Ireland and the Land Question 1800-1922

Michael J. Winstanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135835538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This pamphlet makes use of the most recent revisionist literature to reassess the view, much propagated by nationalist sources, that Ireland was a land of impoverished peasants oppressed by English laws and absentee English landlords.
The land question has always been closely linked to the development of Irish national consciousness, and greatly exercised the minds of English politicians in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The author examines the nature of English understanding of Irish problems, which was often limited or ignorant, and attributes to it much of the unsound and ineffective ligislation passed. The book is concerned less with questions of English party politics than with the situation in Ireland itself and with the nature of the English response to it.

Ireland and the Land Question 1800–1922

Interpretations and images

British political control of Ireland can be traced back to a series of military campaigns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The subjection of the native Irish subsequently relied to a large extent on the collaboration of Protestant settlers from England and Scotland who were granted land and privileges by the British government. In 1782 this Protestant minority’s campaign for greater political independence had resulted in the establishment of a Dublin-based legislature, frequently referred to as Grattan’s Parliament after its main proponent, Henry Grattan. The limited political autonomy which this enjoyed was short-lived. Full, direct rule from Westminster was reimposed by the Act of Union of 1800 which also allowed Protestant Irish MPs to sit in the British parliament. The alleged consequences of this act and various attempts to modify or repeal it have tended to dominate nineteenth-century Irish history. Only after 1885, however, with Gladstone’s commitment to Home Rule, did a significant sector of the British political élite consider conceding any of the demands for greater Irish autonomy. From then on the seemingly increasingly irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the Protestant minority, mainly clustered in Ulster, and those of the rest of the island, has dominated debate. The settlement pieced together between 1920 and 1922 which led to the formation of the Irish Free State resulted in the partition of the island—with six predominantly Protestant counties in north-east Ulster remaining under the protective wing of Westminster.

There is a formidable array of explanations provided by contemporaries and historians to account for Irish refusal to accept British rule. It is difficult to do justice to them in the space available; each is complex, deploys considerable evidence and overlaps with other interpretations. To simplify, however, it is possible to view them as falling into two schools of thought. The former stresses cultural, racial, religious and social factors, the latter alleges that it was British economic exploitation which mobilized opinion.

Until the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, British politicans overwhelmingly believed that the majority of the Irish could be persuaded to accept permanently the existing political framework of the Union. Various courses of action were pursued, each based on rather different diagnoses of Ireland’s problems or needs. The strengthening of the forces of law and order and bouts of vigorous repression were regularly relied on, even favoured in some quarters as the main policy option. As well as deploying the army to maintain public order, the government effected a major reform of the police in the first half of the nineteenth century with the formation of the Peace Preservation Corps in 1814 and the County Constabulary in 1822, later amalgamated in 1836 to create the Irish Constabulary. Coercion Acts were passed during times of social and political unrest and nationalist leaders arrested or, as after the débâcle of the 1916 uprising, executed. Such overt control was supplemented by more subtle attempts to indoctrinate the population and eliminate undesirable social traits. Widespread illiteracy and ignorance, both perceived as causes of backwardness and unruliness, were actively tackled after 1831 through the promotion of a national system of elementary, secular schooling under the National Board of Education. This was designed, in Joseph Lee’s words, to obliterate ‘subversive ancestral influence by inculcating in the pupils a proper reverence for the English connection, and proper deference for their social superiors’.¹ Official attempts at conversion were supplemented by those of voluntary, usually religious, agencies. Popery itself was frequently regarded, especially by Evangelicals, both as an impediment to social and economic progress and even as explicit evidence of political treachery, since it was claimed that Catholics’ first allegiance would always be to a foreign power, the Vatican, and not to the crown. In pre-famine Ireland, in particular, there were massive Protestant, and primarily Methodist, missionary endeavours.

Coercion and persuasion were combined with conciliation and concession. Those who believed that religious discrimination was the main grievance, for example, hoped that reform would win the support and confidence of the Catholic clergy and, through them, the laymen, ensuring both social peace and acceptance of British rule. From the late eighteenth century, therefore, restrictions on both the clergy and the laity were removed. Catholics, after 1778, were allowed to own or take out long leases on land. Catholic bishops were reinstated during the following decade. First the vote and then the right to stand for parliament and hold public office were granted by the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 and, amidst considerable controversy, the Catholic Emancipation Act, passed in 1829. A state-aided seminary was established at Maynooth in 1795 to provide Catholic clerical training. The privileges of the Protestant Church of Ireland were swept away by Gladstone’s Irish Church Act of 1869.

