The Long Depression has resulted in violence…

The Long Depression has resulted in violence and widespread upheavals and extensive evictions when Irish tenant farmers are unable or unwilling to pay their rents and resort to a rent strike.

This is the case particularly in Connacht, where the land is poorer, weather is wetter, farmers are poorer and there are fewer Royal Irish Constabulary on the ground.

The first "monster meeting" (a huge rally) of tenant farmers is held on April 20, 1879, near Claremorris in County Mayo.

This is followed by the localized, but worrying, 1879 famine that occurs mainly in Connacht.

The Land League is founded in 1879 by Michael Davitt, a former Irish Republican Brotherhood member and radical politician.

William Ewart Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, had introduced his "Act to amend the Law relating to the Occupation and Ownership of Land in Ireland", formally titled as the Landlord & Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, in February 1870.

This had passed into law rapidly in August, reforming some unfair contractual aspects where a land tenancy was economically viable.

Gladstone had found that Irish and English tenant farmers had different rights, and the aim was to equalize them.

Unfortunately, the 1870 reforms had become less relevant in the worsening economics of the following decade.

Farm produce prices and earnings had been strong in the 1850s and 1860s, leading Irish tenant farmers to agree to pay higher rents.

This had been followed by years of low world prices, bad weather and poor harvests after 1874 all over Europe, known now as the "Long Depression".

Wheat from new sources, such as the USA and the Ukraine, and refrigerated meat from Argentina and Australia, are being imported into Europe, keeping prices low for producers there.

Many consider that the spark that set off the events in Ireland had been the murder of the unpopular Earl of Leitrim at Carrigart in April 1878.

The three assailants have gone unpunished due to a lack of evidence as no witness had wanted to testify against them.

Further, the term of most Irish land tenancies had reduced from a typical thirty-one years or "lease for three lives" in the eighteenth century down to annual or eleven-month tenancies after 1850.

This had made Gladstone's attempt to equalize them with long-term English tenancies impractical, and has caused tenants a considerable degree of insecurity.

English tenants can also claim for the value of improvements and fertilizers when a lease comes up for renewal; this sometimes applies in Ulster (the so-called "Ulster Custom"), but not in Connacht, the crucible of the Land War.