Land questions in modern Ireland

By Manchester University Press

This collection of essays explores the nature and dynamics of Ireland's land questions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also the ways in which the Irish land question has been written about by historians.

The book makes a vital contribution to the study of historiography by including for the first time the reflections of a group of prominent historians on their earlier work. These historians consider their influences and how their views have changed since the publication of their books, so that these essays provide an ethnographic study of historians' thoughts on the shelf-life of books exploring the way history is made.

The book will be of interest to historians of modern Ireland, and those interested in the revisionist debate in Ireland, as well as to sociologists and anthropologists studying Ireland or rural societies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526111425

Book preview

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Surveys

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Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh: Irish land questions in the state of the Union

In a short but challenging article, published in 1994, the cultural critic Seamus Deane proposed a fundamental distinction between the use of ‘land’ and ‘soil’, as descriptors of territory in Irish history, and between the Irish ‘struggle for the land’ in the nineteenth century and the contest for ‘the soil of Ireland’. According to Deane, ‘soil is what land becomes when it is ideologically constructed as a natal source, that element out of which the Irish originate and to which their past generations have returned. It is a political notion, stripped, by a strategy of sacralisation, of all economic and commercial reference ... The struggle for the land and, indeed, the struggle with the land, is contrastingly marked by an inexhaustible series of references to its economic status – property, rent, productivity, upkeep, leases, encumbrances, improvement, impoverishment, ownership, tenant right, landlord right, buying and selling, state purchase, redistribution etc. ... the distinction [is] between soil as a material-metaphysical possession and land as a politico-legal entity. The nation is of the soil; the State is of the land.¹

When Fintan Lalor, in the famine crisis of 1847, denounced the landlords as an alien class rather than an integral element of the Irish people (‘They do not now, and never did belong to this island. Tyrants and traitors have they ever been to us and ours since first they set foot on our soil’) and declared that ‘I hold and maintain that the entire soil of a country belongs of right to the people of that country, and is the rightful property not of any one class, but of the nation at large, in full effective possession, to let to whom they will on whatever terms, rents, services, and conditions they will; one condition, however, being unavoidable, and essential, the condition that the tenant shall bear full, true, and undivided fealty and allegiance to the nation, and the laws of the nation whose lands he holds ...’,² he was clearly deploying the registers of meaning of both terms, soil and land, as historically constructed in Ireland. A system of laws there must be, governing the ‘holding’ of land, but the existing system (‘Irish landlordism’), based upon the root injustice of conquest and confiscation and the imposition of an ‘alien’ landlord class, could never enjoy legitimacy or command general respect: it must be challenged and torn down. Lalor’s was not the first such denunciation of the authority claims of Irish landlordism, resting as they did on an unexpiated historical injustice done to the Irish people: versions of this case had featured earlier in threatening public notices of such agrarian secret societies as the Rockites.³ This strongly historicized understanding of legitimacy in the matter of landownership and occupancy would also resonate in the later slogans of Parnell, Davitt and others in the Land War, demanding ‘the land for the people’. Notions of contested legitimacy and the incessant historicizing of debate on the complex issues relating to Irish land (owning it, occupying/ holding it, having access to it, ‘belonging’ in it) were central elements of the land struggle and in political discourse in nineteenth-century Ireland.

More recently, within the broad discourse of ‘colonialism’, historical geographers, cultural critics and ethnographers have offered new readings of the conquest and colonization of not only the physical territory of Ireland but of its complex ‘meanings’, through its units, place names, lore and legends of place.⁴ This more comprehensive ‘appropriation’ of the land of Ireland – walking it, dividing it, mapping it, renaming it, assigning legal ownership of it, dictating the terms of its occupancy, ‘mastering’ it – was a fundamental aspect of the protracted process of colonization. Thus, William J. Smyth, in his major study of the mapping of the decisive episode of conquest and colonization in the early modern period, presents this aspect of the conquest in oppositional terms as ‘the uneven battle between the power to shape and flatten worlds which are defined more by accounting, geometry, mathematics and perspective mapping, on the one hand, and on the other, a gaelicized/Gaelic world, where such maps were either unknown or not formally used and where territories and peoples were ruled and administered mainly by the words and living images associated with manuscripts, memory, local lore and myth’.⁵

However, even as the task of naming and mastering the Irish landscape was reaching completion in the Ordnance Survey of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the totalizing nationalist project of ‘reclamation’ was well underway.⁶ Of course, the narrative of Irish history encoded in the Irish language – in its literary, manuscript tradition still functioning into the eighteenth century but increasingly transmitted orally within the Irish-speaking community from late in that century – continued to preserve and transmit the older topography and its mosaic of meanings, as part of a more comprehensive narrative of lost status and legitimacy.⁷ But with the language shift and the development of a nationalist, historicist rhetoric of loss, grievance and restoration, articulated in English (the ‘undoing of the conquest’), the historicization of the Irish landscape itself was evident at various levels of Irish society by the early nineteenth century. Thus, O’Connell not only selected sites of historic significance (Tara, Clontarf) for his repeal ‘monster meetings’, but from the outset of his mass mobilizations, he ‘constantly referred to local landscape to make his audience conscious of current grievance and its imminent redress’.⁸ Novelists, travel writers and journalists repeatedly historicized the Irish landscape. Predictably, and with considerable effect, the Young Irelanders in their propaganda for a ‘nationalist awakening’ saw the Irish landscape as ‘inescapably scored with historical signs’ and constantly reminded their audience of the significance of these signs.⁹

