George Henry Moore (1 March 1810 – 19 April 1870) was an Irish politician, co-founder in the 1850s of the Tenant Right League, of the Catholic Defence Association and, as the Member for Mayo in the United Kingdom Parliament, of the Independent Irish Party. Although an advocate of tenant rights, and renowned for his relief efforts during the Great Famine, at the time of his death in 1870 Moore was defending his rights as a landowner against an oath-bound tenant society, the Ribbonmen.
Family
George Henry Moore was born 1 March 1810 in Moore Hall, Ballyglass, County Mayo, the eldest of three sons born to Louisa Moore (née Browne), granddaughter of John Browne, 1st Earl of Altamont and George Moore (1770–1840), landowner and historian, the son of a wealthy merchant. In the rebellion year of 1798, an uncle, John Moore, was named President of the Government of the Province of Connaught in Castlebar by General Humbert during its brief occupation by the French.
The Moores were originally English Protestant gentry but became Catholic when John Moore married a Roman Catholic, Jane Lynch Athy of Galway, and when their son, George, married Katherine de Kilikelly (a.k.a. Kelly), an Irish-Spanish Catholic, in 1765.
Horse racing gentry
Moore was educated in England at St Mary's Catholic preparatory school in Oscott, near Birmingham, before entering Christ's College, Cambridge in 1827. Unable as a Catholic to take a degree, he spent most of his time gambling and playing billiards. Sent to London in 1830 to study law, he soon fell heavily into debt from gambling and so was recalled again to attend to the family estate of 12,000 acres.
From 1834 he traveled abroad, visiting Russia, Syria, and Palestine. On his father's death in 1840 he was recalled again to Mayo where he established a successful racing stable. After his brother Augustus was killed riding at Aintree in the 1845 English Grand National, and before selling his horses, Moore made one last grand wager. He won £10,000 on his own horse in the 1846 Chester Cup. The winnings he was to deploy, in part, for Irish famine relief.
Organiser of Famine relief
During the Great Famine (1845-1852) Mayo was one of the counties worst ravaged by starvation and illness, but none of Moore's tenants starved, nor were any evicted—a fact he was to uphold twice in libel cases against The Times regarding the treatment of 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.