Edward McHugh

Edward McHugh (1853–1915) was an Irish Georgist (land reformer), trade unionist, Labour activist and social reformer. He spent a great deal of his lifetime engaged in the struggle for social reform not only in Great Britain and Ireland, but also further afield, including spells in America and the Antipodes.

Born in rural County Tyrone to a smallholding family, before emigrating through economic necessity to the overcrowded industrial landscape of Greenock, and then Glasgow, Edward McHugh shared with his friend, Michael Davitt, experience of both sides of the land question. It is not surprising that, having witnessed rural and urban poverty at an early age, McHugh would become firmly committed to the ideals of Henry George, and convinced that land, and its inequitable distribution, should lie at the root of all social ills.

After moving to Glasgow as a teenager to find work as a compositor, McHugh found himself in a city with various possibilities for developing his education as a social reformer. The Irish who had fled to the city in such numbers after the Great Famine were finally starting to organise themselves politically. Native Scots of all classes, especially those Gaels who had come from the Highlands as a result either of the Clearances or the region’s own famine in the 1840s, were contemplating the conditions in which the working classes of Glasgow, and other towns in Scotland, were forced to live. As a member of the Glasgow Home Rule Association, and then the secretary of the Glasgow branch of the Irish Land League, McHugh was singled out as a speaker and organiser of ability, and was chosen to lead a Land League mission to the Scottish Highlands in order to direct the nascent crofters’ agitation along radical lines. After the death of the Land League, McHugh toured Scotland with Henry George himself, and helped to found the Scottish Land Restoration League, a body dedicated to taxing land values to their full extent, thereby abolishing landlordism.

...
Wikipedia