Irish Land Commission - Policy Debates and Changes

Policy Debates and Changes

From 1940 a minority in Fianna Fáil and Coalition cabinets consistently argued for larger farms to be encouraged, instead of sponsoring new small farmers that often had too little capital, skills or enthusiasm. This was successfully opposed for social and political reasons by Éamon de Valera, and in Coalition governments by Joseph Blowick, the leader of Clann na Talmhan.

Under the 1923 Act busier farmers had to rent extra land under an 11-month or seasonal "conacre" system, as longer arrangements could cause an owner to lose his farm by compulsory purchase by the Land Commission. While there were now some 300,000 Irish landowners compared to several thousand in the 1800s, the basic term for the use of land had reverted back to the norm of the 1860s, with no rights to renew a lease and no incentive to improve rented land. By 1980 some 860,000 acres (3,500 km2) were rented annually under conacre, suggesting a new imbalance between mere ownership and the more active farmers. The cost of agricultural machinery requires larger farm sizes to generate economies of scale.

The Lands Act 1965 was passed to restrict new foreign investment in agriculture, some of which was speculatively based upon Ireland's imminent entry to the European Economic Community that eventually occurred in 1973. The EEC's "Four Freedoms" allowed for unlimited investment anywhere in the EEC by any citizen of an EEC member state. This naturally undermined the ethos of the Land Commission, which had processed a further 807,000 acres (3,270 km2) since 1923. By the early 1970s half of open market land purchases were by non-farmers, and half of those were to buy small sites, typically for building bungalows.

By the 1980s, just before its reform, the Land Commission came under the Department of Lands, which was in turn a part of the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Lands was seen as an overgrown entity, employing 750 people in 1983; its budget of IR£15m included IR£8m for administration costs and only IR£7m for actual land purchase or division. Further purchases were suspended that year by Paul Connaughton.