Irish Land Commission - UK Land Acts

UK Land Acts

With the Ashbourne Act 1885 the commission developed into a tenant-purchasing commission and assisted in the agreed transfer of freehold farmland from landlord to tenant. This was a response to the turbulent Land War that had started in 1879. It was rapidly enacted by the government of Lord Salisbury, was funded initially with £5,000,000, and was designed to avert support for the Irish Parliamentary Party, given the larger number of voters allowed by the Reform Act 1884, before the IPP entered its alliance with William Ewart Gladstone in 1886.

The Commission eventually transferred 13.5 million acres (55,000 km²) by 1920. Following the Land Conference of December 1902 arranged by George Wyndham (a conservative minister and Chief Secretary for Ireland, but also descended from Lord Edward FitzGerald), the revolutionary Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act 1903 was orchestrated through parliament by William O'Brien MP, which provided government finance to buy out freeholds, with the former tenant farmers paying back the capital over 68 years. This was managed by the Land Commission, along with ancillary work such as compiling statistics. Valuations were reckoned on a "years purchase" (Y.P.) basis, the price being a multiple of (perhaps 16 times) the annual rent, instead of the discounted cash flow method used today. The Commission had to supervise the haggling process and find the fairest multiple for every transfer. The loans issued by government were resold in the capital markets as "Land Bonds".

By 1908 the emerging problem was whether the new owners would be economically viable on their small farms. Michael McDonnell commented that - "The breaking up of the grazing lands, which in many instances the landlords are keeping back from the market, has not met with much success under the Act, and it is difficult to see how compulsion is to be avoided if the country is to be saved from the economically disastrous position of having established in it a number of occupying owners on tenancies which are not large enough to secure to them a living wage."

It was realised by now that existing rural poverty arose from small farm sizes, yet the Acts' procedures and limits also tended to keep farm sizes down. The aim had been to create "peasant proprietors" owning what were usually small farms. By definition the activists in the 1880s Land War period had been poorer and more desperate, and few came from larger prosperous farms. This remained a matter of policy debate for the rest of the Commission's existence; generally it continued to create new small units by breaking up larger units that had more commercial potential. Larger commercial farmers were characterised as "landlords" or "grazers" simply because they had more land than the average.

A further Land Act in 1909 fostered by the liberal Chief Secretary for Ireland Augustine Birrell allowed for tenanted land where the owner was unwilling to sell to be bought by the Commission by compulsory purchase. In 1915 Birrell confirmed in parliament that all Irish land transfers from 1885 to the end of 1914 had cost the British government £91,768,450, and the tenants had invested a further £1,584,516.