| Act of Parliament | |
 | |
| Long title | An Act to amend the Law relating to the Occupation and Ownership of Land in Ireland. |
|---|---|
| Citation | 33 & 34 Vict. c. 46 |
| Dates | |
| Royal assent | 1 August 1870 |
| Text of statute as originally enacted | |
The Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 [1] [2] (33 & 34 Vict. c. 46) was an act passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1870.
Between the Acts of Union 1800 and the year 1870, Parliament had passed many acts dealing with Irish land, but every one of them had been in the interest of the landlord against the tenant. [3] The Incumbered Estates (Ireland) Act 1849 (12 & 13 Vict. c. 77) had led to a new class of speculators as landlords in Ireland. Their first priority was raising tenants' rents to increase their income, and they were generally considered worse than the old landlords. A report on landlord-tenant relations written by poor law inspectors in 1869 for the Chief Secretary for Ireland drew attention to the hardships inflicted on tenants under the new landlords. [4]
The Liberal Party under the leadership of William Ewart Gladstone had been elected in 1868 promising to bring justice for Ireland, including land reform. The President of the Board of Trade, John Bright, believed that the solution to Irish land question was to transform the tenants into owners. He wrote to Gladstone on 21 May 1869:
When the Irish church question is out of the way, we shall find all Ireland, north and south alike, united in demanding something on the land question much broader than anything hitherto offered or proposed in compensation bills. If the question is to go on without any real remedy for the grievance, the condition of Ireland in this particular will become worse, and the measures far beyond anything I now contemplate will be necessary. I am most anxious to meet the evil before it is too great for control, and my plan will meet it without wrong to any man. [5]
Gladstone replied, doubting to the wisdom of the government embarking on a very large involvement in Irish land, purchasing estates from landlords to resell them to the tenants. He believed that economic laws might afterwards return Irish land again into fewer hands. He added: "Your plan, if adopted in full, could only extend to a small proportion of the two or three hundred millions worth of land in Ireland; and I do not well see how the unprotected tenants of the land in general would take essential benefit from the purchase and owning of land by a few of their fortunate brethren". [6]
From September 1869 Gladstone was busily engaged in investigating landlord-tenant relations in Ireland and also elsewhere in Europe to devise a scheme to regulate landlord-tenant relations. The Chief Secretary, Chichester Parkinson-Fortescue, suggested in November that the Ulster custom of security of tenure for tenants should be protected by law and that a tenant not enjoying the protection of this custom should be entitled to compensation from the landlord if they were evicted. [7]
For the next three months Gladstone went to work on modifying Parkinson-Fortescue's plan. He wrote to the Duke of Argyll on 5 December: "For the last three months I have worked daily, I think, upon the question, and so I shall continue to do. The literature of it is large, larger than I can master; but I feel the benefit of continued reading upon it. We have before us a crisis, and a great crisis, for us all, to put it on no higher ground, and a great honour or a great disgrace. As I do not mean to fail through want of perseverance, so neither will I wilfully err through precipitancy, or through want of care and desire at least to meet all apprehensions which are warranted by even the show of reason". [8] In a letter to Lord Granville on 15 January 1870, Gladstone claimed: "To this great country the state of Ireland after seven hundred years of our tutelage is in my opinion so long as it continues, an intolerable disgrace, and a danger so absolutely transcending all others, that I call it the only real danger of the noble empire of the Queen". [9]
On 15 February 1870 he laid the bill before the House of Commons. The second reading of the bill was passed by 442 votes to 11, the opposition compromising eight Irish MPs who did not think it went far enough and three English Conservatives. The Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli moved an amendment intended to limit compensation to unexhausted improvements by tenants and the government majority against it fell to 76. When the Liberal MP William Fowler moved an amendment the government majority against it was only 32. [10] The debate in the Commons lasted over three and a half months and the third reading was passed without division; in the House of Lords it was read a second time without division. [11] On 1 August the bill received royal assent. [12]
The Ulster Custom or any similar custom prevailing elsewhere was given the force of law where it existed.
Tenants not enjoying that protection (the vast majority) gained increased security by compensation for improvements made to a farm if they surrendered their lease (they had previously been accredited to the landlord, hence no incentive to the tenant) and compensation for 'disturbance', damages, for tenants evicted for causes other than non-payment of rent.
The 'John Bright Clauses', which Gladstone accepted reluctantly, allowed tenants to borrow from the government two thirds of the cost of buying their holding, at 5% interest repayable over 35 years if the landlord was willing to sell (no compulsory powers). [13]
The historian J. C. Beckett claimed that the act "failed, at almost every point, to achieve the purpose for which it was intended" but despite the practical failure the Act also "marked a decisive advance towards a solution of the agrarian problem". [14] The act left it to the courts to decide where the Ulster custom existed; it was up to the tenant to prove that the custom applied to his tenure and that the rights he was seeking to establish were included in the custom. [15]
The clauses relating to custom affected only a minority of the 600,000 tenant farmers in Ireland. Therefore, it was the clauses relating to yearly tenants unprotected by custom which formed the most important clauses in the act. Although the clauses on compensation for improvements were significantly better than previous legislation, their power was limited by the complicated procedure for claiming and assessing compensation. The overall effect, however, was to strengthen the position of the tenant by presuming that the improvements were his work. [16]
According to Australian historian Philip Bull, the bill struck at the heart of the traditional concept of the union between Britain and Ireland, by creating a new law that would affect only the latter, and also at English conceptions of property rights. [17]
The Independent Irish Party (IIP) was the designation chosen by the 48 Members of the United Kingdom Parliament returned from Ireland with the endorsement of the Tenant Right League in the 1852 general election. The League had secured their promise to offer an independent opposition to the dominant landlord interest, and to advance an agrarian reform programme popularly summarised as the "three F's": fair rent, fixed tenure and free sale.
