George Moore (1727-1799), who built Moore Hall, originally came from Straide.

During the time of the Penal Laws, George went to Spain where  he was admitted to the Royal Court. From the 1760s until about 1790, George made  his fortune in the wine and brandy trade, running his business from Alicante.

When the Penal Laws were relaxed at the end of the 18th century, he returned to  Mayo with a fortune of £200,000 and in 1783, bought over 12,000 acres (49 km2)  of land at Muckloon, Ballycally and Killeen from Farragh Mc Donnell, and  commissioned the building of the grand residence of Moore Hall.

Moore Hall
Moore Hall

George’s son, John Moore (1767 – 1799), was educated in  France and became a lawyer. With the rebellion of 1798, he returned to Mayo.  General Humbert appointed him President of the Connacht Republic in Castlebar.  Thus, John Moore was the first President of an Irish republic, albeit for a very  brief interval. He was captured by the English Lord Cornwallis and, although  initially sentenced to death, his sentence was later commuted to deportation. He  died in the Royal Oak tavern in Waterford on 6 December, 1799. His body was  exhumed from Ballygunnermore Cemetery in Waterford in 1962 and brought to  Castlebar, where he was buried in the Mall with full military honours.

George Henry Moore (1810 – 1870), was educated in the  Catholic faith in England and later at Cambridge University. His main interest  was in horses and horse-racing. His brother, Arthur Augustus, was killed after a  fall from the horse Mickey Free during the 1845 Aintree Grand National. At the height of the Great Irish Famine in 1846, he entered a horse called Coranna for the Chester Gold Cup and netted £17,000 from bets laid on the horse. During the  Famine he imported thousands of tons of grain to feed his tenants, and gave each of his Mayo tenants a cow from his winnings. It is still remembered on the Moore estate that nobody was evicted from their home for non-payment of rent during hard times, and that nobody died there during the Famine. George Henry is buried in the family vault at Kiltoom on the Moore Hall estate.

George Agustus Moore (1852 – 1933), was a distinguished  writer of the Irish Literary Revival period. Many famous writers of the time,  including Lady Gregory, Maria Edgeworth, George Osborne, and W. B. Yeats were  regular visitors to Moore Hall. George was an agnostic, and anti-Catholic. His  ashes are buried on Castle Island on Lough Carra in view of the big house on the  hill.

Maurice George Moore (1854 – 1939), Senator Colonel Maurice  Moore was the statesman of the family. He served with the Connaught Rangers in  the Boer War and became concerned with human rights in South Africa. He also  worked to relieve Irish prisoners held in English jails, and for the retention  of UCG when it came under threat. He was also involved with the co-operative  movement in Ireland, founded by Horace Plunkett.

Moore Hall house was burned down on 1 February 1923 during  the Irish Civil War. An account of the burning was given shortly afterwards by the owner in a letter to the press.

George Agustus Moore (1852 – 1933)
George Agustus Moore (1852 – 1933)
Maurice George Moore (1854 – 1939)
Maurice George Moore (1854 – 1939)

Michael Davitt

Michael Davitt was born in the village of Straide, Co. Mayo, on 25 March 1846.

His father was one of the thousands of Catholic smallholders  evicted after the Great Famine. In 1850 the family emigrated to Haslingden in  East Lancashire. At eleven years of age he worked at a cotton mill. His right  arm was severed by machinery and had to be amputated. Unable to work, he  attended the local Wesleyan school and evening classes in the Mechanics’ Institute. He became a typesetter. He was mostly self-taught and learned French  and Italian as well as Irish.

Davitt became involved in the Irish Republican movement and  joined the Fenians in 1865. He took part in the unsuccessful attack on Chester  Castle. In 1868, he was made organising secretary of the Fenians in Scotland and  England and was their chief arms purchaser. In order to cover up his  revolutionary activities, he became a firearms salesman. In 1870 he was arrested  and sentenced to fifteen years in Dartmoor prison on a charge of treason, but he  was released on ‘ticket of leave’ after seven years due to the efforts of Isaac  Butt, Charles Stewart Parnell, and the Amnesty Association.

