Land Commission

The Irish Land Commission (or simply Land Commission) was created in 1881 as a rent fixing commission by the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881, also known as the second Irish Land Act. For a century it was the body responsible for re-distributing farmland in most of Ireland.

With the Ashbourne Act 1885, the Commission developed into a tenant-purchasing commission and assisted in the agreed transfer of freehold farmland from landlord to tenant. This was a response to the turbulent Land War that had started in 1879. It was rapidly enacted by the government of Lord Salisbury, was funded initially with £5,000,000, and was designed to avert support for the Irish Parliamentary Party, given the larger number of voters allowed by the Reform Act 1884, before the IPP entered its alliance with William Ewart Gladstone in 1886.

The Commission eventually transferred 13.5 million acres (55,000 km²) by 1920. Following the Land Conference of December 1902 arranged by George Wyndham (a conservative minister and Chief Secretary for Ireland, but also descended from Lord Edward FitzGerald), the revolutionary Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act 1903 was orchestrated through Parliament by William O'Brien, MP, which provided government finance to buy out freeholds, with the former tenant farmers paying back the capital over 68 years. This was managed by the Land Commission, along with ancillary work such as compiling statistics. Valuations were reckoned on a "years purchase" (Y.P.) basis, the price being a multiple of (perhaps 16 times) the annual rent, instead of the discounted cash flow method used today. The Commission had to supervise the haggling process and find the fairest multiple for every transfer. The loans issued by government were resold in the capital markets as "Land Bonds".

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