Land Commission (Pakistan)
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The Irish Land Commission was created by the British crown in 1843 to 'inquire into the occupation of the land in Ireland. The office of the commission was in Dublin Castle, and the records were, on its conclusion, deposited in the records tower there, from whence they were transferred in 1898 to the Public Record Office'. It took on the role of a rent fixing commission in 1881 via the
Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 The Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 (44 & 45 Vict. c. 49) was the second Irish land act passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1881. Background The Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone had previously passed the Landlord and Ten ...
, also known as the second Irish Land Act. For a century it was the body responsible for re-distributing farmland in most of Ireland. It was formally abolished in 1999.


UK Land Acts

With the
Ashbourne Act The Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act 1885 ( 48 & 49 Vict. c.73), commonly known as the Ashbourne Act is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, passed by a Conservative Party government under Lord Salisbury. It extended the terms that had b ...
1885, the Commission developed into a tenant-purchasing commission and assisted in the agreed transfer of freehold farmland from landlord to
tenant Tenant may refer to: Real estate *Tenant, the holder of a leasehold estate in real estate *Tenant-in-chief, in feudal land law *Tenement (law), the holder of a legal interest in real estate *Tenant farmer *Anchor tenant, one of the larger stores ...
. This was a response to the turbulent Land War that had started in 1879. It was rapidly enacted by the government of Prime Minister The Marquess of Salisbury, was funded initially with £5,000,000, and was designed to avert support for the Irish Parliamentary Party, given the larger number of voters allowed by the
Reform Act 1884 In the United Kingdom under the premiership of William Ewart Gladstone, William Gladstone, the Representation of the People Act 1884 (48 & 49 Vict. c. 3, also known informally as the Third Reform Act) and the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885, ...
, before the IPP entered its alliance with William Ewart Gladstone in 1886. The Commission eventually transferred 13.5 million acres (55,000 km2) by 1920. Following the Land Conference of December 1902 arranged by the
Chief Secretary for Ireland The Chief Secretary for Ireland was a key political office in the British administration in Ireland. Nominally subordinate to the Lord Lieutenant, and officially the "Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant", from the early 19th century un ...
George Wyndham, the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903 was steered through Parliament by William O'Brien, which provided government finance to buy out freeholds, with the former tenant farmers paying back the capital over 68 years. This was managed by the Land Commission, along with ancillary work such as compiling statistics. Valuations were reckoned on a years purchase (Y.P.) basis, the price being a multiple of (perhaps 16 times) the annual rent, instead of the
discounted cash flow The discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis is a method in finance of valuing a security, project, company, or asset using the concepts of the time value of money. Discounted cash flow analysis is widely used in investment finance, real estate devel ...
method used today. The commission had to supervise the haggling process and find the fairest multiple for every transfer. The loans issued by government were resold in the capital markets as Land Bonds. By 1908 the emerging problem was whether the new owners would be economically viable on their small farms. Michael McDonnell commented, "The breaking up of the grazing lands, which in many instances the landlords are keeping back from the market, has not met with much success under the Act, and it is difficult to see how compulsion is to be avoided if the country is to be saved from the economically disastrous position of having established in it a number of occupying owners on tenancies which are not large enough to secure to them a living wage." It was realised by now that existing rural poverty arose from small farm sizes, yet the procedures and limits of the Acts also tended to keep farm sizes down. The aim had been to create "peasant proprietors" owning what were usually small farms. By definition the activists in the 1880s Land War period had been poorer and more desperate, and few came from larger prosperous farms. This remained a matter of policy debate for the rest of the commission's existence; generally it continued to create new small units by breaking up larger units that had more commercial potential. Larger commercial farmers were characterised as "landlords" or "grazers" simply because they had more land than the average. The Irish Land Act 1909, fostered by the Liberal
Chief Secretary for Ireland The Chief Secretary for Ireland was a key political office in the British administration in Ireland. Nominally subordinate to the Lord Lieutenant, and officially the "Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant", from the early 19th century un ...
,
Augustine Birrell Augustine Birrell King's Counsel, KC (19 January 185020 November 1933) was a British Liberal Party (UK), Liberal Party politician, who was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1907 to 1916. In this post, he was praised for enabling tenant farmers t ...
, allowed for tenanted land purchase where the owner was unwilling to sell, to be bought by the commission by compulsory purchase. In 1915, Chief Secretary Birrell confirmed in Parliament that all Irish land transfers from 1885 to the end of 1914 had cost the British Government £91,768,450, and the tenants had invested a further £1,584,516. The Irish Free State (Consequential Provisions) Act 1922, abolished many all-island offices, including the Land Commissioners, effective from the creation of the Irish Free State on 6 December 1922, with Northern Ireland remaining within the United Kingdom. The Land Commission files for Northern Ireland were separated, allowing for the Land Commission to be re-established in and for the Free State in 1923 as if it had never been abolished.