John Poyntz Spencer, 5th Earl Spencer, KG, KP, PC, known as Viscount Althorp from 1845 to 1857, was a British Liberal Party politician under, and close friend of, prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. He was twice Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
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The Irish National Land League, also known as the Land League, was an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which organised tenant farmers in their resistance to exactions of landowners. Its primary aim was to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. The period of the Land League's agitation is known as the Land War. Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism." Foster adds that about a third of the activists were Catholic priests, and Archbishop Thomas Croke was one of its most influential champions.
The Land Acts were a series of measures to deal with the question of tenancy contracts and peasant proprietorship of land in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Five such acts were introduced by the government of the United Kingdom between 1870 and 1909. Further acts were introduced by the governments of the Irish Free State after 1922 and more acts were passed for Northern Ireland.
Ireland was part of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1922. For almost all of this period, the island was governed by the UK Parliament in London through its Dublin Castle administration in Ireland. Ireland underwent considerable difficulties in the 19th century, especially the Great Famine of the 1840s which started a population decline that continued for almost a century. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a vigorous campaign for Irish Home Rule. While legislation enabling Irish Home Rule was eventually passed, militant and armed opposition from Irish unionists, particularly in Ulster, opposed it. Proclamation was shelved for the duration following the outbreak of World War I. By 1918, however, moderate Irish nationalism had been eclipsed by militant republican separatism. In 1919, war broke out between republican separatists and British Government forces. Subsequent negotiations between Sinn Féin, the major Irish party, and the UK government led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which resulted in five-sixths of the island seceding from the United Kingdom, becoming the Irish Free State, with only the six northeastern counties remaining within the United Kingdom.
The Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that created legal definitions of crofting parish and crofter, granted security of land tenure to crofters and produced the first Crofters Commission, a land court which ruled on disputes between landlords and crofters. The same court ruled on whether parishes were or were not crofting parishes. In many respects the Act was modelled on the Irish Land Acts of 1870 and 1881. By granting the crofters security of tenure, the Act put an end to the Highland Clearances.
The Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act 1885, 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 been achieved under the Kilmainham Treaty. It set up a £5 million fund and any tenant who wanted to buy land could do so. One could take a loan from the government and would pay it back in monthly installments.
The Land War was a period of agrarian agitation in rural Ireland that began in 1879. It may refer specifically to the first and most intense period of agitation between 1879 and 1882, or include later outbreaks of agitation that periodically reignited until 1923, especially the 1886–1891 Plan of Campaign and the 1906–1909 Ranch War. The agitation was led by the Irish National Land League and its successors, the Irish National League and the United Irish League, and aimed to secure fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure for tenant farmers and ultimately peasant proprietorship of the land they worked.
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The Tenant Right League was a federation of local societies formed in Ireland in the wake of the Great Famine to check the power of landlords and advance the rights of tenant farmers. An initiative of northern unionists and southern nationalists, it articulated a common programme of agrarian reform. In the wake of the League's success in helping return 48 pledged MPs to the Westminster Parliament in 1852, the promised unity of "North and South" dissolved. An attempt was made to revive the all-Ireland effort in 1874, but struggle for rights to the land was to continue through to the end of the century on lines that reflected the regional and sectarian division over Ireland's continued place in the United Kingdom.
William Sharman Crawford (1780–1861) was an Irish landowner who, in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, championed a democratic franchise, a devolved legislature for Ireland, and the interests of the Irish tenant farmer. As a Radical representing first, with Daniel O'Connell's endorsement, Dundalk (1835-1837) and then, with the support of Chartists, the English constituency of Rochdale (1841–1852) he introduced bills to codify and extend in Ireland the Ulster tenant right. In his last electoral contest, standing on the platform of the all-Ireland Tenant Right League in 1852 he failed to unseat the Conservative and Orange party in Down, his native county.
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Samuel MacCurdy Greer (1810–1880), was an Irish politician who, in Ulster championed Presbyterian representation and tenant rights. He was a founder member of the Ulster Tenant Right Association and of the all-Ireland Tenant Right League. In the general election of 1857 he was returned to Westminster on a tenant-right platform for County Londonderry.
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The Evesham Custom is a distinctive form of customary leasehold tenure used in the market gardens of Evesham, Worcestershire. It is the most well-known of a number of former local practises, such as the Ulster Custom and North Lincolnshire Custom. The underlying principle of such customs was that the tenant could be granted compensation for any improvements they made to the land they leased, since the common law did not provide any such protection.
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The Agricultural Holdings (England) Act 1883 was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed by William Ewart Gladstone's Liberal government.
James MacKnight (1801–1876) was an Irish journalist and agrarian reformer whose call for Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale briefly surmounted Ireland's political and sectarian division. In the United Kingdom general election of 1852 the all-Ireland Tenant Right League, which MacKnight formed in a joint initiative with Charles Gavan Duffy, helped return 48 pledged MPs. Pulled between Catholic and nationalist sentiment in the south and the strength of Protestant and unionist feeling in the north, the League and its Independent Irish Party did not survive the elections of 1857. In Ulster, MacKnight supported tenant-right candidates committed to the legislative union with Great Britain, while remaining sharply critical of British government efforts to address Ireland's continuing agrarian crisis.
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