Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

by Sir Michael McDonnell

The land which it was proposed to affect by the Bill was a mere matter of some 80,000 acres, a bagatelle to the landed interest of Ireland, but involving vital consequences to the poverty-stricken peasants of the West. It was a Bill, as the Lord Chancellor declared, to deal with the tail of an agrarian revolution, and to effect this with the minimum of suffering, compulsory powers and a simple and expeditious procedure were demanded, but in spite of the lip service which Unionists paid to the principles involved, in spite of their admissions that it proposed only to carry out their part of the agreement, arrived at no less than four years ago; by their amendments in the House of

[83]Lords, introducing limitations and appeals involving delays and costs, they succeeded in large measure in destroying the value of the measure. One can understand the attitude of Lord Clanricarde, who roundly denounced the whole proposal as "tainted with the callous levity of despotism," but it is difficult to speak charitably of the members of the Opposition, who, while repeatedly protesting their anxiety to see the evicted tenants restored, took care, through the agency of the House of Lords, to place every possible obstacle in the way of their speedy re-instatement.

Many of the amendments designed by the House of Lords were proposed by two of the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, who sit in that House primarily as judges, and who are supposed to keep free from political entanglements. They aimed at an enhancement of the prices at which compulsory purchase should take effect, with a view, it was admitted by their organs in the Press, to afford a precedent for further schemes of land purchase at large. Of this nature was the compensation which they demanded—fortunately without success—in accordance with the provisions of the Lands Clauses Consolidation Act, which, if accepted by Government, would have given to the landlords on sale a douceur of 10 per cent. in addition to the 12 per cent. bonus which they already enjoy over and above the market value of the land, and the fixation of such a price would have prevented any reinstatement, for this reason, that the instalments of the tenants in those circumstances would have been too high to have been within the means of the tenants whom it was proposed to reinstate.

There was a curious irony in the spectacle of the House of Lords standing out for the principle of fixity of tenure, and defending tooth and nail the tenant-right of a few hundred planters, when little more than thirty years ago this same body offered the most relentless opposition to any recognition of the right of compensation for disturbance on the part of

[84]four millions of Irish tenants. In this matter the Lords gained their point, and compulsory powers are not to be applied under the Act to the holdings on which the landlords have placed planters, who are held to be bona fide farmers. An amendment to this effect was thrown out by the House of Commons, by a majority of more than four to one, on a division in which only 66 voted for the amendment, but although the Bill in its original form offered sitting tenants the fullest compensation ever offered to such persons, and although most of the planters would be only too glad to accept such terms, the Upper House insisted on over-riding the will of the great majority in the Commons.

Lord Lansdowne, on the second reading, gave three reasons why the Bill should not be incontinently rejected by the Peers. In the first place, it came to them, he said, supported by an enormous majority in the other House, "and their Lordships always desired to treat attentively and respectfully Bills which came to them with such a recommendation." Secondly, the late Government, as well as the present, had pledged themselves to a measure of reinstatement of some kind, and if they threw out the Bill on a second reading "it would be said that they had receded from a kind of understanding arrived at in 1903," and lastly, "the summary rejection of the Bill might greatly increase the difficulties of the Executive Government in Ireland." One would have thought that the fact that the Bill was given a second reading did little to exonerate the Upper House from similar consequences as a result of their mutilation of the Bill in Committee.

In its final form the Act allows an appeal on questions of value from the inspector, to two Estates Commissioners, and from them to Mr. Justice Wylie, sitting as Judicial Commissioner with a valuer. On questions of price there is no appeal from him. Other appeals, on questions of law and fact, are, by Section

[85]6, to be heard by a Judge of the King's Bench, with whom rests the final decision whether a particular planter is or is not to be evicted. Demesne lands and other lands, purchase of which would interfere with the value of adjoining property, are omitted from the scope of the statute, and its operation is limited to the case of 2,000 tenants, whose claims must be disposed of within four years. The power vested in the Estates Commissioners compulsorily to acquire untenanted land, not necessarily their former holdings, for the reinstatement of the evicted tenants, is of no practical value in the case of the Clanricarde estate, since all the land on it is occupied, and the fact that on that plague-spot—the nucleus of the whole disturbance—no settlement will be possible under the Act, shows to what an extent was justified Mr. Birrell's declaration that the final form of the statute was a triumph for Lord Clanricarde, and affords a curious commentary on the repeated declarations of the Unionist leaders, that nothing was further from their desire than to effect the wrecking of the Bill.[^[10]]

Rejection of similar measures of relief—notably the Tenants' Compensation Bill of 1880—has led in the past to a recrudescence of strife in Ireland, and Mr. Balfour's unworthy retort to Mr. Redmond's deduction from every precedent in the history of the struggle for the land, that it was an incitement to lawlessness, was a mere partisan retort to an avowal of a danger which every unbiassed observer must see arises from the betrayal by the House of Lords of a confidence in a final settlement which was formerly encouraged by a Conservative Govern merit.

One of the weapons used by the Orangemen in their attack on this Bill was to be found in their repeated insinuations as to the unfitness of the Estates Commissioners to exercise dispassionately the functions which would be demanded of them. In this the Unionists were hoist with their own petard, for the necessity recognised by the Government for placing the Estates