Dáil decree 1920

During the
Irish War of Independence The Irish War of Independence () or Anglo-Irish War was a guerrilla war fought in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 between the Irish Republican Army (IRA, the army of the Irish Republic) and British forces: the British Army, along with the quasi-mil ...
in the early 1920s, some farms were seized, and in June 1920 the Dáil debated a motion proposed by Arthur Griffith as Minister for Home Affairs, and approved a decree stating that all claims to land should not be adjudicated on until after the end of the war.


Northern Ireland

The Land Acts were varied in Northern Ireland in 1925, and the activities of the Land Commission were finally abolished in 1935. Some remaining tenants who had chosen not to exercise their right to buy their farms formed the
Unbought Tenants' Association Unbought Tenants' Association and Unpurchased Tenants' Association were labels for agrarianism, agrarian pressure groups in Ireland in the 1910s and 1920s. Under the Irish Land Acts, most farmers in the preceding decades had bought the Freehold (l ...
.


Irish Land Acts

The commission was reconstituted in the Irish Free State by section 2 of the Land Law (Commission) Act 1923, backdated to the state's creation. The Act also dissolved the Congested Districts Board (the CDB). Provision was made for compulsory purchase of land owned by a non-Irish citizen. Untenanted land could now be compulsorily purchased and divided out to local families; this was applied unevenly across the State, with some large estates surviving if the owners could show that their land was being actively farmed. From 1923, the amounts outstanding were paid to the
British government ga, Rialtas a Shoilse gd, Riaghaltas a Mhòrachd , image = HM Government logo.svg , image_size = 220px , image2 = Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom (HM Government).svg , image_size2 = 180px , caption = Royal Arms , date_es ...
as land annuities, accruing in a Land Purchase Fund. This was fixed at £250,000 annually in 1925. In December 1925 W. T. Cosgrave lamented that there were already: "250,000 occupiers of uneconomic holdings, the holdings of such a valuation as did not permit of a decent livelihood for the owners". Despite this, his government continued to subdivide larger landholdings, primarily to gain electoral support. The Land Act 1933, passed on a vote of 70–39, allowed the Minister for Finance to divert the annuities for local government projects. This was a factor in the Anglo-Irish Trade War from 1933 to 1938, and was mutually resolved by a one-off payment of £10m to Britain in 1938. From 1932 the government argued strongly that Irish farmers should no longer be obliged for historic reasons to pay Britain for Irish land, but when Britain had passed out of the payment system it still required farmers to continue to pay their annuities to it as before. The commission, whilst often regarded as the champion of land ownership for those who used it, and social justice, was not without controversy. In particular its subdivision of land into uneconomic units has had a lasting effect, as well as the destruction of fine landlords' residences such as
Monellan Castle Monellan Castle was a large castellated mansion on the southern outskirts of The Cross, a hamlet just outside Killygordon in the east of County Donegal in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland. It was constructed in the eighteenth century for t ...
and
Shanbally Castle Shanbally Castle was located near Clogheen, County Tipperary and built for Cornelius O'Callaghan, the first Viscount Lismore, in around 1810. It was the largest house built in Ireland by the noted English architect John Nash. The castle was acqu ...
with Government approval. As farming became more mechanized from the 1930s, foreign investment in commercial farms was discouraged, reducing overall farm output. Often the buyers found it hard to earn enough to live a good life, as found in the poems of Patrick Kavanagh. The Dáil reports from the 1920s to the 1960s frequently include questions about the division of former estates, and the acquisition of land with public finance on favourable terms for constituents via the Land Commission was understood as a way for politicians to gain electoral support.


