User:GiacomoReturned/John Mandeville (Irish patriot)

John Mandeville, born at Carrick-on-Suir on 24 June 1849, died 8 July 1888.

Mandeville, a prosperous tenant farmer and director of a local railway was was the leader of the protesting tenants of the Dowager Countess of Kingston, of Mitchelstown Castle,County Cork, Ireland. The tenants, threatened with eviction, believed they were paying unsustainably high rents, their landlady, the Countess, was already in severe debt. The two sides could find no compromise, as result the clash between the two sides led to the "Mitchelstown Massacre", a defining moment not only in the Irish land war, but also in British politics when seized upon by Liberal politician and former Prime Minister, William Gladstone, who coined the slogan "Remember Mitchelstown" it lost the British Conservative government five successive bye-elections and in 189? saw Irish Nationalist MPs join forces with Liberal MPs to defeat the British Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, in a vote of no confidence. Today, Mandeville is little remembered outside of Ireland; he died following a brief, but severe period of imprisonment for sedition, aged 39. He is commemorated by a statue in Mitchelstown.