First Irish Land Act 1870

The Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 was an Act passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1870.

Between the Acts of Union 1800 and 1870, Parliament had passed many Acts dealing with Irish land, but every one of them had been in the interest of the landlord against the tenant. The Incumbered Estates (Ireland) Act 1849 had led to a new class of speculators as landlords in Ireland. Their first priority was raising tenants' rents to increase their income, and they were generally considered worse than the old landlords. A report on landlord-tenant relations written by poor law inspectors in 1869 for the Chief Secretary for Ireland drew attention to the hardships inflicted on tenants under the new landlords.

The Liberal Party under the leadership of William Ewart Gladstone had been elected in 1868 promising to bring justice for Ireland, including land reform. The President of the Board of Trade, John Bright, believed that the solution to Irish land question was to transform the tenants into owners. He wrote to Gladstone on 21 May 1869:

When the Irish church question is out of the way, we shall find all Ireland, north and south alike, united in demanding something on the land question much broader than anything hitherto offered or proposed in compensation bills. If the question is to go on without any real remedy for the grievance, the condition of Ireland in this particular will become worse, and the measures far beyond anything I now contemplate will be necessary. I am most anxious to meet the evil before it is too great for control, and my plan will meet it without wrong to any man.

Gladstone replied, doubting to the wisdom of the government embarking on a very large involvement in Irish land, purchasing estates from landlords to resell them to the tenants. He believed that economic laws might afterwards return Irish land again into fewer hands. He added: "Your plan, if adopted in full, could only extend to a small proportion of the two or three hundred millions worth of land in Ireland; and I do not well see how the unprotected tenants of the land in general would take essential benefit from the purchase and owning of land by a few of their fortunate brethren".

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