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Post date: Feb 04, 2011 5:11:12 PM
Growing up in the west of Ireland in the early 1950s, I remember a conversation in our house about who was Ireland’s greatest patriot. The usual names were mentioned: Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, Charles Stewart Parnell and Daniel O’Connell. Eventually an eighty-year old man took a pipe out of his mouth and said, “you are all wrong, Ireland’s greatest patriot was Michael Davitt.” He then proceeded to give a short biographical account of the life of Michael Davitt and ever since he has been the historical giant at my shoulder.
This man recalled Davitt’s birth in County Mayo in 1846, at the height of the Great Irish Famine (1845-1850), the eviction of his family four years later, and their emigration to England. Davitt took up full-time employment at the age of nine and two years later lost his right arm following an industrial accident. After four years of unexpected education, he took up employment for four years before joining the Fenians, an Irish revolutionary movement. After an imprisonment of over seven years for his Fenian activities, he emerged with an unbroken spirit and a burning ambition to change social conditions in his native country. He became the founder and chief organiser of the Land League, one of the most successful movements in Irish history, which transformed tenant farmers into owner-occupiers within a generation, and in the process bought about one of the greatest social changes ever witnessed in this country.
Michael Davitt’s Land League broke the prevailing spirit of servility, and paved the way for the emergence of a modern democracy. His sympathy and concern ranged from tenant farmers to agricultural labourers, the British working class, prison conditions, social reform, the Boers in South Africa to the Jews in Russia.
Michael Davitt was also a respected international journalist, contributing numerous articles to American publications, the author of six books, a supporter of Irish Home Rule and a Member of Parliament at Westminster. Michael Davitt loved America and was a frequent visitor there. His father, mother and sister emigrated to the USA. His father, Martin (d.1871) and two sisters are buried in the Cathedral Cemetery, Scranton, in Pennsylvania, his mother (d.1880) in Manayunk, Philadelphia, and his sister, Sabina, who had a clerical position in the US navy during the First World War, in Arlington National Cemetery. His wife was Mary Yore, an Irish-American from Michigan, whom he married in Oakland, California in December 1886.
Today Michael Davitt is rightly respected as one of Ireland’s great patriots…if not its greatest.
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