A tenant named Richard Sweeney, whose rent was £48 a year, owed three years' rent. He paid one year, the Government provided another, and the landlord had to forgive the third.
To obtain this result, Sweeney swore that the selling value of his farm was nil, and he received a receipt in full.
A few weeks later he served me—as agent for the landlord—with notice that he had sold his interest in the property for £630.
That is not the end of my story.
The purchaser was a man named Murphy, and a very few years afterwards, upon the ground that the rent was too dear, he took the farm for which he had paid £630 to Sweeney into the Land Courts and got the rent reduced to £36.
The absurdity of this system was well brought out before the Fry Commission, when one high-commissioner and a sub-commissioner both said that in valuing the land they took into consideration the tenant's occupation interest.
The reader will see the way this works out, if he will accept the very simple hypothetical case of two tenants holding land to the worth of £40 each, and one of them only paying £20 a year rent. When they both took their cases into the Land Court, the man paying the lower rent of £20 would obtain the larger reduction, because he had the greater occupation.
These facts will show that a Purchase Bill was an absolute necessity. Lord Dufferin truly remarked that landlord and tenant were both in the same bed, and Mr. Gladstone thought to settle their disputes by giving the tenant a larger share than he had ever had before. But the tenant considered that as he had obtained that concession by fraud and violence, if he could only give one effective kick more, he would put the landlord on the floor for the rest of the term of their national life.
When introducing the Land Act of 1870, Mr. Gladstone proved himself if not an Irish statesman, an admirable prophet, for he denounced in anticipation exactly what the effect of the Land Act of 1881 would be.
In 1870, he prospectively criticised such an institution as the Land Court, which in 1881 he proposed, with its power to give a 'judicial rent.'