Land Proprietors
By the turn of the century the working class segment of the electorate were a new power, a very worthy class to be courted and flattered with at election time. They displayed this at the selection convention for the Mid-Cork by-election in May 1901, returning their President D. D. Sheehan, who stood on a labour platform, defeating the UIL candidate of the Irish Party, as Member of Parliament (1901–1918) in the House of Commons. Rural workers were quick to grasp the potential of local democracy for plots, cottages and direct labour on council roadworks. Their ILLA organisation had grown to 98 branches by 1899, expanding to 144 branches in 1904 mainly in counties Cork, Limerick and Tipperary.
UIL agitation by tenant farmers continued to press for compulsory land purchase and resulted in the calling of the December 1902 Land Conference, an initiative by moderate landlords led by Lord Dunraven on the one hand and William O'Brien, John Redmond MP, Timothy Harrington MP and Ulster's T. W. Russell MP representing tenant farmers on the other hand. It strove for a settlement by conciliatory agreement between landlord and tenant. After six sittings all eight tenant’s demands were conceded, O’Brien having guided the official nationalist movement into endorsement of a new policy of conciliation. He followed this by campaigning vigorously for the greatest piece of social legislation Ireland had yet seen, orchestrating the Wyndham Land Purchase Act (1903) through Parliament. The Act provided very generous bonus subsidy terms to landowners on sale.
Purchases between tenants and landlords were negotiated by Sheehan and the ILLA branches after O'Brien and Sheehan formed a Cork Advisory Committee in September 1904, to mediate between landlords and tenants in their negotiations. They thereby achieved purchase terms with low interest annuities which produced an exceptionally high take-up of land purchase. Munster tenants availed of land purchase in higher numbers than in any other province.
The Act effectively fulfilled the first important demand of the ILLA, the abolition of "landlordism", replaced by land purchase, to finally resolve the Land Question. The result was the formation of a new proud farming proprietorship, and the steady extinction of the dominant Anglo-Irish landed gentry. Whereas in 1870 only 3% of Irish farmers owned their land, by 1908, this jumped to nearly 50%. By the early 1920s, the figure was at 70%, the process being later completed.
Despite some deficiencies of the Land Act, O'Brien could take some pride in its working since its passage. The social effects of the Act were immediate The year 1903 alone saw a 33% drop in reports of intimidation, a 70% decline in boycotting cases, 60% fewer people needing police protection, and a 50% decrease in the number and acreage of grazing farms unlet or unstocked because of agitation. In the period 1903 to1909 over 200,000 small peasant tenant-farmers became owners of their holdings under the Act. By 1914 75% of occupiers were buying out their landlords under the 1903 Act and the later Birrell Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1909 which extended the 1903 Act by allowing for the compulsory purchase of tenanted farmland by the Land Commission. In all, under these pre-1921 Land Acts over 316,000 tenants purchased their holdings amounting to 115 million acres (470,000 km2) out of a total of 20 million in the country.
Read more about this topic: Irish Land And Labour Association
Famous quotes containing the words land and/or proprietors:
“We were uncertain whether the water floated the land, or the land held the water in its bosom. It was such a season, in short, as that in which one of our Concord poets sailed on its stream, and sung its quiet glories.”
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“They know, and will therefore say, that kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.”
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