Policy changes and dissolution

From 1940, a minority in Fianna Fáil and Coalition cabinets consistently argued for larger farms to be encouraged, instead of sponsoring new small farmers that often had too little capital, skills or enthusiasm. This was successfully opposed for social and political reasons by Éamon de Valera, and in Coalition governments by
Joseph Blowick Joseph Blowick (13 March 1903 – 12 August 1970) was an Irish Clann na Talmhan politician who served as Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Minister for Lands from 1948 to 1951 and 1954 to 1957 and Clann na Talmhan, Leader ...
, the leader of
Clann na Talmhan Clann na Talmhan (, "Family/Children of the land"; formally known as the ''National Agricultural Party'') was an Irish agrarian political party active between 1939 and 1965. Formation and growth Clann na Talmhan was founded on 29 June 1939 in ...
. Under the 1923 Act, busier farmers had to rent extra land under an 11-month or seasonal conacre system, as longer arrangements could cause an owner to lose his farm by compulsory purchase by the Land Commission. While there were now some 300,000 Irish landowners compared to several thousand in the late nineteenth-century, the basic term for the use of land had reverted to the norm of the 1860s, with no rights to renew a lease and no incentive to improve rented land. By 1980, some in the state were rented annually under conacre, suggesting a new imbalance between mere ownership and the more active farmers. The cost of agricultural machinery requires larger farm sizes to generate economies of scale. The Lands Act 1965 was passed to restrict new foreign investment in agriculture, some of which was speculatively based upon the Ireland's planned entry into the
European Economic Community The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organization created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957,Today the largely rewritten treaty continues in force as the ''Treaty on the functioning of the European Union'', as renamed by the Lisb ...
, which occurred in 1973. The EEC's Four Freedoms allowed for investment within the EEC by any citizen of an EEC member state. This naturally undermined the ethos of the Land Commission, which had processed a further since 1923. By the early 1970s, half of open market land purchases were by non-farmers, and half of those were to buy small sites, typically for building
bungalow A bungalow is a small house or cottage that is either single-story or has a second story built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas. The first house in England that was classified as a b ...
s. By the 1980s, just before its reform, the Land Commission was a body responsible to the
Department of Agriculture An agriculture ministry (also called an) agriculture department, agriculture board, agriculture council, or agriculture agency, or ministry of rural development) is a ministry charged with agriculture. The ministry is often headed by a minister f ...
. In 1983, the Commission ceased acquiring land; this signified the start of the end of the commission's reform of Irish land ownership, though freehold transfers of farmland still had to be signed off by the Commission into the 1990s. The Lands Section of the Department of Agriculture was seen as an overgrown entity, employing 750 people in 1983; its budget of IR£15m included IR£8m for administration costs and only IR£7m for actual land purchase or division. Further purchases were suspended that year by Paul Connaughton, Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture. Civil servants working for the Land Commission were reassigned to work on related matters. The Irish Land Commission (Dissolution) Act 1992 gave the Minister for Agriculture the power to formally dissolve the commission. In proposing this legislation, Minister
Michael O'Kennedy Michael O'Kennedy (21 February 1936 – 15 April 2022) was an Irish Fianna Fáil politician who served as Minister for Labour from 1991 to 1992, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1987 to 1991, European Commissioner for Perso ...
explained the bill's provisions: The act came into force in 1999. Most of the remaining liabilities and assets were transferred to the
Minister for Agriculture and Food An agriculture ministry (also called an) agriculture department, agriculture board, agriculture council, or agriculture agency, or ministry of rural development) is a ministry charged with agriculture. The ministry is often headed by a minister ...
. Many relevant historical records are held by the National Archives of Ireland.


Further reading


Commons statement on the practicalities of land purchase, July 1919Connaught landed estates on-line databaseFitzsimons, Fiona: ''Records of the Irish Land Commission''; 2014 essay in History Ireland vol.22; accessed 9 Jan 2017


Notes

{{Reflist Land reform in Ireland Agriculture in the Republic of Ireland 1885 establishments in Ireland 1999 disestablishments in Ireland