Amid the profusion of diagnoses and solutions, however, one approach has enjoyed unparalleled support on both sides of the Irish Sea ever since the mid-nineteenth century. This is the view that the key to Ireland’s problems lay in the land question. Successive Liberal and Conservative governments, especially after 1870, sought the answer to this ‘question of questions for Ireland’, as John Devoy, the prominent nationalist and reformer called it, in the hope that it would bring prosperity, peace and acceptance of British rule. Briefly stated, this theory proceeded from the premise that Irish farming was backward and its practitioners poverty-stricken. It then went on to attribute this to the system of land tenure, that is, the conditions under which land was rented to Catholic tenant farmers, conditions which had been introduced by and were allegedly operated for the benefit of Protestant English landlords. Widespread resentment of the system was consequently seen as contributing to Ireland’s social unrest, widely reported violence and strident nationalism. From the British point of view, therefore, any lasting political settlement could only be effected if it was accompanied by a solution to the land question. This appealing and popular theory is outlined in more detail below; subsequent chapters will then examine its validity.

Until comparatively recently, few historians questioned the image of Irish rural society which accompanied expositions of the land question. Ireland, in this portrayal, was synonymous with backwardness, poverty, eviction and exploitation. Agriculture was dominated by numerous small farms, all of them inefficiently run. Consequently there was no agricultural revolution to match England’s with its enclosures, increasing mechanization, sophisticated land management, manuring, crop rotations and selective breeding of stock. Irish farming remained undercapitalized and the vast majority of the population scraped a pitiful living from tiny plots of land, relying on the ubiquitous, unreliable potato for subsistence. These tenants, generally referred to as peasants, paid extortionate rents to a small number of wealthy, absentee landlords who neglected their duties and siphoned off income from their estates to finance a fine social life in England. Responsibility for Ireland’s manifold ills was firmly laid at these landlords’ doors. They, it is alleged, helped to sustain rapid population growth before the famine by encouraging the sub-division of holdings which made early marriages possible so that they could expand their rental income. Rather paradoxically, they are also accused of resorting to widespread evictions throughout the century. Consequently, tenant farmers, robbed of capital by extortionate rents and living in perpetual fear of eviction, were unable and unwilling to invest in necessary improvements. The great famine of 1845–9, during which an estimated 1 1/2 to 2 million people fled or starved as potato blight ravaged the countryside, was depicted as the inevitable outcome of landlord, and by implication, British exploitation.

The famine also featured prominently in the history of Irish nationalism. Those who survived the disaster, appalled at apparent British indifference to their plight, were converted en masse to the separatist cause. God, so the story goes, may have sent the potato blight but the English caused the famine. The subsequent history of popular nationalism stresses the centrality of the land question especially during the widespread ‘Land War’ of 1879–82, also popularly portrayed as a rebellion of impoverished peasants against their rich oppressors. More generally, widely reported and seemingly high levels of rural violence or ‘agrarian outrages’ which made Ireland so difficult to govern were also attributed to disputes about land.

The case for land reform seemed irrefutable to many contemporaries, including members of the British government, when conditions in the province of Ulster were taken into account. Here, although farms were among the smallest in the country (only Connaught in western Ireland possessed a higher proportion of smallholdings), farming seemed to thrive. Visitors commented on the neat white-washed houses, the well-fed, well-dressed inhabitants, the absence of agrarian, as opposed to sectarian violence, and the persistence, even the expansion, of local industry, especially around Belfast. This happy state of affairs was readily attributed to differences in land tenure, specifically the existence of ‘Ulster custom’ which involved the acceptance and observance of certain unwritten, ill-defined but important tenant rights. Two practices in particular were deemed to be of great significance. First, the tenant farmer in Ulster was assumed to have security of tenure; as long as he paid his rent he could not be evicted and he also had first option on the renewal of any lease when it expired. Second, he could sell his ‘interest’ in the farm to another, incoming tenant without undue interference on the part of the landlord or could expect, on leaving the farm, to receive payment from the latter for any unexhausted improvements (for example, new buildings, roads, manuring, drainage) which he had undertaken. The combined effect of these rights was to give effective security to farmers, encouraging them, it was argued, to invest in the knowledge that they would not see their rents raised as a result and that they would enjoy the rewards of their efforts. Ulster’s experience seemed to offer a solution for the rest of Ireland and, not surprisingly, the extension and formalization of tenant right formed the basis of Gladstone’s land acts of 1870 and 1881 (see below, pp. 35–9).

