On this day in 1890, New Tipperary, ‘a living monument to the fight of the townspeople and the tenants against the tyranny of landlordism’ was formally opened at a banquet attended by 600 people.
Local landlord and Tory MP Arthur Smith Barry took a hard line against tenants who were involved in the Plan of Campaign, a Nationalist effort to secure lower rents for impoverished tenants. Tenants in Tipperary Town subsequently refused to pay their rent, culminating in violence and evictions in 1889 and into 1890.
As an act of defiance, it was decided to build New Tipperary adjacent to the existing town. The plan was championed by William O’ Brien, nationalist politician and agrarian agitator. He depicted the new town as a tale of heroic Irish resistance and claimed that ‘the pulse of Irishmen throughout the world beats faster when you mention the name of Tipperary.”
Some £50,0000 was collected to fund the construction, with donations coming from as far as Australia and the United States. Businesses that remained open in the old town were boycotted and some were vandalised. Eventually, the old town was deserted. One visiting journalist noted the sad spectacle of ‘empty houses, gutted shops, a decimated population’.
New Tipperary incorporated two main streets (where Dillon Street and Emmet Street are located today) and the William O’Brien Arcade, which included a butter market and numerous shop stalls. Fifty-seven homes were built in the new town with another 40 nearby and 200 acres were made available for evicted farmers.
The Times of London dismissed the arcade as an absurd structure and the new town itself as a ‘collection of shanties’ and ‘dismal farce’, asserting that tenants had succumbed to terrorism in agreeing to go along with the plan.
Rather quickly, the lack of funding was to prove the downfall of New Tipperary. In December of 1890, Timothy Harrington of the Irish Parliamentary Party wrote that money was urgently needed to sustain the new town. William O’Brien and Nationalist MP John Dillon undertook a fundraising trip to America in November 1890 but the tour proved nowhere near as lucrative as was hoped.
As financial pressure mounted, New Tipperary became an increasingly quiet town. Many of the evicted tenants had reached a settlement with Smith-Barry by 1891, agreeing to pay arrears and return to their properties. It was reported that locals felt ‘the struggle with their landlord has become hopeless, and that instead of ruining him, they were ruining themselves’.
The arcade closed in late 1891, marking the end of the agitation. New Tipperary, once the most promising agrarian campaign in Ireland, was rarely mentioned by Nationalist politicians in the years that followed. Nevertheless, it remained an important symbol of resistance to landlordism and it showed the tenantry’s tenacity at a time when the landowning classes wielded enormous power.
Sources:
‘In protest they built a new town’, The Nationalist, 14 April 1990, p24.
‘New Tipperary: How tenants outsmarted a landlord by building their own town’, Catherine Healy writing in the Irish Independent, 26 February 2022, ‘Review’ section, pp 6-7.
