By Emer ó Siochrú. The design and manner of introduction of the household charge exposed the mindset of the Department of Finance which believes that simplicity (€100 per dwelling owner with almost no exceptions) was more important than fairness for public compliance with a new tax. It appears Irish people are not that simple-minded and have demanded instead that their acceptance of a new tax depends instead on its equity and effectiveness. Land and Site Value Tax is the inheritor of a long and honorable tradition of land reform in Ireland; it is not a new idea but a forgotten idea. James Fintan Lawlor, a leading member of Young Ireland in the 1848 rebellions wrote “I hold and maintain that the entire soil of a country belongs of right to the entire people of that country, and is the lawful property, not of any one class, but of the nation at large, in full effective possession” and that the people should decide that rents “should be paid to themselves, the people, for public purposes, and for behoof and benefit of them, the entire general people”. Lawlor in turn influenced Michael Davitt who led the land struggle at the end of the 19th century. Davitt was influenced by the American economic reformer, Henry George, writer of the best-selling book Progress and Poverty which held that the ownership of land was of less importance than the nature of its ownership. Henry George did not believe that State ownership of the land was necessary or even desirable and in this he differed markedly from Socialists. According to George, by fairly taxing the unearned income from land, the community could recapture that part which was its common inheritance and in so doing entirely eliminate the need for other taxes on productive activity. Henry George visited Ireland during the land struggles of the 1880s and found vindication for his theories in the the call for ‘tenant right’ or the three Fs of Fair rent, Fixity of tenure and Free sale of tenant improvements. Michael Davitt wrote in 1902 that he would … abolish land monopoly by simply taxing all land, exclusive of improvements, up to its full value…In other words, I would recognise private property in the results of labour, and not in land. The land struggle started out well with a nuanced understanding of the nature of land ownership and how rights, responsibilities and revenues might be most efficiently and equitably assigned. But before long tenant ‘right to buy’ became the single dominating issue and the interests of others ignored. Davitt feared that “increasing the number of those holding private property in land” is “simply landlordism in another form”. He also worried that peasant proprietorship “excludes the (agricultural) labourers from all hope of being able to elevate themselves from their present degraded condition”. The Land Act of 1903 set in place the process of redistribution of farmland from the mainly Anglo-Irish landlords to their mainly Catholic head tenants by compulsory acquisition or its threat. Whereas in 1870 only three percent of Irish farmers owned their land, by 1908, this figure was 50 percent. By the early 1920s, the figure was at 70 percent. The Congested Districts Board was then set up to consolidate fragmented landholdings of the ‘clachan’ villagers into the isolated farmhouses that many rural dwellers now insist are the traditional settlement pattern. Pádraig Pearse, writing after the major part of the land redistribution had been accomplished, plainly felt that the job was incomplete and supported Lalor’s call for “land for the people and not just for the farmers”. The Land Commission of the new Free State and later Republic worked to little effect into the 1960s to increase agricultural productivity by acquiring under-performing farmers’ land to transfer to more efficient or more deserving farmers. It was a highly politicised process in which Cumann na nGadheal / Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil failed to find an equitable and efficient system to apportion the nation’s land. In a system where apportioning rights was restricted to the blunt instrument of ownership and possession of land on a finite island, only wide-scale emigration of the disinherited underwrote such redistribution as was possible. The land issue had apparently been solved insofar as the problem had changed to that of emigration and perennial under-development. It was 50 years before the land question was addressed again by the Irish economist Raymond Crotty in his largely forgotten book Irish Agricultural Production, in 1966. Crotty’s first love was farming and he only took up economics to understand why the conventional agricultural advice yielded such disappointing results. Challenging received wisdom, Crotty sought out the data to develop his own theories of Irish economic development from first principles. He concluded finally that the land vested in the occupying farmers by the various Land acts was on “exceedingly favourable” terms and this fact was the root cause of the under-development of Irish agricultural in later years: “The decrease in farmers’ rental payments, which followed the fixing of judicial rents and the vesting of property in the tenants following upon reductions brought about by the organised agitation of the Land League, gave grounds for expecting that “the magic of property” would “turn land into gold”. Irish farmers did not strive to maximise the productivity of their land by hiring and investing: it was more profitable and less risky for them to let the land do the work fattening cattle and sheep for sale on the hoof. The low level of farm output contrasted sharply with other similar countries such as Denmark where many more people worked the land and processed the output, and where wages and living conditions were considerably higher than in Ireland. The measure Crotty proposed to rectify this state of affairs was an annual tax on farm land based on its full conacre rental value. Crotty believed that prioritising the welfare of land-owners over the welfare of the people of Ireland as a whole was morally indefensible and economically