As we shall see, other solutions were also proffered including the abolition of the entire system and its replacement by state ownership or, more commonly, ‘peasant’ proprietorship where the farmer owned rather than rented the land he tilled. All proceeded, however, from a common diagnosis of the inadequacies of the system of Irish land tenure and the backwardness and poverty of rural society. The land question’s contribution to the emergence of strident nationalism also dominated late nineteenth-century political thought and has continued to feature prominently in twentieth-century historical writings. Whether this theory’s assumptions were a fair reflection of the reality of Ireland is, therefore, of crucial importance. If they were not, then remedial action based upon them was likely to be at best irrelevant, at worst positively counter-productive, and the traditional view of Irish history seriously misleading.

Realities

INDUSTRY AND POPULATION

‘If England has had too much town life,’ commented J.L.Hammond, ‘Ireland has had too little.’¹⁷ Nineteenth-century Ireland was predominantly a rural country. Only one-fifth of its population of 8.1 million in 1841 lived in towns, generously defined as centres of twenty or more houses. Although this proportion increased fractionally over the century the reasons lay rather in the dramatic decline of rural population than in urban expansion, and many of the smaller towns continued to lose people. By 1901 the Irish population had fallen to 4.5 million. Most settlements were ports or market towns servicing the surrounding countryside, rather than centres of industry. Only Belfast, Dublin and Cork could claim the rank of cities and their expansion, based on a combination of textiles, shipbuilding and commerce, was unexceptional in terms of the British experience, Cork faring least well of the three. In contrast with England, Irish towns were incapable of absorbing surplus rural population.

Eighteenth-century industry, however, had not been confined to towns and rural life had not been synonymous with farming. Domestic or cottage-based manufacturing, especially of textiles, had been widely dispersed throughout Ireland. Although there were concentrations in north Leinster and Ulster, spinning and weaving were carried out all over the country, even transforming Mayo in the far west, a county later devastated by the potato famine of 1845–9, into a thriving centre for the production of linen yarn for export. ‘In the closing decades of the century’, concludes L.M.Cullen, ‘Ireland’s economic prospects seemed attractive.’¹⁵ Indeed, from the 1780s English manufacturers were worried that freer trade between the two countries, later brought about by the Act of Union in 1800, would lead to an influx of Irish manufactured goods. Like its counterpart in England, domestic weaving continued to expand in the early years of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, factory-based production, concentrated in south-east Lancashire, the Scottish Lowlands and to a lesser extent north-east Ulster, dealt it a cruel blow from which it never recovered. This collapse of domestic industry robbed small farmers and labourers of a valuable subsidiary source of income. The cause of this industrial failure is still hotly debated but it is most unlikely that the maintenance of protective barriers would have saved Ireland. More important would seem to have been the country’s lack of good steam coal; significantly, Belfast on the east coast was able to draw on supplies from west Cumberland and south-west Lancashire.

Ireland’s rural problem, therefore, was as much a consequence of this industrial collapse as it was an agricultural crisis. Since there was no organized system of poor relief in Ireland until 1838, this collapse led to an increase in the number of beggars, a feature frequently commented on by visitors to the country, and, for those with some access to land, an increasing dependence on the potato as the means of subsistence. Such employment as existed was now largely restricted to seasonal work on larger farms. For those in the over-populated, barren west of Connaught this necessitated seasonal migration, either to the more commercial eastern counties or to England, where they formed bands of itinerant harvest workers. Those with a specialist skill or sufficient capital fled the country permanently. An estimated 33,000 per annum left for North America in the thirty years before the famine. Even more went to England, settling in the growing factory towns of Lancashire or, more commonly, in the crowded, commercial metropolises of Liverpool and Manchester. Six per cent of Lancashire’s entire population in 1841 was Irish, more if the children born to migrants were included. Emigration by that date was running at an estimated 100,000 to 130,000 per annum, the counties of north Leinster, where textiles had once thrived, suffering particularly heavily.

The mass exodus of people during and after the famine of 1845–9 needs to be seen in this context. Industrial stagnation, land shortages, declining agricultural employment and inadequate diet were already combining to choke off population growth by the 1830s. Numbers which had risen by approximately 13 to 14 per cent in each of the first three decades of the century rose by only 5 per cent between 1831 and 1841. There is even some evidence which suggests that absolute numbers had begun to decline by 1845. It would be wrong, therefore, to attribute all the population loss during and after the famine just to the famine. This certainly accelerated the downward trend but any notion that it initiated it is clearly very wide of the mark. Longer-term structural changes in the economy were more important influences.

