Jonathon Swift sought to make the world understand the terrible poverty that existed in Ireland under English control. He suggested,"a young healthy child well nursed, is at a year old, a delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food,"in his satirical essay A Modest Proposal in 1729. He added,
Much of the English acquisition of Irish land started in the sixteenth century with the rule of King Henry VIII. In 1534, Henry was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church. Subsequently, he tried to convert Ireland to Protestantism, but the Irish rejected Henry's efforts and viewed the event as an opportunity to launch a rebellion to defeat the English. The Irish, however, were quikly defeated. Henry angrily directed his army to size conrol of all Ireland --intil that time England was only able to control the are around Dublin, called the English Pale. This was the starting point for the religious division; the native Irish were Catholics, and English and their descendants were Protestants.
Several years later, Henry's daughter, Mary I, directed the English army to seize the lands of the rebellious O'More and O'Connor clans in central Ireland. She gave the land to English settlers --setting up the first English plantation in Ireland.
In the early 1600's, England established control over the Ulster region in northern Ireland. The O'Neill clans had been very resistant to english control and had fought the English back for many years. When the English army was finally able to defeat the O'Neills and their control of their vast lands in Ulster, the English decided they needed to take actions that would maintain strict control of the area. So they established another plantation. Again, after the native Irish were evected from good farmable land in Ulster, loyal English and Scottish settlers were welcomed to the land on the condition they would keep the English ways and the Protestant religion.
In 1641, Irish Catholic rebels, who deeply resented the plantations, massacred about 4,000 Protestant settlers. Protestants retaliated in 1649 under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, who had become the lord protector of England. Cromwell launched his infamous march across Ireland, which killed thousands of men, women, and children. Cromwell assumed the role of an angry God, punishing Irish Catholics for their actions.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Irish Catholics found themselves limited to being tenants or owners of small unprofitable farms. In addition, the English Parliament passed legislation that excluded Catholics from any position in the Irish government. The Irish parliament took further actions, outlawing Catholic worship, legal actions over land settlements, practicing law, buying land, holding a lease for more than thirty-one years and bequeathing land to Catholic heirs.
The poverty the landlord system created was deplorable. Arthur Young, who toured Ireland in the 1770's wrote, "The cottages of the Irish...are the most miserable looking hovels that can well be conceived...consisting only of a pot for boiling their potatoes, a bit of a table, and one or two broken stools; beds are not found universally, the family lying on straw"(Moody 217).
Gustave de Beaumont in 1839 wrote, "though he had seen the Red Indian in his forests and the American Negro in his chains, in Ireland he had come across 'the very extreme in human wretchedness" (Johnson 97).
the Irish Potato Famine led to the worst chapter in the "landlord system" in Ireland. Most of the Catholic farmers were too poor to raise any crops other than potatoes. When a fungus invaded the fields in the summer of 1845, Ireland's potato crop was destoyed. "About 750,000 people died of starvation or disease, and hundreds of thousands more left the country during the famine" (World Book 727).
Ath the start of the famine, the English people felt the Irish landlords should be responsible for helping the starving masses, instead of English taxpayers. However, the landlords saw the famine as an opportunity to upgrade their estates. "What stayed longest and deepest in the collective memory of the Irish peasants was not so much the hunger itself as the way in which landlords exploited the famine to disencumber their estates, actually emerging better off from the disaster" (Johnson 104-5).
Landlords used the famine to drive the poor tenants off their land and into town or onto emigrant ships. Landlords had legislation passed that required a tenant to give up his land before he could receive any financial assistnce fro the government. When the tenants left, the landlords demolished the tenants' homes. J.CBeckett in his book, The Anglo-Irish Tradition, describes landlords during the famine who refued "to reduce rents and, if the farmers defaulted, (they raided) their crops under possession orders, protected by bailiffs and police" (Johnson 105).
The events of the famine influenced the thinking of Irish Catholics. They saw how reluctant the English were to provide assistance to the starving masses. They saw how the landlord profited from the famine to drive poor tenants off their estates. Where the Catholics had been collectively resistant to many changes before the famine, they now were ready to take the actions necessary to bring about change, expecially with the landlord system.
Aside from the violent elements, peaceful factions made real progress for the Catholics. Daniel O'Connell led the Catholic Emancipation movement. As a result of his efforts, the Catholics won the right to serve in the British Parliament in 1829. In 1850, Charles Duffy started the Tenants Rights League, which unified the Irish to demand the 'three Fs' --fair rent, fixity of tenure, and freedom for the tenant to sell his interest in his holding.
The callous attitude of the British government towards Ireland during the famine enraged Irish leaders. As a result, several nationalistic clubs and societies joined together in 1858 to create the Irish Republican Brotherhood, also known as the Fenian Movement. Their goal was to build a military force that could defeat the British. "The concept of revolution included a confiscation and redistribution of the land of Ireland"(dePaor 263).
British leaders became fearful of the Fenian movement. In 1868, William Gladstone became the British Prime Minister. He realized the Irish troubles, stating, 'My mission is to pacify Ireland" (dePeor 263). In 1870, Gladstone led Parliament to pass the Land Act. It was the first time the British Parliament had taken an action to help the Irish tenants. Unfortunatey, there was a great decline in agricultural prices in the late 1870s that led many farmers to face bankruptcy, starvation, and eviction. Between 1874 and 1881, there wer over 10,000 evictions. Those evictions lead to a drastic increase in agricultural crime and outrage (Johnson 140).
To protect the tenants from eviction and unfair rent amounts, Michael Davitt, a Fenian, founded the Land League in 1879. The Land League led "the so-called 'land war'of 1879-82...the greatest mass-movement of modern Ireland. An elaborate system of moral-force warfare was developed; process-serving and evections were made the occasion of great popular demonstration, families evicted for non-payment of rent were sheltered and supported; and embargo was placed on evected farms; persons involved in prosecutions because of league activities were defended and families of those sent to prison were cared for' and the terrible weapon on social ostracism, the boycott, was perfected (Moody 286).
In 1881, Parliament passed a new land bill which conceded many of the demands of the Land League. However the land bill still ignored the 100,000 tenants who were now being evicted. Rural vilence and resistance to rent immediately increased as the Irish people now sought ownership of the land.
Many landlords realizedit was time for them to sell out. In addition to the violence, they saw that land courts, which were provided for in the new legislation, were sstarting to lower the rents of the tenants.
In 1885, the Ashbourne Act established a state-aided system that enabled tenants to purchase their land. Finally, in 1903, the Wyndham Act "abolished landlordism and turned(ed) Ireland into a land of "peasant owners" (Moody 288).