Keller, Daniel (1839–1922), priest and agrarian radical, was born in March 1839 at Inniscarra, near Cork city, where his father Timothy was a substantial tenant farmer; his mother was Mary (née McAuliffe). His surname is a variant of 'Kelleher'; it was rendered as 'Kealeher' in his baptismal record, and his father was listed as 'Keleher' in Griffith's valuation in the 1850s. The change in the form of the name bespeaks a subtle gentrification, the family being part of the upwardly mobile tenantry of the period from c.1850 to 1878.
Educated at the Vincentian college in Cork and at the Irish College in Paris, Keller was ordained in 1862 for the diocese of Cloyne and taught in St Colman's College, Fermoy, before returning to Paris where he was professor of philosophy at the Irish College until it shut down at the outbreak of the Franco–Prussian war in 1870. He was then curate and later administrator in St Colman's cathedral in Cobh until 1885, when he was appointed parish priest of Youghal.
In Youghal, Keller soon found himself at the centre of one of the most dramatic episodes in the second phase of the land war in late nineteenth-century Ireland. The tenants on the nearby Ponsonby estate were the first in the country to adopt the so-called 'Plan of Campaign' in November 1886. They sought a rent reduction of 35 per cent from their landlord, Charles Talbot-Ponsonby (qv). When that was refused, those tenants able to pay – and scores could not – placed the amount of the reduced rent in the hands of a trustee in accordance with the modus operandi of the Plan. The identity of the trustee was not revealed, so as to frustrate any legal action to sequestrate the funds – but it was widely believed, though never proven, that the trustee was the local parish priest, Fr Keller.
In March 1887, Keller was summoned to appear as a witness in a Dublin court seeking to identify the whereabouts of the funds. When he failed to appear, a warrant was issued for his arrest. This prompted a demonstration in Youghal which had fatal consequences: the police charged the crowd with fixed bayonets, and in the fight that ensued a young fisherman named Patrick Hanlon was stabbed to death. Keller was nevertheless arrested on 18 March 1887, and brought to Dublin. He appeared in court on the following day. Predictably, he declined to answer any questions and was jailed for 'contempt of court', his imprisonment to last until he purged his contempt by answering the questions. In declining to assist the court, Keller had the full backing of his own bishop, Dr John McCarthy of Cloyne. Moreover, he was greeted en route to Dublin by the archbishop of Cashel, Dr T. W. Croke (qv), and was escorted all the way from the court to Kilmainham Jail by William Walsh (qv), archbishop of Dublin. A further mark of approval was forthcoming from ecclesiastical quarters in Ireland at Easter 1887 when Keller, still languishing in jail, was appointed a canon of St Colman's cathedral in protest against his imprisonment. He remained a prisoner in Kilmainham for over two months, until the court of appeal found at the end of May 1887 that there were, after all, no legal grounds for his detention.
As a result of the authorities' failure to break Keller, the struggle on the Ponsonby estate was now deadlocked. Some of the larger tenants were evicted in May 1887, but Talbot-Ponsonby took no further action – presumably so as not to jeopardise the chances of a settlement. His agent eventually made overtures for a settlement, and negotiations – to which Canon Keller was party – got under way at the end of 1888. The government and Talbot-Ponsonby's fellow Cork landlords viewed this development with alarm, and they conspired to throw the beleaguered landlord a lifeline. In early 1889 a London-based syndicate headed by Arthur Hugh Smith Barry (qv), MP and leader of a particularly aggressive landlord faction, stepped in and bought the estate from Talbot-Ponsonby. The sale was merely a temporary expedient in order to frustrate the proposed settlement and deny the Plan of Campaign a victory. It succeeded in this, and the syndicate proceeded to evict the remaining Ponsonby tenants in four stages: in June 1889 and April, September and October 1890.
The Plan of Campaign did not finally collapse on the Ponsonby estate until February 1892, when over 100 tenants – about half the total number – accepted the syndicate's terms for settlement and returned to their holdings. The terms were, in Keller's view, exorbitant. He opposed their acceptance, but to no avail. In a letter dated 20 January 1892 to a meeting of evicted tenants in Cork, he deprecated the landlord's impending victory and stated that 'the cause of the present attitude of many landlords can only be attributed to the weakness of the tenants arising from division in the national ranks' (Freeman's Journal, 22 January 1892). He was referring to the Parnell split precipitated by the O'Shea divorce case in November 1890. That effectively derailed the Plan and left participating tenants throughout the country high and dry.
Keller remained parish priest of Youghal until his death in the town on 8 November 1922, serving in that capacity for thirty-seven years. He was also dean of Cloyne from 1894 until his death, and in 1900 he was given the title of monsignor. When Bishop McCarthy of Cloyne died in 1893, Keller was the first choice of the priests of the diocese to succeed him, but the president of Maynooth college, Robert Browne (qv), was appointed instead, a mark of Rome's disapproval of Keller's behaviour during the Plan of Campaign. He was, however, no 'turbulent priest', but simply a churchman of strong political principles in the mould of Archbishops Croke and Walsh. His motivation in supporting the Plan had been sympathy for the Ponsonby tenants, and he genuinely believed that they would have triumphed if only they had held out for longer – at least until the return to power of the Liberals under Gladstone.