This decision technically justified the position that the earl has taken, and it applies to the estates of Mrs. Lewis also, so that the commissioners cannot go any farther in their work of restoring the evicted tenants upon those two properties. As soon as the decision was rendered a bill was introduced in parliament confiscating the entire Clanricarde estates. It is not expected to pass, but was intended to advertise the situation and create public opinion. The government, however, took the matter promptly in hand, and the Earl of Crewe introduced a bill authorizing the estates commissioners to take by force, after the usual legal proceedings, any occupied land they may think necessary and proper for the restoration of evicted tenants, provided they can obtain the consent of the occupant. This act was passed, and notice was immediately given in the Dublin Gazette that the estates commissioners intend, under the Evicted Tenants Act, to acquire compulsorily upwards of eighteen hundred acres of land on the estate of Lord Clanricarde in County Galway. This means that the owner of the property is to have nothing to say about the matter, but a bona fide tenant, who in good faith is occupying a farm from which his predecessor has been evicted, cannot be ejected without his consent. We are familiar with the methods of “persuasion” that have been used for years by the United Irish League and other patriotic organizations, and it is entirely probable that they will prove sufficient in all cases that will arise under this new provision. Therefore, as soon as the proposed act is passed, the tenants upon the Clanricarde estates will be looking for trouble.
The Earl of Clanricarde cannot expect to live a great while longer. He is already an infirm old man and his heir, Lord Sligo of Westport, a nephew, is almost as old as he. Lord Sligo is one of the largest land holders in Ireland. He owns 114,000 acres in the north, which is mostly grazing land, and his tenants are miserably poor, living in squalid hovels scattered over the estate. He does nothing for them, and exacts the last halfpenny of his rent. His heir, who will soon come into both the Clanricarde and Sligo estates, is his son, Lord Henry Ulick Browne, of whom very little is known. He is fifty-eight years of age and lives at Westport Castle, Westport, Ireland. As he has had the management of much of his father’s property for many years, it is generally believed that he is responsible for the harsh policy that has been followed toward the tenants, and that they can expect no better treatment when he becomes their lawful lord.
The British Parliament has published a return (No. Cd. 4093) covering all the proceedings under the Act of April, 1907, to restore evicted tenants in Ireland; giving particulars in each case in which an evicted tenant, or a person nominated by the estates commissioners to be a personal representative of the deceased evicted tenant, has with the assistance of the commission been reinstated, either by the landlord or by the estates commissioners, or provided with a new parcel of land under the Land Purchase Act.
It is a quarto pamphlet of forty-seven pages, and gives in fine type the names of all the farmers in Ireland who have been evicted since 1876, with the dates of the evictions, the area they formerly occupied, the rent they formerly paid, the arrears of rent due at the time of the eviction, the value of the property, the name of the landlord, the name of the estate, the name of the town and the county, the date of restoration, the price paid by the estates commissioners for each tract, the valuation of the buildings and other improvements on the property, and the compensation given to outgoing tenants who surrender their holdings under the law, to those who were formerly evicted from them.
This report shows that forty tenants have been restored to the Blacker-Douglass estates in Armagh, thirty-two have been restored on the Charlemont estates in the same county; forty-four of those evicted from 1887 to 1889 by Lord Massareene in County Meath have been restored, and thirty-nine on the estate of the Marquess of Lansdowne in Queen’s County. On the estates of Sir G. Brooke, in Waterford, seventy-eight families, evicted in 1887 and 1888, have been restored; twenty-six on the estate of A.L. Tottenham, Leitrim; thirty-four on the Vandaleur estates in Leitrim; thirty on the estates of C.W. Warden in County Kerry; thirty-three on the estates of the Earl of Listowel, and similar numbers elsewhere.
So far as is known, every family in Ireland that has been evicted from a farm during the last fifty years for non-payment of rent, or for political reasons, has been restored wherever they are living, and, if the head of the family at the time of the eviction is dead, his heirs have been placed in possession of the place. And all this has been done by the government at the expense of the taxpayers as a vindication of the policy of the Irish Land League, the United Irish League, and other organizations which have conducted the land wars.
The restoration of the evicted tenants was not voluntary on the part of the British government. It was forced upon the parliament by the Irish agitators. In a debate on this act in the House of Lords, the Marquess of Lansdowne, who had evicted a large number of tenants from his estates, admitted that he and other landlords accepted the proposition with great reluctance, and “only because the government had represented to them very earnestly, indeed, that the measure formed an integral part of a policy of pacification which they desired to bring about in Ireland, and if the landlords took the responsibility of rejecting this particular item, the entire programme was destined to failure. It is on the strength of these representations,” said the Marquess of Lansdowne, “that we ask the House of Lords to agree to the restoration of all Irish tenants who have been evicted at any time for political reasons as well as for failure to pay their rents.”
The members of the National Party in Ireland concede this point cheerfully. They willingly admit that they insisted upon the restoration of all evicted tenants as the first and the most important proposition in the programme of pacification in Ireland, and they agreed with the Marquess of Lansdowne that it would have been a failure otherwise. It should also be stated that all arrears of rent for which families have been evicted from Irish farms have been cancelled, and the restored tenants have become the actual owners of the land, the houses, and all improvements. Instead of paying rent to a landlord, they become the landlords themselves. The purchase money in every case has been advanced by the government, and is to be repaid by the purchaser in sixty-eight years with interest at three and one quarter per cent per annum. This sum represents two and one-half per cent interest upon bonds issued to raise the funds and three-fourths of one per cent for a sinking fund to meet the bonds at maturity.