Terence Dooley - Decolonisation of Ireland

Terence Dooley is Head of Department, Professor of History, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at the Department of History, Maynooth University. His most recent monograph is Burning the Big House: the Story of the Irish Country House in War and Revolution (Yale University Press, 2022).‍

The Irish Land Commission and the Irish Country House

Following independence the Irish Land Commission, first established in 1881, was reconstituted on 24 July 1923 under the Land Law (Commission) Act, placing it under the control of the Minister for Agriculture. The following month, under the 1923 Land Act, the process of the final transfer of tenanted land from landlord to tenant occupier began. More controversially, the Land Commission was given extraordinary powers to compulsorily acquire and redistribute all untenanted lands, including demesnes, required for the relief of congestion (that is, to bring small farms up to a viable level).

When the Land Commission acquired demesnes, they were left with great houses sitting on islands of small farms. In a society where land redistribution was perceived to be so important to social and financial security, much more so than in industrialized Britain (which included the six north-eastern counties of Ireland), the remnants of aristocracy and their Big Houses were simply obstacles to be removed, physically if necessary. Unlike in Britain where David Cannadine tells us: ‘All too frequently, the contemporary cult of the country house depicts the old landowning classes as elegant, exquisite patrons of the arts living lives of tasteful ease in beautiful surroundings,’, in Ireland they were not seen as part of the national patrimony and so the state, through the Land Commission, expedited the breakup of their estates and was slow to concern itself with the protection of Big Houses. Thus, the aim of this talk is to examine the role of the Land Commission in the demolition of Irish country houses, and asks whether there were alternatives left unconsidered.