Davitt would be proud of modern Ireland, says President in UK

President Mary McAleese has paid tribute to the Land League founder Michael Davitt, the centenary of whose death is being celebrated this year.

Mrs McAleese, on a visit yesterday to the Lancashire mill town where Davitt grew up, said the patriot would be proud of the achievements of a modern Ireland in which young people had access to education, opportunity and jobs, and emigration has ceased.

However, he would be the "first to remind us we are still on the road to social inclusion".

The President was speaking after unveiling a plaque to Davitt in Haslingden, northern England, where the Irishman spent 20 years after emigrating from Co Mayo, aged six.

Addressing the local Irish Democratic League club, close to the cotton mill where Davitt lost his right arm while working as an 11-year-old, Mrs McAleese said Davitt would also be reassured by the egalitarian and democratic values underpinning both British and Irish society.

"In every generation those values have needed champions and in some generations the cost of such leadership was savage. We drink from the well he dug. We gather in gratitude for his life and the investment he made so unselfishly in our future."

Davitt had the misfortune to be born right in the middle of the Great Famine, she noted.

"He was part of that horrendous scattering that saw millions of impoverished Irish leave the land of their birth in desperation, not as adventurers or fortune-seekers but food seekers, seekers of shelter and not much more than subsistence."

"The prosperity of today's Ireland, the success around the world of their children's children may to some extent vindicate their sacrifice but in truth many of them went, unremarked, to early graves."

In contrast, she said, Davitt overcame the worst cruelties life could inflict, returned to Ireland and in championing the struggle for land reform changed Irish history.

President McAleese recalled that Davitt left for England after his family was evicted from their Mayo home in 1852. "Just imagine what it must have been like for him - the contrast between the Mayo fields and the mills and chimneys and the dense rows of workers' houses, traces of which are still visible today."

Sheila Davitt and Emer Disley, two granddaughters of the Land League founder, attended yesterday's ceremony in the IDL club, which has received a £60,000 (€87,000) grant for refurbishment from the Government.

Later, the President visited the Haslingden library where, as the plaque outside states, "Michael Davitt first read the history of Ireland".

Mrs McAleese is the first Irish head of state to visit the site of Davitt's upbringing in the Lancashire town.