Irish Land Acts - Free State Land Acts

Free State Land Acts

On the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, the Commission was reconstituted by the Land Law (Commission) Act, 1923, which also dissolved the Congested Districts Board. The 1923 Free State Land Act adopted many proposals for a final land settlement from decisions reached during the Irish Convention in 1918 under the chairmanship of Horace Plunkett. The Convention's proposals formed the basis of the Act.

The Land Commission had bought up 13 million acres (53,000 km2) of farmland between 1885 and 1920 where the freehold was assigned under mortgage to tenant farmers and farm workers. The focus had been on the compulsory purchase of untenanted estates so that they could be divided into smaller units for local families, some of which proved to be "uneconomic"; this policy was applied unevenly across the country, with some large estates surviving if the owners could show that their land was being actively farmed. Provision was made for compulsory purchase of land owned by a non-Irish person until repealed in 1966.

From 1923 the amounts outstanding under earlier acts were paid to the British government as "land annuities", accruing in a Land Purchase Fund. This was fixed at £250,000 annually in 1925. In December 1925 William Cosgrave lamented that there were already: "250,000 occupiers of uneconomic holdings, the holdings of such a valuation as did not permit of a decent livelihood for the owners". Despite this, his government continued to subdivide larger landholdings, primarily to gain electoral support.

The Land Act 1933, passed on a vote of 70-39, allowed the Minister for Finance to divert the annuities for local government projects. This was a factor that caused the "Economic war" in 1933-38, and was mutually resolved by a one-off payment of £10m. to Britain in 1938. From 1932 the government argued strongly that Irish farmers should no longer be obliged for historic reasons to pay Britain for Irish land, but when Britain had passed out of the payment system it illogically still required farmers to continue to pay their annuities to the Irish government as before.

The Land Act of 1965 was designed to stop speculative purchases of land by non-Irish persons. The Succession Act of 1965 treated real estate owned by a deceased person as personalty for the first time.

In 1983 the Commission ceased acquiring land; this signified the start of the end of the commission's reform of Irish land ownership, though freehold transfers of farmland still had to be signed off by the Commission into the 1990s. The commission was dissolved on March 31, 1999 by the Irish Land Commission (Dissolution) Act, 1992 and most of the remaining liabilities and assets were transferred to the Minister for Agriculture and Food. Many relevant historical records are held by the National Archives of Ireland.