Irish Land and Labour Association - Cottage Ownership

Cottage Ownership

In November 1903 O’Brien left the Irish Party when his policy of "conciliation" with landowners was rejected by the party leaders John Redmond and John Dillon, who feared O’Brien’s course and popularity would drive a wedge between the farming and labouring community allegiance to the Irish party.

O'Brien then joined forces a year later with Sheehan’s ILLA organisation, identifying himself with Sheehan's demand for agricultural labourers' housing, who up to then were dependent on limited provision of cottages by local County Councils or landowners at unfavourable terms. A breakthrough occurred when a scheme was made public at "the largest labour demonstation ever held in Ireland" (Cork Examiner), a memorable rally in Macroom on 10 December 1904 addressed by William O'Brien. His concepts became known as the `Macroom Programme´, its principles and measures subsequently carried into law in 1906.

The Second Phase of the Labourers Acts (1906–1914) began after the unprecedented Labourers (Ireland) Act, long demanded by the ILLA was won in 1906, for which both the Redmondite and O'Brienite factions were zealous in claiming credit. The so called 'Labourers Act' provided large scale state funding for extensive agricultural labourer-owned cottages, the accommodations to be erected by the local County Councils. A major socio-economic transformation in rural state housing erasing the previous inhuman habitations, O'Brien saying that the Labourers Act -- "were scarcely less wonderworking than the abolition of landlordism itself", in 1904 Davitt going so far as to declare that the Labourers Acts constituted -- "a rational principle of state Socialism" .

In the next five years the programme produced a complete 'municipalisation' of over 40,000 additional commodious working-class dwellings dotting the rural Irish countryside, the proportionally larger number of 7,560 cottages erected in County Cork in coordination with Sheehan and the ILLA branches, became known locally as "Sheehans' cottages". At first the compulsory surrender of an acre of choice land to each labourer who claimed it was resisted by the new land owning farmers. In due course they too reaped the benefits, gone the days when a farmer never knew when or where to find labour to work his fields. Either they were migrant or drink ridden. Now occupying their own proud family home and vegetable patch at the corner of his farm, they worked cooperatively for him all year round. This had enormous long-term consequences for rural Irish society.

Only 17 per cent of labourers had lived in houses with five or more rooms in 1841; in 1861 one rural family in ten still lived in what were classed by the census as fourth class accommodation, essentially meaning one room per family. By 1911 only one per cent of families did. The bulk of the labourers' cottages were erected by 1916, resulting in a widespread decline of rampant tuberculosis, typhoid and scarlet fever. Up to a quarter of a million were housed under the Labourers Acts by 1921. It is not an exaggeration to term it a social revolution, in a sense it was the first large-scale public-housing schemes in the country, a development neglected by historians, because the houses, rural based and more scattered, were not as evident as the urban tenements, that officialdom would not even look into.