The traditional view of the Land War…

The traditional view of the Land War in Ireland has been of the displacement of a Protestant Ascendancy class and the often absentee landlords.

The former ascendancy had been on the decline since the Great Hunger of the late 1840s, and for them the problem was that previously agreed rents could not be paid after the slump in prices from 1874; some have allowed generous rent rebates while others have stuck to the agreements and enforced their property rights.

Some are already owed rent and many have mortgaged their property and need the rents to pay the mortgage costs.

Many new landlords since the famine are Irish Catholics, but are still associated with the Ascendancy because of their wealth.

A survey of the four thousand largest Irish landlords in 1872 had revealed that twenty-nine percent lived outside Ireland.

By then, forty-three percent of all proprietors were Roman Catholics, though the richest owners were mostly Anglicans.

Rent strikes often lead to evictions.

Land League members resist the evictions en masse during the Land War, resulting in enforcement of evictions by court judgments for possession that are carried out by the quasi-military Royal Irish Constabulary.

Murders of some landlords, their agents and policemen, as well as attacks on supportive witnesses and on their property and animals, all occur as reprisals for evictions.

In response, the British army are often deployed to back up the police, restore law and order and enforce evictions, after the Coercion Acts are passed.

For protesting tenants, these Acts are a form of martial law; their opponents see it as the only way to guarantee their legal rights.

The most effective method of the Land League is the boycott, which takes its name from when an unpopular landlord's agent, Charles Boycott, is ostracized by the local community.

Boycotting is also applied to tenants who want to pay their rent, and to the police, as well as shops and other businesses who trade with boycotted people.

The boycotts are often extremely effective, since they are unquestionably lawful under the common law, nonviolent, and effectively punitive: since nobody is forced to join a boycott, it is a voluntary act, through private agreement, and consequently there is no common law remedy against it, since the right to not engage in commerce, socialization, or friendship is implicit in the right to engage in commerce, socialization, or friendship.

Those who break a boycott, and their families, however, can expect to be subject to social and informal sanctions for breaking a boycott, such as shunning, ostracism, or extension of the boycott to them.

This proves an extraordinarily effective remedy against mistreatment, theoretically allowing people who believe they are being mistreated to counteract their situation purely through voluntary, nonviolent, and unquestionably lawful means.

A minority also use violence on boycott-breakers and threats to ensure compliance.

The fatal shooting of Peter Dempsey in May, 1881 is an example; he is a tenant farmer near Loughrea who is shot while walking his two daughters to Mass, using a mass path across a boycotted farm.

Dempsey had taken over an eighteen-acre (seventy=three thousand square meter) holding near Hollypark, Loughrea after the previous tenant, Murty Hynes, had given it up following a speech by Matt Harris.

Hynes rhad elinquished the holdings in September 1880 after Harris, who was a Fenian, Land Leaguer, nationalist and British MP, condemned him in a speech for taking a farm from the previous occupant (Martin Bermingham), who had been evicted for nonpayment of rent.

Dempsey, who had refused to leave the farm, was killed in retaliation.

Two men are charged with murder, but both are acquitted for lack of evidence after witness intimidation.

Only a few attend Dempsey's funeral out of fear of assault or reprisal.

The boycott is particularly effective in the communities of rural Ireland.

Ostracism makes it very difficult to acquire food and other necessities; compliance with a boycott or leaving a community are the stark options.