Land Acts is a collective term applied to a series of Irish land reforms enacted between the end of the 19th and early 20th cents. This legislation was partly an attempt to defuse the increasingly assertive peasant nationalism which, fuelled by rural grievance, was threatening the stability of British rule in Ireland. Though often very different in detail, the legislation generally had two aspects: first, the immediate improvement of the tenant's contractual position, and, second, the gradual encouragement of a peasant proprietorship. Gladstone's Land Act of 1870 sought to give legal force to the Ulster custom, and to give tenants enhanced security of tenure; his more comprehensive measure of 1881 offered more decisive relief in the same areas, establishing in effect the principle of joint-proprietorship: rents might be fixed by judicial arbitration, and the tenant was given both the right to free sale, and enhanced protection against unjust eviction. Conservative legislation developed these Gladstonian precedents, although the principle of land purchase (a secondary feature of the Act of 1870) was much more prominent: the ‘Ashbourne’ Land Purchase Act (1885) provided £5 million in order to fund sales of property to occupying tenants. This measure, even when boosted by subsequent funding, had a restricted impact, but it provided a precedent for the much more lavishly funded and successful Wyndham Land Act (1903): this built upon an earlier political agreement between landlords and tenants (the land conference of December 1902), and offered a range of inducements to both classes. Although watered down by the Birrell Land Act (1909), Wyndham's measure facilitated a massive transfer of land from the old Anglo-Irish proprietors to their tenants. This legislation, together with its predecessors, effected a social revolution in Ireland long before the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21.

Alvin Jackson