While the land question from the mid-Victorian period to the eve of the
First World War plays a prominent role in Irish historiography,
historians have tended to overlook its importance in post-independence
Ireland and have generally assumed that there was no land question after
1922. Terence Dooley debunks this myth. In this first systematic
analysis of the land question in independent Ireland, he contends that
agrarian agitation proved to be an important stimulus to political
revolution during the period 1917 to 1923. He assesses the dangers which
agitation posed for the Provisional Government after 1922 and argues
that the 1923 Land Act not only ended agrarian agitation but also made a
major contribution to ending the Civil War. Dooley emphasises the
significance of Irish Land Commission to Irish rural life in an
extensive analysis of the working of the Land Commission after its
reconstitution in 1923. The commission became the most important (and
controversial) government body operating in independent Ireland.It acted
as a facilitator of social engineering, compulsorily acquiring lands
from traditional landlords, large farmers, graziers and negligent
farmers and passing them on to smallholders, ex-employees of acquired
estates, evicted tenants and their representatives, members of the
pre-Truce IRA and the landless. It migrated over 14,500 farmers onto
lands totalling almost 400,000 acres. The continued hunger for land and
the impact of land acquisition and division on so many people ensured
that the land reform question remained one of the most potent political
issues until the early 1980s.
