THE ULSTER CONFLICT into conflict with the landlord or the incoming farmer over what he considered his traditional right of occupancy. This form of agrarian unrest was, therefore, a feature of the more prosperous parts of the countryside and usually at times of falling prices. In fact a more universal spring of agrarian unrest was the tithe system whereby the Anglican Curch of Ireland levied a tax on farm produce, and resentment of tithes at times constituted a bond uniting landlords and tenants. The acrimony against tithes was strongest when prices were low, and the agrarian unrest of the early 1830s revolved around the tithes issue. In this Tithe War, as it was called, the more prosperous sections of the Catholic population were led by Daniel O'Connell, who had previously channelled peasant discontent into a struggle for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland which had succeeded, through Parliamentary action in 1829. O'Connell had created the first mass Catholic movement by his undoubted powers of oratory, but also by skilful organizational methods. When he first founded his Catholic Association in 1823 membership cost a guinea a year, an immense sum that a peasant would rarely see in one lump sum, and which he was far more likely to spend on his own personal and family needs than on membership of an association devoted to the furthering of the political advancement of the small Catholic middle class to which they did not belong. Several months after he had founded the Association he had a stroke of genius: he changed the membership rules by making the subscription payable at one penny per week and he arranged that the Catholic clergy should collect after Sunday mass. By the end of the year £ 1,000 a week was being collected in this way, which meant that the membership was well over 240,000. The success of the Association so alarmed the administration based in Dublin Castle that they ordered its dissolution. O'Connell was no revolutionary but a constitutionalist conservative and he immediately obeyed the letter of the law, but reformed the association under the name of Liberal Clubs. This organization started to contest seats in the 1826 general election using Protestant candidates pledged to emancipation and backed by the Catholic clergy. They were successful in some of the southern counties and in one of the Ulster border counties, Monaghan. In 1828 O'Connel himself contested and won a by-election in dare, but as a Catholic he could not take his seat. This disenfranchisement (in effect) of a large 75
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