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The policy of confiscation and plantation culminating in the years following the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, had largely succeeded in its objective of cementing English rule in Ireland.
The new system based on large, landed estates, controlled in many instances by former soldiers, ensured that there was an ‘English garrison’ in every locality.
It has to be accepted that many of the Gaelic and Anglo Norman ruling classes retained estates by converting from Catholicism to the Protestant religion.
The rapid growth in population from an estimated 2.9 million in 1700 to over five million in 1800, gave rise to an ever-increasing demand for land with the effect of transferring the balance of power from tenants to the 10,000 Irish landlords who owned the majority of Irish land.
In such an environment the first semblance of land agitation could be observed with the emergence of the ‘Whiteboys’ movement in the 1760’s and later ‘Ribbonism’ in the 1820s and 30s.
Such organisations while not political in terms of structure or purpose sought to intimidate through violence and disruption what they saw as alien landlords who controlled that most sought after of commodities, land.
Emigration
Despite the emigration of an estimated 1.5 million people in the years following the ending of the Napoleonic wars (1815-1845), Ireland’s population reached it’s zenith, 8.5 million, on the eve of An Gorta Mór (the Great Famine). This growth created enormous pressures on the demand for land with subdivision of holdings reaching ridiculous levels. Overuse, overcrowding, underinvestment and economic depression meant that agriculture in Ireland could hardly be called an industry and instead had become purely subsistence based. Unfortunately, the Famine that started in 1845 was to expose these fragilities in such a dramatic and tragic fashion and with such long lasting consequences for our country and our people.
The Famine exposed the weakness of many landlords. Faced with burgeoning debts and falling rents many were forced to seek protection in the Encumbered Estates Court in order to sell their estates. For many tenants the Famine meant death, ruin and for many more emigration. For many landlords it spelt financial ruin and the eventual sale of their estates. It also meant that the mystique of landlordism had unalterably been damaged.
Despite the horrors of the Famine years, demand for land reform remained muted. The years from 1852 to the mid-1870s were years of prosperity. The Fenian uprising of 1867, like the earlier Young Ireland revolt of 1848, laid little emphasis on land or the ownership thereof. In fact, one of the reasons the Fenian movement found little favour with tenant farmers was a fear that were it to be successful, that it could see a return of many of the movement’s supporters from the USA with demands to be reinstated to their former holdings.
Restlessness
The Fenian rebellion and the subsequent fallout acted as a spur to William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister to seek to pacify a growing restlessness in the Irish populace. His means of doing this was to disestablish the Irish Church (CoI) in 1869 and to follow that up with the introduction of his Irish Land Act 1870. The 1870 Act achieved little, but its importance lay in the fact that it represented for the first-time, an abandonment of the laissez faire doctrine of non-interference by government in landlord-tenant relationships. Of far more significance was the 1881 Land Act. Again, introduced by Gladstone in response to the Michael Davitt initiated Land War (1879-1882), the act has been described as ‘the Magna Carta of peasant rights’. This act fundamentally undermined the position of landlords in their dealings with their tenants. It granted the much sought ‘Three Fs’ of right of free sale, fair rent, and fixity of tenure. It effectively introduced the concept of ‘dual ownership’ and the process of ‘judicial rent reviews’ which meant that if a tenant could not agree a rent with his landlord, he (and it was almost always a he) could apply to the Courts to have one set, or an existing one reviewed. The balance of power had shifted yet again and thereafter landlord tenant relations would never be the same.
The 1881 Act was important for another reason. Hidden deep in its bowels, Sections 41 to 56 to be exact, was the creation of perhaps the most important organ of State control particularly with regard to rural Ireland, namely, The Land Commission.
This institution, which operated until 1992, was central to rural life for over one-hundred years. It adjudicated on over 600,000 judicial rent reviews, arranged 400,000 land sales and handled countless land disputes. Unfortunately, its vast archives remain closed to historians thus depriving them of an unequalled insight into Irish society from the late nineteenth century to the final years of the twentieth.
Despite the legislative progress made, the ‘land question’ continued to play a major part in Irish and indeed British politics. Politicians such as Charles Stewart Parnell, a landlord himself, were quick to appreciate its emotive value and to weaponize it as part of the wider struggle for Home Rule. Militant agitation such as ‘The Plan of Campaign’ (1886-1891) ensured that ‘land’ was to the forefront of Irish politics both domestically and in Britain. As a result, it would, for the next thirty years, become the key bargaining chip in the yin and yang policies of successive Conservative led governments of ‘Coercion’ and ‘Killing Home Rule by Kindness’ or ‘kicks and hapence’ as it was denigratory termed.
Land purchase acts
With landlords well and truly softened up, the emphasis in land reform focused on the creation of a ‘peasant proprietorship class’ brought about by a series of land purchase acts rather than the more technical acts of 1870 and 1881. The Ashbourne Acts of 1885 and 1888, and the Balfour Acts of 1891 and 1896 were designed to encourage landlords to sell their lands to their tenants through the provision of relatively low-cost loans funded by the issuance of Land Bonds. Despite sales of over £23m involving some 72,000 individual sales, the land purchase acts of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, for a multiplicity of reasons, failed to make any significant inroads into addressing the ‘Irish land question’. That would require a more ambitious and determined approach and one that would await a new century and new Chief Secretary.
Tony Mc Carthy After a career spanning over 40 years initially as an accountant but later stockbroking, consulting and for the past twenty years running his own business, Tony Mc Carthy received his PhD from Maynooth University in 2017. He is a former writer in residence in the Princess Grace Library Monaco, and is currently a visiting fellow at the School of History in Newcastle University. His most recent publication, Land Reform in the British and Irish Isles since 1800, which he co-edited with Prof. Annie Tindley and Dr Shaun Evans, was published by Edinburgh University Press in February 2022. He is also co-editor along with Prof. Terence Dooley and Prof. Annie Tindley of a book dealing with Irish Land Legislation which will be published by Mc Gill University Press later this year.
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