Abstract
This chapter examines the establishment phase of Ireland’s property-based welfare system, when property redistribution was transformed from a field of periodic crisis management to a permanent item on the policy agenda. Its starting point in 1870 reflects the timing of the first significant attempt at land reform (the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1870), the emergence of the agricultural tenants movement which promoted this reform (led by the Land League) and the intensive phase of the parliamentary campaign for Irish self-government within the UK (home rule which was dominated by the Irish Party led by Charles Stewart Parnell). Much of this chapter concentrates on the emergence of policy action to first regulate agricultural tenancies and then to enable and finally to subsidise the purchase of farms by tenant farms from the autocratic agricultural landlords who owned almost all land in Ireland prior to the 1870s. The chapter explains that the scale of this intervention was remarkable. In 1870 only 3 per cent of Irish farmers owned their land and fewer than 800 landlords owned half the country; by the time Ireland seceded from the UK and an independent Irish state was founded in 1922 some two-thirds of tenant farmers had bought their holdings and the government loans provided to enable them to do so amounted to £101 million, whereas Irish GDP has been estimated at £135 million at this time. This chapter explains how the precedent set by government spending on land reform inspired knock-on claims for similarly generous subsidies for rural social housing and also homeownership.
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Norris, M. (2016). Establishment: 1870–1921. In: Property, Family and the Irish Welfare State. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44567-0_2
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