LAVELLE, Rev. Patrick. P.P., Cong. The Irish Landlord Since The Revolution. With notices of Ancient and Modern Land Tenures in various countries

THE PATRIOT PRIEST OF PARTRY

Dublin: W.B. Kelly, 1870. pp. 541, + erratum and advertisements. Green faded cloth, title in gilt on spine. Previous owner's signature on titlepage. Occasional light foxing and browning. A very good copy.

Fr. Pat Lavelle was perhaps the best-known individual Irish priest in the mid-nineteenth century. At that period everybody in the British Isles, because of him, knew where Partry was. This was due to the fact that he had made a name for himself in his relentless struggle to protect his parishioners from eviction at the hands of the local landlord, Thomas Plunket, Church of Ireland Bishop of Tuam, Killala and Achonry since 1839.

The bishop at that time lived in Tourmakeady on the estate which he bought from George Henry Moore after the Famine (see Gerry Moran's The Mayo Evictions). Fr. Lavelle was born in Mullagh, Murrisk, County Mayo, in the year 1825, the son of a prosperous farmer. He entered St Jarlath’s, Tuam, when he was aged fifteen and Maynooth in 1844, just before the Famine, in that same year Fr. Peter Conway began the construction of Partry Church. After his ordination in 1854 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the Irish College, Paris. In addition to his philosophy lectures, he taught the students who would need it, as priests, the Irish language, at which he was equally as proficient as he was in English. To these he was shortly to add a third language - French. Even in Paris his abrasive temperament was evident and his prolonged squabble with the Rector of the Irish College, Dr. Miley of Dublin, ultimately brought about his removal from that college in 1858. Back home in his diocese, Fr. Lavelle was sent to work as a curate in Mayo Abbey, but his stay there was very short. Dr. John MacHale badly needed a man of his mettle elsewhere. In that same year he was appointed Parish Priest of Ballyovey. He resided in Tourmakeady, which he always referred to as Mount Partry, later he became known as the Patriot Priest of Partry.

This work contains chapters on: General Retrospect; Tenure of Land; Land Tenure throughout Europe - Prussia; Belgium and the Netherlands; France and Switzerland; Austria, Italy, Russia; The Channel Islands - Norway; Spain; India; America, Canada, The Cape; England in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; Ancient Italy; Irish Clearances; Agrarian Outrages; Absenteeism; Waste Lands; The Remedy, etc.

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