Davitt went to America in 1878 and met Clann na Gael leaders  including Devoy. He undertook a public lecture tour to earn money and he  addressed issues such as the past and present policies of nationalists and what  needed to be done to put the national cause on a stronger footing. He called for  an end to the landlord system in Ireland and for Irish independence. He  discovered in discussions that Devoy’s thinking on the land question was more  advanced than his own and he was soon convinced of the merits of Devoy’s ideas  about a ‘New Departure’ in Irish politics. He was anxious to return to Ireland  to promote the plan to form a movement with the two great aims of  self–government and land reform. He returned to Ireland in 1878. This new  policy, known as the ‘New Departure’, called on nationalists to back  parliamentary representatives who, though not Fenians, would act in the national  interest in and outside parliament. It was, at first, treated with suspicion by  the IRB and, though no formal alliance between extremists and constitutionalists  came about, the combination of agrarian agitation and parliamentary leadership  created the politics of Parnellism.

Michael Davitt
Michael Davitt

As crops failed and farm prices fell Davitt’s plan became  more attractive. A mass protest meeting was organised in Irishtown, Co. Mayo, in  April 1879 by local leaders. Davitt played an important part in its organisation  but he did not attend. In the worsening agricultural conditions of 1879, Davitt  persuaded Charles Stewart Parnell to address the second key meeting in Westport, Co. Mayo, on 8 June 1879 and to become involved in land agitation. Davitt, too,  addressed the Westport meeting and called for an end to the evils landlordism  and for Irish freedom. Davitt founded the Land League of Mayo, in August 1979, to organise and direct the agitation. Davitt’s role was vital and the leadership  he offered in directing agrarian agitation was of profound importance. He  believed that the land war could do much for Ireland and that all nationalists  would support the abolition of landlordism.

‘He adopted the slogan ‘the land of Ireland for the people of  Ireland’.

This was to ring as a battle cry throughout the country.  Davitt was convinced that Parnell was the only constitutional politician that could help him to achieve his aims and that he should be supported. He persuaded Parnell to take the initiative of turning the Mayo Land League into a national  organisation. Parnell, reluctant at first, agreed on the understanding that its programme was one that could be advocated in parliament. Parnell issued a letter accompanied by an ‘Appeal to the Irish race’, written by Davitt, on 29 September  1879 to some public men and began the negotiations that led to the foundation of the Irish National Land League, in Dublin, on 21 October 1879. Parnell became  its first president and Davitt its secretary. It was Davitt, however, who had  promoted this development and it resulted in a movement under Parnell’s leadership that had Fenian, Clann na Gael, and widespread popular support. It combined, in one great agrarian movement nationalists, from moderates and  constitutionalists to revolutionaries, and got strong backing and financial help  from the Irish in America.

The Land League undertook a long and bitter land war against unjust rents and evictions. In May 1880 Davitt was expelled from the IRB supreme council. Distress in Ireland was so severe after the poor harvest of 1879 that  it seemed that a catastrophe like that of the Great Famine was looming. Davitt  considered the distress the tragic culmination of an evil system and his  passionate sense of social justice was clear. He was extremely active and he was  imprisoned on several occasions because of the Land League’s vigorous prosecution of the Land War. The Land League was also political and here Parnell  was dominant. By 1881, the government was pressurised by the League’s popularity to introduce land reform measures to pacify Irish tenants. In 1881 Gladstone’s Land Act was passed. It granted the Land League’s demand, that is, the three  Fs—fair rent, fixity of tenure and freedom of sale—but the League fought on.  While in prison Davitt became familiar with the ideals of the English socialist  movements, some of which influenced his subsequent agrarian demands. He became a  keen advocate of land nationalisation, and developed a policy based on an  alliance of nationalist and British working-class interests. However, this policy led to an open breach with Parnell in 1884 and failed to attract popular  support.

