THE ULSTER CONFUCT in Britain and America. Ironically the priests' attempt to improve living standards coupled with the failure of governmentsponsored schemes once subsidies were withdrawn, probably encouraged the emigration they were designed to reduce. The tenant farmers, however, were determined to stay put, and to increase the viability of their farms. In 1896 rent reductions became possible under the provision of Gladstone's 1881 Land Act, and they were usually of the order of 20% when cases went to arbitration. This was a further incentive to absentee landlors to agree to the sale of increasingly less profitable lands where interested tenants could be found (very few of them were so mesmerised by the prospect of ownership that they were willing to pay a yearly instalment on the purchase price for the foreseeable future which was more than they were already paying in rent). The British conservative administration were encouraging land purchase in the mral areas by a variety of schemes, but none of them were generous enough to encourage the transfer of ownership on a large scale. They did, however, effect a large transfer of political power by the reform of local government in 1898. Previously the rural areas had been under the control of "grand juries" composed of the local Protestant Ascendancy landlords or their representatives. Now these juries were replaced by elected county councils which, outside East Ulster, fell almost exclusively into the hands of the Nationalists. Various extensions of the franchise in Britain had meant that political power was increansigly being transferred to the petty bourgeoisie, in electoral terms at least, who were represented massively in Ireland by the farming constituency. After Parnell's death the Irish parliamentary had splintered into warring factions. One of the contenders for leadership was William O'Brien, the author of the "plan of campaign", but he had "retired" from politics in 1895 apparently out of disgust at the struggle for power going on in the party (more likely, because of his own lack of success at it). O'Brien's power-base was in the rural West and in 1897 he climbed on the back of a campaign being waged by local small farmers to break up large grazing farros and have them compulsorily divided up and sold so that they could make their own operations more viable. In January 1898 O'Brien launched the United Irish League as an organization dedicated to the issue of the grazing farros which he saw as a means of harnessing the power of the "land-hunger" being experienced by the farm39
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