Irish History and the Irish Question

by Goldwin Smith

Either party may apply to the court to have the rent made a judicial rent. The court fixes this rent after considering all the circumstances of the case, holding, and district, and having regard to the interests of both parties. No rent shall be payable in respect of improvements made by the tenant unless he has been already compensated for them by the landlord. In the administration of the act the word “improvements” has given rise to endless litigation. In the now famous case of Adams v. Dunseath it was held that “improvements” meant improvement works and not increased letting value. It was also held in a case affecting the same holding that a tenant is entitled to “a fair return by way of annual allowance in respect of the present capital value of his improvement works which may be estimated by way of percentage on such capital value; and if after making this percentage there is still a surplus of increased letting value, it is within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Land Commission to determine whether, and in what proportions, such surplus shall be divided between landlord and tenant.” It was further laid down that the Land Commission was to treat “the latent and dormant resources of the soil, as let by the landlord to the tenant, as the property of the landlord, and the development of those resources by the tenant as the act of the tenant.”

This act was undoubtedly a great charter for the tenants and created something like a revolution in Ireland. It contained many defects, and was marred by many blemishes, but on the whole it was a masterly attempt to settle the question. Like much of the land legislation for Ireland, most of its shortcomings were due to a reckless disregard on the part of British ministers for Irish opinion. Indeed, this was the cause of most of the amending legislation that followed.

Under the Act of 1881 “fair rents” were fixed for periods of fifteen years, when they were again ripe for revision. Roughly speaking, the old non-judicial rents were reduced by twenty per cent on an average to convert them into first term rents. These again were further reduced by twenty per cent on an average for the second term. This, of course, played havoc with the landlord’s income, and did not materially benefit the tenant, the prices of the produce of whose farm was falling with even greater rapidity. The experiment of dual ownership had been tried and was found wanting; a return to single ownership was sought for by the series of acts known as the Land Purchase Acts.

It was not till 1885 that the experiment of land purchase was seriously tried in Ireland, but it is right to say that the question first came before the public in a practical form so far back as 1869 in the discussions on the disestablishment of the Irish Episcopal Church. At that time Mr. Bright proposed to increase the number of owners of land in Ireland by allowing the glebe tenants to purchase the property attached to the glebes. The idea was embodied in the Irish Church Act, and over six thousand occupying owners were thus created. Under this act three-fourths of the purchase money was advanced by the State, and the balance paid in cash by the purchasers. The money was advanced by the State for thirty-two years, the shortest period allowed by any of the acts. From the tenant’s point of view this act cannot be said to have been an unqualified success. The price of land was high at the time, and the purchasers having bought high sustained the whole burden of the sudden fall in the prices of produce which almost immediately succeeded the conclusion of their bargains. In 1870 and in 1881 there were embodied in the acts of these years provisions to enable tenants to purchase their holdings; but the procedure to be followed was made so complicated that the tenants did not avail themselves of the purchase clauses to any great extent. The insignificant number of sixteen hundred sales were completed under the two acts.

In 1885 a Conservative government came into power, and though their term of office was of short duration, they introduced and passed a measure which, by its marvellous and, I might add, its unexpected success, pointed the direction and paved the way for all future legislation for the settlement of the land problem in Ireland. Back to single ownership was the keynote of the measure. Hitherto the credit or discredit of all legislation on the land problem belonged to the Liberals. They strove to make dual ownership a possibility. Conservative statesmen sought for a settlement in the opposite direction.

In sales under all the purchase acts from 1885 to the Act of 1903 all the purchase money is advanced by the State to the selling landlord, and is charged by the State to the tenant who purchases. The tenant repays the amount borrowed or “advanced,” to use the language of the acts, in annual instalments, which instalments clear off not only the original “advance,” but the accumulated interest.

Roughly speaking, the procedure is this. The landlord and tenant, having agreed on a price, sign an agreement for sale, and file it with the Land Commission, which body has the carriage, so to speak, of all purchase transactions, as well as all other transactions under the land acts. The holding is inspected by the Land Commission which, having been satisfied that the land in question is security for the “advance,” pay the purchase money to the landlord and collect from the tenant the annual instalments necessary to repay it to the State.

The plan of the Act of 1885, better known as the Ashbourne Act from the fact that it was Lord Ashbourne who introduced the measure to the lords, was simple in the extreme, and to this is due, in no small measure, its rapid success. It was easily understood by the people, and so popular did it become that in three years the money provided by it was completely exhausted.

In 1888 a second bill was passed under which an additional sum of five millions—this was the amount provided by the Ashbourne Act—was set aside for purchase. Under the two measures 25,368 owners were created.

“Almost from the start,” writes Mr. George Fottrell (a gentleman well qualified to discuss the question of land purchase in Ireland) in the Morning Post, “the Ashbourne Act was a success. During the first five years of its working, the ‘advances’ actually paid over by the Land Commission to landlords amounted annually on an average to £1,250,000 sterling. The ‘applications’ represented a considerably larger sum. By 1887 they had more than exhausted the £5,000,000 which had been voted by Parliament for the Ashbourne Act, in 1885, and thereon a further sum of £5,000,000 was voted. The scheme continued to work well; the ‘applications’ came in steadily but with no feverish haste, the largest total sum applied for under the Ashbourne Act in any one year being in 1887 when it reached £3,700,000. In each of the next two years it reached just two millions. In 1890 it had dropped to less than a million and a half; in 1891 it was slightly in excess of that amount. By 1891 it was plain that the second vote of five millions had been virtually absorbed, and that Parliament must be applied to for further money. To cool-headed people in Ireland it seemed that the obvious course was to ask for a small grant, say of ten millions, so as to continue to test cautiously the usefulness of an act which had so far worked well, while by the very smallness of the grant keeping in reserve a check on the expansion of the act if it should prove to work mischievously.