In the grounds of St Mary’s Catholic Church in Youghal, Co Cork, there is an intriguing inscription on the monument over the grave of a former parish priest, Daniel Keller.
It reads: “A priest who shed lustre on the priesthood /A pastor who went to prison for his people”.
Born in March 1839 at Inniscarra, near Cork city, Keller was appointed parish priest of Youghal in 1885. After ordination, he had taught philosophy at the Irish College in Paris until it closed at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870.
He later served as curate and administrator in St Colman’s Cathedral in Cobh before going to Youghal. In Youghal, Keller found himself at the centre of a dramatic episode in the so-called “Plan of Campaign” – the second phase of the Land War, beginning in November 1886.
Simply stated, the Plan prescribed that landlords should be asked to reduce rents voluntarily to a level that reflected the fall in agricultural incomes in Ireland at that time. Where the landlord refused to do so, the tenants were to offer rents which they considered fair.
The police charged the crowd with fixed bayonets, and in the fight that ensued a young fisherman named Patrick Hanlon was stabbed to death
If these were not accepted, the rents would be withheld and the amount of the “fair” rents paid into an estate fund – under the control of a trustee – and the money used to assist tenants who might be evicted.
The tenants on the Ponsonby estate near Youghal were the first in the country to adopt the Plan of Campaign. They sought a rent reduction of 35 per cent. When that was refused, those tenants able to pay – and scores could not – placed the amount of the reduced rent in the hands of the trustee in accordance with the modus operandi of the Plan. The identity of the trustee was not revealed, so as to frustrate any legal action to sequestrate the funds. It was widely believed, though never proven, that the trustee was Fr Keller.
In March 1887, Keller was summoned to appear as a witness in a Dublin court seeking to identify the whereabouts of the funds.
When he failed to appear, a warrant was issued for his arrest.
This prompted a demonstration in Youghal which had fatal consequences. The police charged the crowd with fixed bayonets, and in the fight that ensued a young fisherman named Patrick Hanlon was stabbed to death.
Keller was arrested on March 18th, 1887, and brought to Dublin. He appeared in court on the following day. Predictably, he declined to answer any questions and was jailed for “contempt of court” – his imprisonment to last until he purged his contempt by answering the questions. He remained a prisoner in Kilmainham jail for over two months, until the Court of Appeal found at the end of May 1887 that there were, after all, no legal grounds for his detention. In declining to assist the court, Keller had the full backing of his bishop, Dr John McCarthy of Cloyne.
Following the authorities’ failure to break Keller, the struggle on the Ponsonby estate entered a new, and nastier, phase.
Some of the larger tenants were evicted in May 1887, and following the sale of the estate in early 1889 to a London-based syndicate headed by Arthur Smith Barry, the neighbouring landlord at Fota House, the remaining Ponsonby tenants were evicted in four stages between June 1889 and October 1890.
The struggle dragged on inconclusively until it was overtaken by the Parnell spilt in the 1890s. The Ponsonby tenants – like so many others in the country – were then left high and dry, with no alternative but to settle on terms that fell far short of what they had sought.
In February 1892, over 100 of them – about half the total number – capitulated and returned to their holdings. The settlement terms were, in Keller’s view, exorbitant. He opposed their acceptance, but to no avail.
Keller remained parish priest of Youghal until his death on November 8th, 1922. When Bishop McCarthy died in 1893, Keller was the first choice of the priests of Cloyne to succeed him – but the president of Maynooth College, Robert Browne, was appointed instead, a mark of Rome’s disapproval of Keller’s behaviour during the Plan of Campaign.
His parishioners did not share that disapproval, as evidenced by the inscription on the monument over his grave.