Plan of Campaign

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Plan of Campaign

The Plan of Campaign was the second of three phases of land agitation that occurred in Ireland between 1879 and 1903. Like the Land League before it, the Plan of Campaign was a reaction to falling agricultural production and prices that made it difficult for many tenant farmers to pay their customary rents. An increase in the late summer and early autumn of 1886 in the number of legal and forcible dispossessions of defaulting tenants, more commonly known asevictions, and the seeming indifference of the newly elected Conservative government to the tenants' economic plight, sparked the agitation, which in essence was a refusal to pay the contracted rents on selected estates.

The Plan of Campaign manifesto was published in the nationalist newspaper United Ireland on 23 October 1886. According to the manifesto, tenants on individual properties were to decide the percentage rent reduction they required. If the landlords refused their demands, the tenants were to entrust their rents, less the desired reduction, to individuals known only to themselves. This money, which was known as "the estate fund" or "the campaign fund," was to pay general expenses and to support evicted tenants. Campaigners were strongly urged not to pay legal costs, to publicize and resist evictions, and to boycott those responsible for them.

The Plan of Campaign affected a mere one percent of Irish estates during its five-year existence. It was implemented on at least 203 properties—75 in Munster, 71 in Connacht, 33 in Leinster, and 24 in Ulster. Although the heaviest concentration was in the poorer western half of the country, the Plan of Campaign was not simply the reaction of an impoverished peasantry to adverse economic circumstances. The evidence suggests that virtually all of the crucial Plan of Campaign struggles were fought on estates that had notoriously insecure financial bases. If tenant farmers, by withholding rents, could bring landlords to the verge of bankruptcy and force them to sell at sacrificial prices, the occupying tenants might be the beneficiaries.

The leadership of the movement was drawn from the more radical, agrarian wing of the Irish Parliamentary Party that regarded landlords as parasites and landlordism as alien. Additionally, and perhaps more significantly, the landlords were seen, and largely saw themselves, as part of the English garrison in Ireland, and as such, they were a considerable barrier to the establishment of a Home Rule parliament in Dublin. The leading proponents of land agitation in the 1880s made no secret of the fact that Home Rule was their ultimate aim, and thus the Plan of Campaign had a political dimension from the beginning.

The agitation was exclusively Catholic. With some exceptions, the Catholic hierarchy and clergy shared the nationalist community's attitude toward the landlords and the Plan of Campaign. They took their lead from the two most influential churchmen of the day, Dr. William Walsh, archbishop of Dublin, and his archiepiscopal colleague in Cashel, Dr. Thomas Croke, both of whom, after initial misgivings, defended the morality of the agitation. Their position was challenged by the more conservative members of the Catholic hierarchy, notably the redoubtable bishop of Limerick, Dr. Edward Thomas O'Dwyer. He and a handful of like-minded colleagues regarded the refusal to pay rent as illegal and morally wrong—a violation of the sacrosanctity of contract as enshrined in the Land Act of 1881. Their objections were strengthened in late December 1886 when the Irish executive proclaimed the agitation "an unlawful and criminal conspiracy," and made absolute in April 1888 when a papal rescript condemned the Plan of Campaign on the grounds that it was unlawful to break contracts freely entered into by landlords and tenants, that the land courts were available to those who believed that their rents were unfair, and that funds collected under the Plan had been extorted from tenants. The pope decreed that boycotting was contrary to charity and justice, depicting it as a tactic designed to intimidate individuals who were willing to pay their rents or who were exercising their legal rights in taking farms from which other tenants had been evicted.

The general response to the papal decree was great indignation. John Dillon, William O'Brien, and other Catholic leaders acknowledged Rome's religious and spiritual jurisdiction but rejected the pope's condemnation of boycotting and the Plan of Campaign as unwarranted meddling in Irish political affairs. In their reaction to the rescript and in the ensuing debate on the question of church-state relations, Irish Catholics demonstrated impressive political maturity and firmly indicated that, in an independent Ireland, Home Rule would not necessarily mean Rome Rule.

An ironic exception to the broad nationalist consensus on the Plan of Campaign was Charles Stewart Parnell, the charismatic leader and embodiment of Irish nationalism. His attitude was one of undisguised antipathy, and he disavowed the agitation publicly on several occasions, notably in a press release in December 1886 and more comprehensively in a major address to the Liberal Party hierarchy at the Eighty Club in London on 8 May 1888. Parnell was opposed to the agitation on political and tactical grounds rather than on moral ones; he was concerned that certain aspects of the Plan would have an adverse affect on English public opinion and on the political situation generally. Agrarian agitation endangered the alliance that Parnell had forged between Irish nationalists and English Liberals, and thus it threatened the prospect of Home Rule for Ireland, Parnell's overriding political ambition.

The Plan of Campaign came through the twin traumas of the papal rescript and Parnell's Eighty Club address more or less unscathed. However, the leaders of the agitation could not escape the crippling shortage of funds and the financial demands of an ever-increasing number of evicted tenants, and their difficulties became more acute as the government and the landlords sharpened and coordinated their responses. But the blow that precipitated the collapse of the agitation was the London divorce-court verdict against Mrs. Katharine O'Shea and Parnell on 17 November 1890. The subsequent rending of nationalist Ireland into pro- and anti- Parnellite camps was reflected in the ranks of the campaigners. Several of the Plan's leading advocates sided with Parnell, but the majority lined up against him. The tribulations in the nationalist camp demoralized the tenants, and by mid-1891 many had settled with their landlords, accepting terms that many observers regarded as ruinous. A small number of disputes dragged on for several years, but to all intents and purposes the agitation was moribund by the time of Parnell's death in October 1891.

Despite its precipitous and less than glorious termination, the Plan of Campaign was successful on most of the estates on which it was implemented and secured sizeable rent reductions for many tenants. In addition, the agitation had a considerable, if incalculable, indirect influence on rent movements—many landlords conceded to their tenants' demands when threatened with the Plan or after seeing it take root in their area. The agitation exposed the fallacy of dual ownership in the soil by landlord and tenant, and it signalled that peasant proprietorship was the only long-term solution to the Irish land question. In the wake of the Plan of Campaign the political and social isolation of the mainly Protestant landed class was almost complete.