Davitt was elected MP for Meath in 1882 but was unseated by special writ of the House of Commons. Later he was elected to north Meath, in  1892, and unseated; to north-east Cork, 1892, unopposed; east Kerry and south Mayo, 1895–99. Davitt’s denunciation of the Phoenix Park murders (of 6 May 1882) marked his final disillusionment with physical force politics.

Davitt met Parnell in Avondale in September 1882 and he  co-operated with him in setting up the Irish National League which put Home Rule  in first place and land-law reform in second. In 1903 Davitt described the  founding of the National League as ‘the complete eclipse, by a purely  parliamentary substitute, of what had been a semi-revolutionary organisation … the overthrow of a movement and the enthronement of a man’. He may well have had  that view in 1882 though he did not express it and he became a member of the organising committee of the National League. Davitt had an appreciation of  Parnell’s greatness as a leader though he was critical, at times of Parnell’s  policies and detested the cult of Parnellism. He cooperated with Parnell in the  Liberal alliance and in the struggle for Home Rule.

When Parnell’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party  was under threat in the wake of the O’Shea divorce case (November 1890), Davitt  was one of his strongest critics. He called for Parnell’s temporary retirement in an article in the Labour World on 20 November 1890. He was troubled by the divisions in the party  and he made valuable contributions to the negotiations that reunited the party  in 1900.

Davitt founded a short-lived newspaper in London, the Irish  World (1890). This paper collapsed after his resignation. His attempts to  organise the agricultural workers into the Irish Democratic Trade and Labour  Union met with little success. In 1895 he visited Australia and New Zealand,  delivering 70 public lectures identifying the similarities of the Irish land  question with that of the Aborigines, Maoris, Kanakas, and Chinese.

When William O’Brien established the United Irish Land League  Davitt supported him. He was bitterly critical of the Wyndham Act, 1903. He was  also a supporter of non-denominational education.

Davitt’s final years, following his resignation from  Westminster on 25 October 1899 as a protest against the Boer War, were occupied  with journalism. His books deal with subjects ranging from Anti-Semitism in  Russia (a country he had visited) to convict life in Britain. In 1866 Davitt  married an American, Mary Yore. They were given a house at Roselawn, in  Ballybrack, Co. Dublin, which became known as the ‘Land League Cottage’ as a  mark of appreciation for his life-long work fighting for tenants’ rights. He  commanded great respect and affection among the majority of Irish people as the ‘father of the Land League’. Davitt died in Dublin on 31 May 1906.

Writings, Biography & Studies. Davitt was a prolific writer  and his works are reprinted in Michael Davitt, Collected writings, 1868–1906,  ed. & intro. by Carla King (8 vols, Bristol 2001). Important individual works  are: Leaves from a prison diary (2 vols, London 1884); The Boer fight for  freedom (New York & London 1902); The fall of feudalism in Ireland or the story  of the Land League revolution (London & New York 1904). Francis  Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt: revolutionary, agitator and labour leader  (London 1908; repr., with intro. by F. S. L. Lyons, London 1967). M. M. O’Hara,  Chief and tribune: Parnell and Davitt (Dublin 1919). J. E. Pomfret, The struggle  for land in Ireland, 1880–1923 (Princeton NJ 1930). T. W. Moody, ‘The New  Departure in Irish politics, 1878–9’, in H. A. Cronne, T. W. Moody & D. B. Quinn  (ed), Essays in British and Irish history in honour of James Eadie Todd (London  1949) 303–33. T. W. Moody, Davitt and the Irish revolution, 1846–1882 (Oxford  1981). Philip Bull, Land, politics and nationalism: a study of the Irish land  question (Dublin 1996). Carla King, Michael Davitt (Dundalk 1999).