“To look over the fence of the famine-stricken village and see the rich green solitudes, which might yield full and plenty, spread out at the very doorsteps of the ragged and hungry peasants, was to fill a stranger with a sacred rage and make it an unshirkable duty to strive towards undoing the unnatural divorce between the people and the land” (William O’Brien in an Olive Branch in Ireland).

Mr Arthur Balfour had established the Congested Districts Board in 1891 to deal with the Western problem, where “the beasts have eaten up the men,” and when Mr O’Brien settled down at Mallow Cottage he devoted himself energetically to assisting the Board in various projects of local development.  But his experiences proved that these minor reforms were at the best only palliatives, “sending men ruffles who wanted shirts,” and that there could be only one really satisfactory solution—­to restore to the people the land that had been theirs in bygone time, to root out the bullocks and the sheep and to root in the people into their ancient inheritance.  It was only after years of patient effort that he at last succeeded in persuading the Congested Districts Board to make its first experiment in land purchase for the purpose of enlarging the people’s holdings and making them the owners of their own fields.[1] The scene was Clare Island, “the romantic dominion of Granya Uaile, the ‘Queen of Men,’” who for many years brought Elizabeth’s best captains to grief among her wild islands.  The lordship of this island of 3949 acres, with its ninety-five families, had passed into the hands of a land-jobber, “with bowels of iron,” who sought to extract his cent. per cent. from the unfortunate islanders by a series of police expeditions in a gunboat, with a crop of resulting evictions, bayonet charges and imprisonments.

The result of the experiment was, beyond expectation, happy.  After many delays the Congested Districts Board handed over the island to its new peasant proprietors, now secure for ever more in their own homesteads, but this transfer was not completed until the Archbishop of Tuam and Mr O’Brien had guaranteed the payment of the purchase instalments for the first seven years—­a guarantee which to the islanders’ immortal credit never cost the guarantors a farthing.

Fired to enthusiasm by the success of this experiment Mr O’Brien conceived the idea of a virile agitation for the replantation of the whole of Connaught, so that the people should be transplanted from their starvation plots to the abundant green patrimony around them.  He avows that no political objects entered into his first conceptions of this movement in the West.  But the approach of the centenary of the insurrection of 1798, with its inspiring memories of the United Irishmen, furnished him with the idea, and the happy title for a new organisation which, in his own words, “drawing an irresistible strength and reality from the conditions in the West, would