Even in popular ballads, as Maura Cronin points out, ‘... where references to landscape served to recall specific local events, the capacity of the ballad to fuel popular grievance was particularly powerful’, and ‘ballads – and the communities for and among whom they were composed – manipulated landscape to reflect the political and social aspirations of the cosmhuintir in an era of change’.¹⁰

Contested beliefs regarding the Irish past infected many aspects of cultural and philanthropic endeavour, including scholarship and publications on Irish history and antiquities. The issue of exactly whose past was being celebrated and commemorated was contested, even among dedicated scholars. Who could claim to be the authentic ‘heirs’ of this glorious past, or was it the common inheritance of all who now called themselves Irish, whatever their origins, their ethno-religious identity, or indeed their current political loyalty on the issue of the Union?¹¹ Contested ownership of the Irish past – issues of pedigree, continuity and cultural inheritance – would inevitably be coloured by ethno-religious considerations and identity conflicts, despite the strongly inclusivist refrain that echoed through official nationalist rhetoric from O’Connell to Redmond in the constitutional tradition and from Tone to the Fenians in the republican separatist line. It is in the context of this pervasive contestation on the ‘ownership’ of the Irish landscape and of history itself that we can best understand why the registers of ‘soil’ and of ‘land’ need to be kept under constant review in any examination of the ‘Irish land question’ as it is more commonly understood in commentaries on nineteenth-century Ireland.

In recent years, several scholars – notably Beiner and Leerssen – have explored the construction of ‘social memory’ as a factor in Irish popular history.¹² However, in the context of the relationship between Irish popular sentiment, political mobilization and the dynamics of land agitation in its several, successive phases (popular–constitutional and clandestine–violent) during the nineteenth century, the integrity of social memory is less important than the general popular receptivity to the myth of ‘historical dispossession’, however mediated or manipulated. All significant movements – constitutional or clandestine or hybrid – intent on influencing the terms and conditions under which land was owned, occupied or worked in nineteenth-century Ireland addressed both the politico-legal significance of land and the material–metaphysical dimension of ‘Irish soil’. That is to say, these movements arose out of real, pressing economic grievances and demands: they may well have been triggered by highly local circumstances, sometimes salted by local personal or family feuds and enmities, or by heightened religious or sectarian tensions, but effective mobilization invariably required the lubrication of ‘historical memory’–however selective, imperfect or manipulated – of old, unexpiated wrongs.

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The conventional formulation of the Irish land question is as an essentially political question. For the British state, beginning to preside over the first industrial society and the most powerful empire in the world, security was the paramount factor in completing the Union of 1801. Security, stability and law and order remained its priority in Ireland throughout the Union era. The state would work with those social groups in Ireland best able to ensure such stability. Its own security apparatus – the laws, courts, magistrates, military and police – was formidable and capable of enhancement as circumstances demanded. The natural – and, by historical ties and loyalties, the preferred – leading partners in this project of keeping Ireland safe and orderly were the landed elite. But when and where they proved inadequate to the task, the state found alternative allies and agents within Irish society. This, in a nutshell, is the principal reason why the Irish land question was at the centre of the larger ‘Irish question’, in all its complexity, throughout the Union period, and why shifting formulations of the Irish land question reflected changing circumstances and challenges for the rulers of the state in seeking to make Ireland a safe and stable constituent of the United Kingdom.¹³

At the beginning of the Union era, Ireland’s population, already growing for several decades, was over five million; it would continue to grow until reaching around eight and a half million by 1845.¹⁴ Apart from an emerging industrial enclave in the north-east, agriculture was overwhelmingly the basis of the economy, with Ireland becoming, in effect, a specialist supplier of food to the emerging industrial Britain. By the early nineteenth century, the land of Ireland was owned by c. 10,000 landowners, the majority of plantation and Protestant origin (though Catholic landownership was increasing and would continue to increase throughout the century). There were of the order of 800,000 agricultural ‘holdings’ in Ireland. Tillage (encouraged by the long wartime economy from the 1770s to Waterloo) was a major component of the agricultural economy, facilitated by massive potato cultivation that sustained a huge underclass of agricultural labour (landless, cottiers and smallholders). By 1845, about three million were virtually exclusively subsisting on a potato diet, which was also a major part of the diet of a much larger number.¹⁵

By contrast, by the eve of the Great War, as the Union era reached its twilight, the population of Ireland was 4.4 million and had been falling almost continuously since 1845. The famine and emigration had savagely winnowed the ranks of the agricultural labourers, cottiers and smallholders. Irish agriculture was now predominantly based on grassland: by 1914, livestock accounted for three-quarters of the total value of agricultural output.¹⁶ A revolution in landownership was well underway, as state-funded schemes (notably the Land Act of 1903, with later amendments) enabled farmers to buy out their holdings from their landlords (and enticed or compelled landlords to sell). Irish landlords were on their way out; farmer-owners constituted the new base of Irish landed