Andrew Kettle

Who was Andrew Kettle?

Andrew J. Kettle: was an Irish nationalist politician, progressive farmer, agrarian agitator and founder member of the Irish Land League.

Born in Dublin, was a tenant farmer with properties in County Dublin. He married Margaret, daughter of Laurence McCourt of St. Margaret’s Finglas, north co. Dublin. They had twelve children, one of whom was Thomas Kettle, an Irish Volunteer who died in World War I. He and his father were members of Repeal Union. As a member of the Tenant Right League in the 1850s, he was influenced by the policies of Isaac Butt following the publication of Butt’s Plea for the Celtic Race, so was from an early age in the constitutional movement to achieve Irish home rule. Kettle later became a close supporter of Michael Davitt and was instrumental in persuading Charles Stewart Parnell to support the land agitations of the late 1870s. He presided at the first meeting of the Land League in October 1879, at which Parnell became president and Kettle its honorary secretary.

In 1881 Kettle proposed that the answer to the British government’s Coercion policy was that ‘’the whole Irish Party should rise and leave the House of Commons, cross over to Ireland and carry our a ‘no rent campaign’.’’ This policy of confrontation though opposed by Parnell, was adopted in modified form. Kettle was imprisoned for organising resistance to coercion. He was a signatory of the No Rent Manifesto.