Whose Land Was It

Every account of the Irish bachelor farmer runs into the same objection, usually from someone who knows a little history.

The Irish did not own their land. Landlords did. So how can inheritance explain anything at all.

It is a fair question and it has a clean answer. What passed from a father to a son was never a deed. It was a place, and a place could be handed on just as tightly.

1870. Three farmers in a hundred

In 1870, three per cent of Irish farmers owned the ground they worked. The other ninety seven per cent paid rent for it.

And the ownership was gathered into very few hands. Around 750 families held roughly half of Ireland. At the top, some 302 proprietors, one and a half per cent of all owners, held a third of the country between them. At the other end, more than fifteen thousand small proprietors shared under a fifth of it. [1]

So the picture the objection paints is correct. Now look at what it leaves out.

What a tenancy at will actually was

Most western farmers did not hold a lease. They held at will, which meant no fixed term, no written agreement, and no legal claim beyond the landlord's continuing consent.

Among holdings valued at under fifteen pounds, 83.8 per cent across Ireland were held at will. In Connacht the figure was 90.1 per cent.

And nearly every Connacht holding was in that class. Holdings under fifteen pounds were 75.1 per cent of all holdings in Ireland, and 89.5 per cent of holdings in Connacht.

Put the two together. Nine in ten Connacht smallholders farmed with no lease, no term, and nothing they could sell. [2]

What a father handed his son was his name on the rent roll, his standing with the agent, and the understanding of the townland that this was his ground. In law that was worth very little. In practice it was the whole world, and it could only go to one person.

The custom that stopped at the Ulster border

There was one arrangement that turned occupancy into something saleable, and the West did not have it.

Tenant right, or the Ulster Custom, let an outgoing tenant sell his interest in a holding to the man coming in. The sums were serious money. Commonly four to six years rent, and sometimes ten to twenty. In Ulster in 1873 an interest in 41 acres changed hands for £435. In 1880, 70 acres went for £970.

A man who held under that custom had an asset. He could sell it, divide the proceeds among his children, and see them all set up.

The custom was rooted in Ulster and never became part of the fabric of rural life outside it. [3] So the western smallholder held the weakest tenure in Ireland and had nothing to divide even if he had wanted to.

That is the answer to the objection. The West did not need ownership to produce a single heir. It needed the opposite: a holding worth keeping and nothing that could be split off it.

1860. The law said contract and nothing else

Parliament made the position worse before it made it better.

Deasy's Act of 1860 declared that the relation of landlord and tenant rested on contract, and on contract only. Custom had no standing. Whatever a family had built into a holding over three generations counted for nothing that a court would recognise.

Ten years later the direction reversed. Gladstone's Act of 1870 gave compensation for improvements and for disturbance, and gave the Ulster Custom statutory recognition where it already ran. It also offered to lend a tenant two thirds of the price of his farm.

Eight hundred and seventy seven tenants took that offer. In a country of more than half a million holdings.

1881. Fair rent, fixity of tenure, free sale

The Land Act of 1881 granted the three Fs to the whole country and set up the Land Commission to fix rents by law.

The rents came down and stayed down. Across 382,813 holdings in the first round, judicial rents were cut by an average of 20.7 per cent. A second round cut them by a further 19.3 per cent. By 1911 about three fifths of Ireland's agricultural land sat under a rent set by a court rather than by a landlord.

Free sale mattered more than it sounds. It gave every Irish tenant the saleable interest that only Ulster had enjoyed. A holding was now worth money in itself, quite apart from what it grew.

That is worth holding on to. The reforms that freed the Irish tenant also made his farm an asset. An asset does not want dividing.

1885. The state starts writing cheques

The Ashbourne Act of 1885 advanced the entire purchase price for the first time, so a tenant needed no deposit and no savings. Twenty five thousand three hundred and sixty seven tenants bought, on 942,600 acres, an average of thirty seven acres each.

The Balfour Acts of 1891 and 1896 carried another 46,834.

For the first time buying was not a theory.

1891. The Board that redrew the West

The same Act of 1891 set up the Congested Districts Board, and its work changed the shape of western farms more than any purchase did.

The test was poverty, written into the statute. A district qualified where the rateable value came to less than thirty shillings a head. Eight counties were scheduled: Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, Kerry and west Cork. Together, 428 electoral divisions, 3,608,569 acres and about 549,510 people. Galway came in at 17s 10d a head, Donegal at 18s, Mayo at 18s 3d, barely half the threshold.

Much of that ground was still held in rundale, a joint tenancy worked in scattered strips and redivided among heirs. In 1845 the Westport union had 83 per cent of its holdings in joint or common tenancy. Scariff had 71, Ballina 68, Ennistimon 53, Kenmare 50.

The Board bought rundale estates, ended the joint tenancy, and laid the land out in single strips running from the road or the shore up to the hill, one holding to a family, each with a share of good ground and poor. One Mayo farmer at Cloondeagh held about twenty two separate scattered plots before the rearrangement and one afterwards.

It was a humane piece of work and it had a consequence nobody planned. A scattered holding can be picked apart. A single striped farm cannot. The Board handed the West a farm that could only pass whole.

1903. The year it actually happened

The Wyndham Act paid landlords a twelve per cent bonus for selling a whole estate rather than a field at a time, and the country changed hands.

One hundred and ninety six thousand and sixty nine tenants bought under it. Sixty five million pounds advanced. In little over four years, half the unsold land in Ireland was sold.

The Birrell Act of 1909 then paid landlords in stock instead of cash and the run stopped almost dead. Annual sales fell from about twelve million pounds a year to under one.

By the total to 1916, 300,335 tenants had bought their farms and £96.4 million had been advanced. [4]

1923. The last hundred thousand

At independence 114,000 tenants still had not purchased. The Land Act of 1923 took the decision out of their hands and out of the landlords' hands, converting the remaining rents into annuities and compelling the transfer.

The West had already finished. Of holdings still tenanted in 1916, Leinster had 45.5 per cent, Connacht 22.6, Mayo 21.7 and Leitrim 12.9.

The poorest province owned its land first.

1929. Ninety seven in a hundred

By 1929, 97.4 per cent of Irish farmers held their farms freehold.

Three in a hundred to ninety seven in a hundred, in fifty nine years. It is one of the great transfers of property in European history and it happened almost without violence after 1903.

And here is the part that matters for this series.

It did not loosen the grip. It tightened it.

A tenancy at will was a poor thing to inherit and a poor thing to hold on to. A freehold farm, paid for by an annuity the family had carried for a generation, was the most valuable thing most households would ever own. Nobody divides that. Nobody hands it over early. The old man who would not let go in 1935 was holding something his father had never held at all.

The reform worked. It gave the Irish farmer his land. Then the land closed around the family that owned it.