An 1850 Irish Franchise Act had nearly tripled the electorate of Ireland, primarily in the county constituencies, thereby undoing the disenfranchisement of the 40-shilling freeholders. In these circumstances, Gavan Duffy, a Young Ireland member and editor of the Nation, who had successfully defended himself against prosecution, joined with two other editors, John Grey of the Freeman’s Journal and Frederick Lucas of the Tablet, an English Catholic weekly, to promote an Irish Tenant League. The organization would support candidates who would champion tenant rights, or, what would be called, the three "F's," that is, fixity of tenure, fair rent, and free sale.10 Forty-eight members elected in 1852 committed themselves to these principles and, by joining their votes with the Whigs, Radicals, and former Tories who had remained loyal to Robert Peel, brought down the Conservative government of Lord Derby (the same Edward Stanley who was chief secretary for Ireland in the Whig government of the early 1830s). The Catholic hierarchy and a Catholic Defence Association had supported their election.11 Two of the tenant rights MP's, William Keogh and John Sadleir, took office in the new government headed by Lord Aberdeen against the group policy of remaining independent.
The hierarchy regarded their taking office as an effective means of promoting concessions on education to the likings of the church, but the break in party unity started the demise of the movement, especially as the new government was disinclined to yield on the tenant rights issue. Gavan Duffy withdrew from involvement and moved to Australia, where he achieved considerable political distinction before returning to Ireland in later years. A. M. Sullivan, a young Cork-born journalist, replaced him as editor of the Nation. The number of members of parliament linked to the independent Irish group had shrunk by the end of the decade to 12.
The movement was scarcely encouraged by archbishop Paul Cullen, who was archbishop of Armagh between 1849 and 1852 and of Dublin until 1878. This son of strong farming stock had spent most of his earlier clerical life in Rome and shared papal misapprehension of nationalist revolutionaries. He directed his energies to asserting the rights of the Catholic Church in Ireland, especially in terms of education, and he called for the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. Within the Catholic Church, he completed the bringing to Ireland, three centuries afterward, of the centralizing and standardizing reforms of the 16th-century Council of Trent. He worked hard at gaining the loyalty of most of the rest of the hierarchy in curbing folk religious practices that the church held to be superstitious, irreverent, and sometimes licentious. He encouraged more formal religious devotions such as novenas and missions. His objectives coincided with growing literacy among the masses of the Catholic population together with a certain degree of social and economic improvement.
Free sale meant that a tenant leaving a holding would be entitled to payment from the person who would replace him, implying that the tenant had a proprietary claim to the holding.
1 They were perturbed by the anti-Catholic implications in Lord John Russell’s advancement of a Church Temporalities Act. That measure prohibited a Catholic hierarchy, which the pope hope to reestablish in England, from assuming the same territorial titles as the hierarchy of the established church.
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