A lecture titled ‘Landlords and tenants in Co. Carlow, 1879-1960’, will take place this evening in the Seven Oaks Hotel by Dr Oliver Whelan.
The lecture will cover the history of landlords and their tenants in Carlow from 1879 when virtually all the land in Carlow was owned by landlords to 1960 when the landlords had entirely disappeared from the landscape.
The deep agricultural depression which caused the ‘Little Famine’ of the late 1870s prompted a major attack on the dominant position of the Carlow landlords who refused to make any meaningful reductions in rents for their tenants and often evicted those who were unable to pay. The landlords MacMurrough Kavanagh of Borris, Bruen of Oak Park and Rathdonnell of Lisnavagh dominated political and social life in Carlow at this time.
Following the outbreak of this agitation, known as the land war, the British government adopted a carrot and stick approach to pacifying the country. Prominent leaders of the land movement in Tullow, Hacketstown, Borris and Ballon were imprisoned while the power of the landlords was undermined when special land courts were set up to decide on how much rent the tenants should pay. Continued agitation by tenants resulted in gradual improvements in the terms on which they could borrow money from the government to purchase their farms. Land and politics were deeply entwined as Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster supported the tenants’ campaigns while agitating for a Home Rule parliament in Dublin. During World War I the British government ceased to provide money for tenants to purchase their holdings as it devoted all its resources to the war effort. This was followed by the emergence of Sinn Fein and its campaign in the War of Independence for full national sovereignty.
After the Civil War the Free State government set about completing the transfer of land ownership to the tenants with the enactment of the 1923 Land Act – more than half the land in Carlow was still owned by landlords at that stage. The programme of transferring land ownership from landlords to tenants continued in Carlow, often under difficult circumstances due to the depression of the 1930s and the outbreak of World War II. The last significant lands of the Carlow landlords were acquired by the Land Commission in the 1950s following pressure exerted mainly by the Bennekerry land club, led by Kathleen Brady.
