April 2017 3 5
L
AND – the lack of it, and the lament for it – is a
foundation source for annals of Irish poetry,
song, theatre and legal dispute. It has played
host to the battle of a Catholic King and a Prot-
estant Prince, giving undue deference to 1690
as the pivotal moment for this island, while denying the
potency of the occupation of Ireland from the 1650s, its
plunder and its plantation, fuelled by a sectarianism that
will persist across time if not readdressed in our own,
dangerously interesting, times.
In 1649, half a century before the Battle of the Boyne,
Charles I of England was executed. In his wake, the
Reformed armies of an English Commonwealth, under
the command of Oliver Cromwell, embarked upon a jour-
ney across the sea to subdue the Irish and to complete
the conquest of this island. To the victor, the spoils: the
armies led by Cromwell included chain-laden surveyors
deploying the tools of cartographers in service to the
newly dominant power. Across Ire-
land, chains were laid down. The
Down Survey, conducted under the
authority of William Petty, was the
“first detailed land survey, on a
national scale, anywhere in the
world” (downsurvey.tcd.ie). The land
was measured, forfeited by Irish
owners and redistributed to Adven-
turers, to English soldiers and
others, thus securing the ‘planting’
of new settlers loyal to their benefactors. For example,
Trinity College Estates enjoyed a boost to its land bank.
Twelve London companies were granted land ”in return
for a financial contribution to the scheme for the planta
-
tion of Ulster” (Dooley, 2000).
The sectarian transfer of ownership, in large part but not
exclusively from Catholic to Protestant l, included all land
surveyed and valued that was between 500 acres and
“almost 157,000 acres”, creating a newly enriched landlord
class. Tenant rents, collected by a ‘middleman’- often the
second son of an absentee landlord - fostered division and
sub-division of the estates. Land was fragmented, tenan
-
cies rendered insecure and lives made precarious with
both poverty and resistance widespread.
Tensions inherent in the Cromwellian settlement and
later plantations were compounded, under the 1801 Union
of Great Britain and Ireland, by the failed harvests of 1845,
1846 and 1847, and by famine. Authoritative sources esti
-
mate 700,000 tenants on small holdings were evicted.
Under instruction from the Courts of Equity, bankrupt
landlords were relieved of their property and the Encum-
bered Estates Act of 1849 facilitated a fur ther 1200 petitions
for sale. Meanwhile the gombeens, who exploited the
starving by selling much-needed food and goods on credit
at ruinous interest rates, were rising.
One million famine related deaths, and the fraught pas-
sage of a million dispossessed, transported disaffection
– Whiteboys, Molly Maguires, the Knights of Labour –
across the world from Munster to Liverpool, to the
coalmines of Pennsylv ania, and beyond. Ragged battalions
of Ireland were dispatched to colonies across the British
Empire, fostering the political will to organise, to return
and to subvert. In 1867 the Fenians, emerging from the
secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, resolved to secure
a Republic for Ireland by force of arms.
British Prime Minister William Gladstone acknowl-
edged that there was injustice across Ireland. Irish MPs
How the
gombeens
prevailed
by Mary Jones
Agitation for land reform
was fuelled by the claims
and the ambitions of ‘strong
farmers’, the dominant
social and political class in
nineteenth-century Ireland
Ire
‘We declre he righ of he people of
Irelnd o he ownership of Irelnd’.
Third paragraph, 1916 Proclamation of the
Irish Republic.
Illusrion couresy of www.rbble.ie