A bit more to ignore
"From 1918 to 1920 a major part of the unrest in rural Ireland, as so often in the past, related to land. The purchase and division of estates under the Land Acts had largely ceased during the Great War and emigration was curtailed. Sinn Féin's victory in the 1918 election is likely to have raised expectations; the party agitated on the land question during the 1918 election, with de Valera and Cosgrave in particular campaigning against landlords and large graziers.11 Thousands of farm labourers joined the ITGWU, which launched a land campaign in 1919 aimed at securing better wages and conditions. Strikes were accompanied by cattle running, arson and land occupations. Smallholders, labourers and eleven-month conacre tenants began forcibly to lay claim to land. As Frank Gallagher, at the time publicity officer for the first Dáil, described the situation in his Four Glorious Years (1957):
Farm hungry men do not believe in gentle methods ... When the farmer objected his crops were sometimes burned, his family set upon ... Those who led the taking over of estates did not hesitate to shoot owners who stood in their way.
More often than not, as Gallagher admitted, Protestant-owned land was the target, with ancestral grievances justifying occupations. A Land Settlement Commission established by the Dáil reported that "claims are being based on the assertion that the claimants or their ancestors were formerly in occupation of the property" and that some claims were being "put forward in the hope of intimidating the present occupiers". As one person sent by the Dáil to investigate the situation described it: "…the fever [of agrarian agitation] swept with the fury of a prairie fire over Connacht and portions of the other provinces, sparing neither great ranch nor medium farm and inflicting in its headlong course, sad havoc on man, beast, and property".12
Based on his reading of the Dáil Commission's reports, Diarmaid Ferriter describes many rural areas as on the verge of social anarchy:
Obduracy could be fuelled by long-term sectarian hatred or in many cases abject poverty, while those seeking land frequently organised themselves into ad-hoc committees to orchestrate agitation, or simply to plead for a fair hearing. Many locals deprived of land took it upon themselves to evict Protestant neighbours without recourse to arbitration.13
- See more at: http://www.drb.ie/essays/getting-them-out#sthash.I0YrcOh4.dpuf"
Jim Carroll