THE HISTORY OF IRELAND IS LACERATED, TOP TO BOTTOM, BY LAND.
It is the barbed wire entanglement that tortures yet frees in the long
story of this small island on 'the dark edge of Europe'. It defined
the national struggle for independence far more than any other single
issue. The famine between 1845 and 1850 killed a million of the island's
population of 8 million and drove another million into exile. This event
chopped Irish history in half, demonstrating as nothing else could that
without security of tenure for a normal life span you were at the mercy
of landowners. This book is not about the famine, but about the key
event that followed it: the extraordinary redistribution of land from
mainly aristocratic landed estates to small farmers. This redistribution
took over 150 years, from famine's end to the closure of the Land
Commission in 1999, and was achieved with some civility and far less
violence than the actual independence struggle itself.
Who Owns Ireland is a startling expose of Ireland's most valuable
asset: its land. Kevin Cahill's investigations reveal the breakdown of
ownership of the land itself across all thirty-two counties, and show
the startling truth about the people and institutions who own the ground
beneath our feet.
