Present Irish Questions

by William O'Connor Morris

‘The old rent was £688?—Yes.

‘That was reduced by the Sub-Commissioners to £493?—Yes. A reduction of about 30 per cent.

‘Notwithstanding the outlay by the landlord in the interval of nearly £2000?—Yes, that is it.

‘Table F is a list of eleven farms, on which there was practically no expenditure by the landlord?—Quite so, no recent expenditure. That is, between 1863 and 1887?—There was a good deal done in the famine time, but I did not take account of that.

‘You had no evidence in these eleven cases of expenditure for many years prior to the fixing of the rent?—No. In these cases the old rents tot up to £361?—Yes. And the reductions only brought them to £280?—A reduction of 18 per cent.

‘In other words, on the unimproved farms the reductions only average 18, while on the improved farms they went as high as 30 per cent.?—Quite so.

‘Sir E. Fry: Were these two sets of farms different classes of farms?—They were practically of the same class.’[108] In the same way, in the case of the estate of Lord Leconfield, a great and excellent landlord in the County Clare, the Sub-Commission made no real allowance for a sum of £20,500 expended on twenty-seven farms. ‘Am I right in saying that from 1852 to 1881 there was spent by Lord Leconfield £20,500 in these twenty-seven cases?—The return speaks for itself. That is the result of it.’ ‘No. 4: As an example of the reductions of the Sub-Commissioners were the rents put back to what they had been in 1852?—Very nearly. There is a difference, I think, of about ½ per cent.?—About ½ per cent. The rent in 1852 was £2524, and the judicial rents on these farms was £2632.’[109]

I pass on to the methods pursued by the Sub-Commissioners in actually fixing ‘fair rents.’ As I have said, they usually heard the cases at length in Court; they usually devoted attention to them. I do not think they set much store on the reports of valuers, on the part either of landlords or tenants; they formed their decisions, as a general rule, on the inspections made by the lay Commissioners of the lands they visited. This was a much better method, as I shall point out afterwards, than that adopted by their superiors; but obviously inspections of this kind made by officials without local knowledge of the farms, which they examined and valued, could not be a sufficient, or a satisfactory, way to fix ‘fair rents.’ The great error, however, made, in this matter, by the Sub-Commissions—and in this respect they had the countenance of the higher tribunal—was that they had little or no regard for the evidence which in adjusting rent was assuredly of the greatest importance. They rejected, we have seen, the principle of competition in adjudicating on rent; in fixing the ‘fair rents’ of holdings before them, they refused to consider the rents of the neighbourhood and of adjoining lands, that is, to consider the price of the market. Yet this was but a trifling compared to their capital mistake, one that, indeed, can hardly be explained: in investigating the subject of ‘fair rent,’ they would not take into account sums paid on the transfer of farms, that is, their tenant right, in other words, as an indication of what ought to be their ‘fair rents.’ If we bear in mind, as I have said before, that these sums were given subject to the existing rents, which always formed the first charge on the lands, it is most difficult to understand, as we have seen, how this circumstance did not create a very strong presumption that the rents in question must be ‘fair’ from the very nature of the case, assuming the Irish tenant to be a rational being. The sums paid for this tenant right were sometimes enormous, not uncommonly equal to one-third or one-half of the value of the fee; I illustrate my meaning from the evidence, taken with reference to the estate of Lord Downshire, one of the largest and best managed in Ulster: ‘What would you say the tenants’ interest would be worth on the Downshire estate?—Well, judging from the average prices obtained by tenants on transfers, my opinion is that the tenants’ interest would be worth £1,000,000.

‘On the Downshire estate alone?—Yes.

‘Now, could that value in the tenants, or that interest in the tenants, exist, unless the rents at which they were holding were low rents?—No, the prices of tenant right are incompatible with high rents. Does it in your opinion point to their being lower than the commercial rents?—Yes, they are lower.’[110] And will it be believed that on this very estate, in the case of thirteen farms, held at the rents fixed by the landlords, the tenant right realised £7296, and yet the Sub-Commission reduced the rents more than 20 per cent.? In other words, they declared that the old rents were not fair, though these lands, when transferred, fetched £7296 paid by their purchasers, subject to the rents in question![111]