Who Owns Ireland E-Book

Kevin Cahill

• Herausgeber: THP Ireland
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 756

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to

Ros, Jane, Kay and Stella

And to

Ian, Jen and Ed

And to

Ivo, Arlo and Rona

First published 2021

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Kevin Cahill, 2021

The right of Kevin Cahill to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7509-8661-8

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

Antrim

Armagh

Carlow

Cavan

Clare

Cork

Donegal

Down

Dublin City

County Dublin

Fermanagh

Galway

Kerry

Kildare

Kilkenny

Offaly (King’s County)

Laois (Queen’s County)

Leitrim

Limerick

Londonderry or Derry

Longford

Louth

Mayo

Meath

Monaghan

Roscommon

Sligo

Tipperary

Tyrone

Waterford

Westmeath

Wexford

Wicklow

Context

Appendix

End Note

Special Bibliography

General Bibliography

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

An Irish Childhood – The ‘Why and the Tao’ of This Book

There are worse places to be born in than Ireland – but, if you are lucky, there are few better. I was lucky and this book is a sort of generalised thanks to a providence I don’t believe in, for the peculiar good fortune of being born in the Republic and not in one of the planet’s war zones or famine-stricken places.

It is easy to define a good childhood. It is one in which the impact of each day, wet or dry, is neither dimmed nor enhanced by memory; just held there, crystal clear, and with the water that got into your wellies as uncomfortable as it was at the time, sockie, smellie, slushie, cold. A child’s day is defined by immediate things: the walk to school; the staring at the sun, past the holy nun, out the classroom windows; the golden red pinkeens caught in the shiny waters of the local river. But as childhood edges forward, other things enter the frame.

The biggest one in my childhood was land. The two elderly relatives in Tipperary had a 120-acre farm, with three fine horses in the last far field, for what purpose no one seemed to know. Unrideable, they neither raced nor worked at the plough. Maybe some things should just be left to live?

The cousins, however, were women of substance and it was the land that made them so, as even a child could see. Their land was grand to explore and walk across, with always new things to be found. On Mayday there was the circumambulation of the farm boundaries with the parish priest, the rain streaming up the leg of your trousers, filling the incense turible, dousing the charcoal and plastering your altar boy’s white surplice to your black soutane. The poor priest read from a swamped book of Latin verse, unintelligible to us and maybe to him, too. But we knew what the Catholic juju was meant to do: keep the pishogues and other demons off the land and out of the farm. It may have been the 1950s but the ancient evil of the secret curse still stalked the place.

And it was the evenings, before all fifteen decades of the Rosary, every night, that brought the land into focus. Where these rich green fields that surrounded us had come from, endlessly retold. How the Mahers, the cousins’ family, had wrested it from the hands of English usurpers, even if it was four or five hundred years since the English did the usurping.

The name of the usurpers are in this book, their descendants from the wars of Cromwell and Elizabeth I still clinging to the land booty of conflict in Tipperary, hundreds of years later. But, finally giving way to the native Irish – us.

Halfway on the walk from the farm into Golden there was a cross set on a concrete plinth in the ditch. Men of the old IRA, fresh from their breakfast in the farm’s kitchen, had been ambushed by the Black and Tans, and died on that roadside. As a child, you only get the edge of it; the excitement of ancient gunfire, never the horrors of violent death. But it made us cling around the valve radio with ferverous intent, as the Hungarians battled their Soviet masters during our sun-ravaged, hazelnut autumn of 1956.

We may not have actually understood it, but we knew intuitively what those strange people, in a far-off land of which we knew ‘terribly little’, were trying to do. Then, the first strangers for many years, refugees arrived. Ireland was ungenerous to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, unaware that Ireland, too, got an ominous mention in the Wansee document setting out the Holocaust plan, and with my home county then headed by a TD (MP) who was a rabid admirer of Hitler, the Hungarians were treated slightly better than the pre-war Jews.

Nothing, however, then prepared Ireland for the payback for the missionary Catholic Irish piety that clung to the coat-tails of Britain’s Empire and pervaded that Empire; the penny-black babies of our childhood coming home to the ‘religious motherland’, to a far better welcome – I hope – than the Jews of the pre-war continent got. Every country in Europe owes the Jewish people a debt that can never be repaid, for their sufferings in the Holocaust. One way of repaying it is to welcome, now, all those threatened by conflict and oppression.

The end of my childhood, which coincided with my going to Rockwell, was filled, every evening in that Tipperary farmhouse, with the stories of how each bit of the surrounding farms had been wrested from foreigners and strangers who shared neither our all-smothering religion nor our distant past as another people. Oddly, I have no recollection of the Land Commission, the body that did the actual wresting and resettling, ever being mentioned.

