THE ULSTER CONFUCT they could force their wages up slightly, but the nature of the new farming meant that less of them were needed. The main lesson that the small famers still left learned was that they needed security of tenure and a fair way of fixing rents if they were to survive future bad harvests. During the 1850s there was agrarian agitation organised through a Tenants' Rights league which, for a time, united peasants in the north and the south but their activities were sporadic and easily defused by good harvests. But prior to this there had been some insurrections in 1848 led by the Young Ireland wing of the Repeal Movement. (O'Connell had been unable to get the movement for Repeal really moving, and he had died in 1847 on his way to Rome to meet the Pope). Although they were another farcical failure they were to have important consequences since some of the exiled survivors of the uprising were to play a role in the founding of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (or Fenians) ten years later. In 1849, another rising in Wexford failed badly, buts its leader, James Lalor had made a movement to abolish landlordism the main plank of his programme for an independent Ireland. Lalor called for the nationalization of the land and its letting out for crop-growing to peasant families. This was to be the programme of the powerful Land League in the 1889s. An analogous vision of Ireland as a nation of small peasant proprietors (borrowed from Bismarck's comtemporary policies) was to form the basis, along with demands for social welfare programmes and political independence, of the « New Departure» in Fenian policies after their abortive attempts at uprising in 1867. The rise of the Fenians (or Irish Republican Brotherhood) out of the ashes of the Young Ireland insurrection was another result of the Famine emigrations to America. A sizeable Irish Catholic community had grown in the eastern seaboard of America where they clustered together in the face of as ferocious an anti-Catholicism as some of them had encountered in Ulster. The result of this experience was to build a fierce Irish nationalism amongst them but to displace their hatred of the puritan Americans onto the English. The Irish proved themselves to be very adept at American local politics (which they entered mainly for the secure and wellpaid jobs it offered) and particularly good at setting up welloiled party machines (a superb example of this is the late and unlamented Governor Daly of Chicago who was very proud of his Irish descent). In addition to remittance money and emigration tickets, one of the main exports of American Irish 81 6
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