Land Conference

The Land Conference was a successful conciliatory negotiation held in the Mansion House in Dublin, Ireland between 20 December 1902 and 4 January 1903. In a short period it produced a unanimously agreed report recommending an amiable solution to the long waged land war between tenant farmers and their landlords. Advocating a massive scheme of voluntary land purchase, it provided the basis for the most important land reform ever introduced by any Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland during the period of the Act of Union (1801–1922), known as the Wyndham Land Purchase Act 1903.

Through it, the whole Irish land question underwent a revolutionary transformation whereby the entire tenantry were encouraged to purchase their holdings with advances from the imperial exchequer, provided for the express purpose of facilitating the transfer of the land from owner to occupier.

There were three periods of particularly acute tension and conflict between landlord and tenant in the period 1877–1903. The first period 1877-82, a period of poor harvest, decreased demand for agricultural products and falling prices, saw the establishment of the Irish National Land League in 1879 followed by demonstrations, boycotting, no-rent campaigns, arrests, suppression and prosecutions during 1880-82. The Land Acts introduced in 1881 and 1885 alleviated certain needs, but by and large the grievances of the mass of tenant farmers went unheeded.

A second period of agitation began with rent strikes in 1885 accompanied by the Plan of Campaign during 1886 to 1892. Land Acts in 1885 and 1891 provided for limited tenant land purchase, but as the acts were cumbersome and unwieldy they were little availed of by tenants. The third period of unrest was around the turn of the century, from 1898 to 1902, when, backed by intensified campaigns for compulsory land purchase of both William O’Brien MP’s United Irish League (UIL) and T. W. Russell MP’s Ulster farmer’s organisation in 1901-2, tenants again agitated for concessions from their landlords. There was also a growing resentment at the landlord class as enunciated by Russell, who castigated their control of land as ‘systemised and legal robbery’.

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