tenants and his character. Moore reduced rents: a full remission for any tenant paying £5 per year and 75% remission for those paying under £10 per annum. Together with the Marquess of Sligo and Sir Robert Lynch-Blosse, from the United States he imported 1,000 tonnes of flour for distribution among tenants at half cost. As the famine got worse Moore gave grazing lands to the people and placed others directly under his care on his own estate at Moore Hall. His estate gradually fell into debt, forcing him during 1854 to sell half his property for £5,900. Catholic Defence, and Tenant Right, MP Moore ran successfully in Mayo against Irish Repeal candidates in the 1847 general election. On a narrow property franchise he won his seat in Parliament with 504 votes. He tried, and failed, at a Dublin convention to get his fellow Whigs to oppose their leadership at Westminster, the government of Lord John Russell, and protest the laissez-faire approach to the agrarian crisis maintained by Treasury secretary Charles Trevelyan. In 1851, Moore became chief parliamentary spokesman for the Irish Catholic opposition to the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, an attempt to hamper the restoration in the United Kingdom of the Roman Catholic episcopate. A close friend of Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam, Moore took the leading role in establishing (August 1851) the Catholic Defence Association (CDA). On 28 October 1852, with the support of twenty-six MPs, Moore also established in Dublin the short-lived Friends of Religious Freedom and Equality to call for the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. At the same time, Moore cooperated with the Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of The Nation, in uniting southern, overwhelmingly Catholic, tenant protection societies with northern, largely Presbyterian, tenant-right associations in an all-Ireland Tenant Right League. In the 1852 general election, Moore was one of 48 MPs returned with the League's endorsement. At his insistence, and by prior agreement, they sat as the Independent Irish Party, pledged to support no government that did not both advance tenant rights and revoke the Ecclesiastical Titles Act. Combined with the presence among of many sitting Repeal MPs, the joining of the two platforms assisted the Irish Conservatives and their Orange Order auxiliaries in painting disloyalty to landlords as disloyalty to the Protestant Crown and to the Union. Only one tenant-right MP was returned from Ulster: William Kirk in Newry. Within six months two