Kirk from Newry where, despite the property franchise, the Catholic vote was determinant.
[20] John Rogers (of Comber) who likened landlords to "locusts that came up on Judea"[20] and who saw in the Tenant League a "union of north and south in one glorious brotherhood for the regeneration of their common country" was to be elected Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in 1863, replacing Henry Cooke who had accused him of preaching communism,[15] and again in 1864.
Together with the presence of so many Repealers (ready to support a Catholic-majority parliament in Dublin), the determination to remove restrictions on the titles assumed by a revived Catholic episcopate in both Ireland and Great Britain heightened the suspicion that the League was being used for political purposes beyond its declared agenda.
[5] It was the case as well that landowners in the north threatened to withdraw their consent for the existing Ulster Custom if their Conservative nominees were not elected,[22][20] and that they had League electoral meetings broken up by Orange "bludgeon men".
But in the process two of the leading members, John Sadlier and William Keogh, broke their pledges of independent opposition and accepted positions (respectively as a junior Lord of the Treasury and as Solicitor General) in a new, on the issue of tenant rights equally unsympathetic, Whig-Peelite administration..[4]: 295 [24] Significantly in a League debate in February 1853 MacKnight, wary of any sign of Irish separatism, did not support Duffy in condemning these desertions.
[25] 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.
A month later Duffy published a farewell address to his constituents, declaring that it was no longer possible to accomplish the task for which he had solicited their votes[28] He emigrated to Victoria, Australia, where on a platform of land reform he re-entered politics.
[27]: 121 David Bell left for England where in 1864 he was inducted by Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa into the Irish Republican ["Fenian"] Brotherhood, and from 1867 lived in exile in the United States[16] Agricultural prices began to rise from 1853, and were given an additional stimulus by the onset of the Crimean War in the following years.
Conscious that the [secret] Ballot Act 1872 had weakened the landlords' authority, Conservatives expressed a willingness to give the Ulster Custom legal force.
[32] The Conservatives triumph in Ulster was not as complete as in 1852: two tenant-right Liberals were returned from County Londonderry, and in Down James Sharman Crawford succeeded where in 1852 his father William had failed.