We should not assume, however, that those who left the country, or the minority who resided in urban areas, can safely be written out of any discussion of Irish social or political problems and protests, even those which appear to have been specifically about rural concerns. The prosperity of most towns was inextricably linked with that of the surrounding farming communities and, as we shall see, their inhabitants, especially artisans, shopkeepers and commercial and professional men, often took active roles in land agitation and wider political movements. Much individual and financial support also came from the Irish overseas.

AGRICULTURE

Although there were marked regional variations and considerable hardship for much of the population, especially in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Irish agriculture was relatively successful in adapting to changing market conditions and more and more farmers enjoyed increasing prosperity, especially after 1850.

Eighteenth-century farming was already finely tuned to the needs of the English market. Since Ireland enjoyed a ‘maritime climate’ with mild winters and plentiful rain, grass grew luxuriantly for much of the year and farmers were ideally placed to specialize in livestock and dairy husbandry. Traditionally, live cattle had comprised the bulk of the exports, but from the 1760s with corn shortages and rising prices in England brought about by her expanding population, farmers increasingly put their pastures under the plough to grow corn. The disruption caused to European supplies during the long French wars after 1793 accelerated this development. This switch to arable farming encouraged both the reclamation of previously uncultivated waste land and the cultivation of potatoes both as part of a regular crop rotation and as a way of breaking in the newly reclaimed ground. The increased workforce required for labour-intensive arable farming were paid partly in kind in the form of potato plots. These developments, coupled with the buoyancy of domestic industry, undoubtedly contributed to the noticeable quickening in the rate of growth of the population from the late eighteenth century.

Although it is still common practice to portray the famine as the important turning-point in Irish agricultural history, many historians have followed R.D.Crotty’s pioneering work, Irish Agricultural Production,⁷ in arguing that the move away from such arable farming actually began rather earlier, possibly in 1815, more plausibly from the mid-1830s. As with demographic changes, the famine accelerated rather than initiated trends. Grain prices collapsed after the Napoleonic wars, causing deep depression and distress on both sides of the Irish Sea. Prices for livestock products dropped less spectacularly, however, and this, combined with Ireland’s climatic advantages and the development of steamship services which were quicker and more reliable than those operated by sailing vessels, encouraged farmers to switch back to pasture. As in England, this shift took several decades to effect, corn exports continuing to rise until the mid-1830s, but evidence that pastoral farming revived seems irrefutable. Live-cattle exports rose from just under 47,000 animals per year between 1821 and 1825, to over 98,000 in 1835 and an average of 190,800 per year between 1846 and 1848 at the height of the famine. Sheep exports doubled over the same period.

Although this brought prosperity to those larger farmers engaged in the trade it worsened the lot of the majority of the population. Pastoral farming required few labourers. Coupled with the collapse of domestic industry, the decline in demand for labour proved disastrous for the smallholders and labourers. Dependence on the potato increased alarmingly, especially in the west where inferior land, poor communications and distance from ports restricted both the development of commercial farming and the prospects of emigrating. Periodic famine was endemic as the potato crops failed or proved inadequate to support families through the winter. Social tension in the countryside escalated with the prospect of clearance and eviction to make way for larger pastoral farms. The widespread destruction of the famine which wiped out upwards of 1 1/2 million impoverished smallholders and labourers or forced them to flee overseas, speeded up and consolidated the expansion of commercial pastoral farming.

For nearly thirty years after the famine, with only one noticeable depression in fortunes between 1859 and 1864, Irish farming and farmers prospered. Price trends coupled with an expansion of the rail network continued to favour livestock and dairy farming. The quality of animals improved dramatically as new breeds were introduced and, while the number of cattle rose by 60 per cent in the half-century after 1850, sheep flocks doubled. The annual average value of agricultural output (excluding potatoes) rose by 40 per cent from £28.8 million between 1851 and 1855 to £40.64 million between 1871 and 1875. Farmers’ incomes increased by an estimated 77 per cent over the same period while bank deposits increased fourfold from £8 million in 1845 to £33 million in 1876. As a result of this increased spending power, shops spread rapidly throughout Ireland, even in the far west where their absence during the famine had proved so disastrous for government attempts to relieve distress through market channels. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Guide to major political events and economic trends
• Interpretations and images