Ireland Goes Bust

[David Guyatt]

This could result in a new "Great Famine" the necessary conditions of which are set out in the Wiki entry extract below. Today's "Landlords" are the EU:

Landlords and tenants

During the 18th century a new system for managing the landlord's property was introduced in the form of the "middleman system". Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the (usually Protestant) landlord of a regular income, and relieved them of any responsibility; the tenants however were then subject to exploitation through these middlemen.

Catholics made up 80 percent of the population, the bulk of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity despite Catholic emancipation in 1829. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class", the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land, and who had more or less limitless power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast: the Earl of Lucan owned over 60,000 acres (240 km2). Many of these landlords lived in England and were called "absentee landlords". The rent revenue was sent to England [14], collected from "impoverished tenants" paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export.[15]

In 1843, the British Government considered that the land question in Ireland was the root cause of disaffection in the country. They set up a Royal Commission, chaired by the Earl of Devon, to inquire into the laws with regard to the occupation of land in Ireland. Daniel O'Connell described this commission as perfectly one-sided, being made up of landlords and no tenants.[16] Devon in February 1845 reported that "It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure . . . in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water . . . their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury . . . and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property." The Commissioners concluded that they could not "forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain."[17]

The Commission stated that the principal cause was the bad relations between the landlord and tenant. There was no hereditary loyalty, feudal tie or paternalism as existed in England. Ireland was a conquered country, with the Earl of Clare speaking of the landlords saying "confiscation is their common title." According to Woodham-Smith, the landlords regarded the land as a source of income from which to extract as much money as possible. With the Irish "brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation" according to the Earl of Clare, Ireland was seen as a hostile place in which to live, and as a consequence absentee landlords were common, with some visiting their property once or twice in a lifetime, or never. The Rents from Ireland were then spent in England, it being estimated that in 1842 £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland.

According to Woodham-Smith, the ability of the middlemen was measured by the amount of money they could contrive to extract.[18] . Described by the Commission as "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country," they were invariably described as "land sharks" and "bloodsuckers."[19]