or 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 also throw
open to the free air of a new national spirit those caverns and
tabernacles of faction in which good men of all political persuasions
had been suffocating for the previous eight years." Accordingly the
United Irish League was born into the world at Westport on the 16th
January 1898, to achieve results which, if they be not greater--though
great, indeed, they are--the fault assuredly rests not with the
founder of the League, but with those others who malevolently thwarted
his purposes. The occasion was opportune. The three several movements
of the Dillonites, Redmondites and Healyites were in ruins, and
Ireland went its way unheeding of them. The young men were busy with
their '98 and Wolfe Tone Clu