Tenant Right League

The Tenant Right League, established in 1850, was an organisation which aimed to secure reforms in the Irish land system. Formed by Charles Gavan Duffy and Frederick Lucas, it united for a time Protestant and Catholic tenants, Duffy calling his movement The League of North and South.

The political background to the movement was the Encumbered Estates Act and the resultant change in land ownership at landlord level. In the North of Ireland, Protestant and Presbyterian ministers feared that the new landlords would destroy the "Ulster custom" of tenancy, which compensated tenants for any improvement undertaken. Concurrently, in the South of Ireland politically minded young Catholic priests were agitating for the adoption there of the Ulster custom as a measure of reform.

The League was founded in Dublin at a meeting attended by representatives of the Tenant Protection Societies, 9 August 1850. Its support came initially from the Ulster Tenant Right Association led by William Sharman Crawford. The support was short lived because of the involvement of Catholic clergymen from the south. As a constitutional movement, the league sought to secure the adoption and enforcement of the Three Fs, namely:

For the larger tenant farmers fixity of tenure was the priority; on the other hand the league never had the support of smaller tenants, their prime concern was fair rents. The founders strove to establish a parliamentary party of Irish members who would oppose any government not prepared to grant "Tenant-Right" also known as the Ulster Custom.

The Tenant Right League met with considerable success under its national organiser, John Martin. It had the support of the surviving Repealers in the British House of Commons; and of a number of English Radicals. It was agreed, all around, that a Land Act embodying the three F's would be a real gain. In the 1852 general election, some fifty Tenant Right candidates, including Gavan Duffy, Lucas and John Sadleir, were returned to parliament, where they sat as the Independent Irish Party. Its manifesto read:

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