The decline in population since the Great Famine had been accompanied by the conversion of previously cultivated land into large grazing ranches, so that in many areas most of the local population was still crowded on tiny, uneconomical holdings within sight of open, untilled fields [REF].
The League was equally and explicitly designed to reconcile the various parliamentary fragments by bringing them together in a new grass roots organisation around a programme of agrarian agitation, political reform, settlement of the Irish land question and pursuit of Irish Home Rule.