X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Irish Land Commission


Irish Land Commission

This was successfully opposed for social and political reasons by Éamon de Valera, and in Coalition governments by Joseph Blowick, the leader of Clann na Talmhan.

A further Land Act in 1909 fostered by the liberal Chief Secretary for Ireland Augustine Birrell allowed for tenanted land where the owner was unwilling to sell to be bought by the Commission by compulsory purchase.

After the Partition of Ireland the Irish Free State (Consequential Provisions) Act, 1922 abolished many all-island offices, including the Land Commissioners, effective from the the creation of the Irish Free State on 6 December 1922.

Often the buyers found it hard to earn enough to live a good life, as found in the poems of Patrick Kavanagh.

John O'Hagan

After Gladstone had passed his Irish Land Act, he chose O'Hagan as the first judicial head of the Irish Land Commission, making him for this purpose a judge of Her Majesty's High Court of Justice.

Woodbrook House

In 1946, over fifty acres was sold to the local Carrick on Shannon Golf Club while the Land Commission subsequently divided the remainder.


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).


see also