first organised body to represent agricultural labourers) as well as the Irish Agricultural Labourers' Union (IALU) 1873 also in Kanturk, but these faded by 1875 due to lack of support from the nationalist home rule directory. The most successful organisation was later the Kanturk Trade and Labour Association established in 1889<ref>O'Connor, Emmet: A Labour History of Ireland 1824–1960 p.52, Gill and Macmillan (1992) </ref> with the assistance amongst others, of a young man as its secretary, D. D. Sheehan who had experienced eviction with his family at the height of the Land League's Land War in 1880, when his father followed William O'Brien's "Pay No Rent" manifesto, their farm taken over by a "land-grabber" who paid their rent arrears. The Kanturk Association spread to other districts under a new title, the Duhallow Trade and Labour Association, in which Michael Davitt also became involved, until it broke up under the Irish Party's "Parnell split" in 1891. It was realised on all sides, that the 1884 enfranchisement of the labourers had been insufficient in itself to wrest solutions to grievances from the state and the rural upper- and middle-classes. The control exercised over the implementation of the labourers' acts by conservative elements in rural society had had a ruinous affect. This finally brought the labourers' bodies together to gain political muscle. It became the raison d'être for calling a labour convention at Limerick Junction, County Tipperary on 15 August 1894,Lane, Fintan: pp.189-192 at which the Irish Land and Labour Association was created and officially launched, its founders D. D. Sheehan as chairman together with a young Carrick-on-Suir solicitor J. J. O'Shee as its secretary. It was formed to agitate on behalf of small tenant farmers and agrarian labourers as follower organisation to Michael Davitts' and Michael Austins' 1890 founded Irish Democratic Trade and Labour Federation, setting forth its broad but short-lived achievements. Sheehan founded the Association to pursue tenant-farmer and labourer's grievances as a labour lobby within the nationalist movement, demanding radical changes to the inadequate Irish Land Acts. With labourers "as strangers in a strange land, without influence and without rights" it was to be expected that obstructions placed in the path of the labourers' welfare by landowners and farmers would invite bitter recrimination at the new Associations meetings. The Association would prove itself to be the most enduring of the labour groups. Agrarian agitation was unique in that it was