Michael Davitt

Michael Davitt was born in Straide, County Mayo, on 25 March 1846 during the Great Famine, the third child of tenant farmers who spoke Irish and struggled to keep their land. At four years old he witnessed the family eviction that drove them across the sea to England, a wound he later described as the root of every ill they suffered. That childhood displacement forged the activist who would return to Ireland, break prison walls twice, and help build the Land League to protect the vulnerable from being cast out again.