Irish Land Commission

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 Representation of the People Act 1884, before the IPP entered an alliance with William Ewart Gladstone in 1886.

Following the Land Conference of December 1902 arranged by the Chief Secretary for Ireland 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.

basis, the price being a multiple of (perhaps 16 times) the annual rent, instead of the discounted cash flow method used today.

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.

By definition, the activists in the 1880s Land War period had been poorer and more desperate, and few came from larger prosperous farms.

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.

[5] 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 Act 1933, passed on a vote of 70–39, allowed the Minister for Finance to divert the annuities for local government projects.

[12][13] 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, the leader of Clann na Talmhan.

By 1980, some 860,000 acres (3,500 km2) in the state were rented annually under conacre, suggesting a new imbalance between mere ownership and the more active farmers.

[15] 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, which occurred in 1973.