Land War
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The Land War in Irish History was a period of agrarian agitation in rural Ireland in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. The agitation was led by the Irish National Land League and was dedicated to bettering the position of tenant farmers and ultimately to a redistribution of land to tenants from landlords, especially absentee landlords. While there were many violent incidents in this campaign, it was not actually a "war", but rather a prolonged period of civil unrest.
[edit] History
In February 1870 the Land Conference, at a public sitting, passed resolutions condemning capricious evictions and demanding
- permanent fixture of the tenant in the soil
- eviction only on non-payment of rent
- right of sale of interest by the tenant
- the establishment of local land tribunals and the valuation of rent.[1]
The Land League was founded in 1879 by Michael Davitt - an Irish Republican Brotherhood member and radical politician. Initially it sought reform including the "Three F's" - that is Fair rent, Fixity of tenure and Free sale. Davitt was rapidly joined by Charles Stewart Parnell the leader of mainstream Irish nationalism and the Irish Parliamentary Party together with other agarian agitators and activists William O'Brien, John Dillon, Timothy Healy and Willie Redmond. Violence occurred when Land League members resisted the eviction of farmers by the Royal Irish Constabulary and there were also attacks on Landlords and their property during the "Land War" and the later Plan of Campaign. In response soldiers were even deployed to restore law and order and enforce evictions, and coercion acts were passed -a form of martial law, for a time. However the most effective method of the Land League was the Boycott, where an unpopular landlord agent Charles Boycott was ostracised by the local community.
The Land question in Ireland was ultimately defused by a series of Irish Land Acts, beginning in 1870 and continuing until 1927. These acts allowed tenants first to attain extensive property rights on their leaseholdings and then to purchase their land off their landlords via government loans. The traditional view of the Land War in Ireland has been of the displacement of an ascendancy class and the largely absentee landlords.
However, recent research has suggested that many Landlords in the late 19th and early 20th century, such as Lord Dunsany or Lord Dunraven, had more progressives attitudes towards their estates and tenants. In addition, it is claimed that the bigger farmers were the main beneficiaries of the Land Acts, as the small farmers' holdings, especially in the west, were uneconomic as private farms.
