X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Irish Land Acts


Alexander Haslett

Haslett was a Presbyterian – a member of the Ballyalbany Congregation in Monaghan town – who had purchased his own small farm under the 1903 Land Act.

Irish Land Acts

The "Report of her Majesty's Commissioners of Enquiry into the working of the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act of 1870 and the acts amending the same", under the chairmanship of the 6th Earl of Bessborough and hence commonly known as the Bessborough Commission Report, was published in 1881 after lengthy hearings in 1880.

Irish nationalism

O'Brien's attainment of the 1903 Wyndham Land Act (the culmination of land agitation since the 1880s) abolished landlordism, and made it easier for tenant farmers to purchase lands, financed and guaranteed by the government.

Laurence Ginnell

The purpose of the war was to bring relief to the large numbers of landless and smallholders, particularly in the West, who were relatively untouched by the Wyndham Land Purchase Act (1903) and by the larger policy of purchase.


Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement

Ireland was also to pay a final one time £10 million sum to the United Kingdom for the "land annuities" derived from financial loans originally granted to Irish tenant farmers by the British government to enable them purchase lands under the Irish Land Acts pre-1922, a provision which was part of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty (to compensate Anglo-Irish land-owners for compulsory purchase of their lands in Ireland mainly through the Irish Land Commission).

Land War

Prime Minister Gladstone attempted to resolve the land question with Balfour’s dual ownership Second Land Act of 1881, but it failed to eliminate tenant evictions.


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