The Irish now live in a new-found land, with the liberal young dictating the culture of the place – as they should. The past is another planet. The future, the only thing the young have, is best in their possession. But forgetting the past is never safe, it may rise like a ghoul from the grave and bite your behind. And not all the pishogues are quite dead, yet. Some, the worst, live on in government still.

A Few Facts About Modern Ireland – North and South – and the UK Too

The island of Ireland is situated, according to the poet Desmond O’Grady, ‘on the dark edge of Europe’. It has a long, wild Atlantic wave-etched coastline to its west.

The Republic of Ireland is an avid member of the European Union, especially now that the UK has departed the European project. It’s the last English-speaking country in the EU, except maybe for Malta. It is No. 119 in size, in the world acreage listing of 193 countries, with 17,342,080 acres (Kevin Cahill, Who Owns the World, pp. 270–81). Together with Northern Ireland, the island is 20,862,755 acres and ranks equal to a notional No. 114 in the full list of countries by size. The population of the Republic for 2020 is estimated at 4,937,786 people, from figures provided by the Central Statistics Office of Ireland. The population of Northern Ireland for 2020 is estimated at 1.87 million people. Both figures together are still less than the pre-famine population of 1841 – the famine that chopped Irish history in half.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per Capita

GDP per capita is a curious, little-understood number that tells you more about how history is working than do most other numbers. This is the total output of a country’s economy, divided by its population. It is a good, but not absolute, pointer towards how the benefits of progress are reaching ordinary people. Northern Ireland is rated with the UK while the Republic of Ireland is rated separately.

GDP per capita for the Republic of Ireland in 2019, the year before Covid-19 struck, was given by the World Bank at $78,661 and the country was ranked fourth in the world in these terms. The International Monetary Fund estimated the Republic’s GDP per capita at $77,771 and with the same fourth-place ranking. This book does not use the world economic figures widely touted by the CIA, an espionage organisation.

The United Kingdom: Ireland’s Nearest Neighbour

The United Kingdom’s economic rankings are strikingly different. For 2019, the World Bank gives the country, the Republic’s neighbour with a population thirteen times greater than that of the Republic, a figure of $42,300 for GDP per capita and a ranking in the world of No. 23. The International Monetary Fund estimates UK GDP per capita in 2019 at $41,030 and ranks the country No. 21 in the world.

These are not the kinds of figures with which to be sailing free from the massive EU trading bloc to the east, nor to be setting out into the stormy waters of the post-Covid-19 world – not that the Brexiteers ever mentioned these figures. All was ideology for the departure into the economic unknown, led by a convicted constitutional gangster as prime minister, who lied to his sovereign and misled Parliament, according to the unanimous judgements of two supreme courts, those of the UK and Scotland.

The ‘How’ of this Book – The Return of Owners of Land for Ireland 1872–76

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

These are probably the thirteen most famous words in Ulysses, that day out in Dublin on 16 June 1904 made into a masterful monument by Jimmy Joyce, aka James Joyce. Ulysses towers over the wastelands of modern literature, as it towers over Dublin, the city it immortalised. Now, those words may appear to slightly contradict the sense of the introduction. They don’t. They complement it.

And, as the good Jimmy wanted, they raise, by implication, the issue of what Irish history actually is. Is it the almost theatrical – if it weren’t for the dead and injured – triumph of the armed nationalist heroes of 1916, when some Irish men and Irish women, again in ‘durty’ Dublin’s streets, challenged the armed might of the largest empire the world had every known? Or is it something else, more prosaic in the telling, though far more powerful in the execution and the result, and for that reason, all but suppressed?

There are more than 8 million Land Commission records, dating from 1881 and earlier, for which no public access is available. They are lodged in a warehouse in Portlaois, in God knows what kind of order. The Irish state’s secrecy about its own people’s records is as obsessive as the culture of secrecy in the UK now, and wholly of a piece with the secrecy in the time of the landlords. In his prescient article in the Irish Times on 23 September 2013, John Grenham asks the question that this book is mostly about: ‘How long can it possibly take to decontaminate this part of our history?’

History, however, is above all slow, and the events that really affect its course are usually slow, too. Ireland is no exception. But what actually changed Ireland, what forced the slothful process of snail’s pace change into action, was the famine of 1845 to 1850. This catastrophe set in motion a process of land reform the like of which has not occurred almost anywhere else in the world. And that process, of which the 1916 rebellion was indeed a part, was what changed the people of the island forever.

From being uniquely landless, as we shall see, the people of Ireland became the first peasant people to evict their landlords and eventually take possession of the bulk of the island’s land. That took time, from the first Land Sale Acts of 1870, arranged while the Republic was still part of the United Kingdom, to the closure of the Land Commission in Dublin in 1999.

And although there are as many versions of Irish history as there are narrators to tell it, this is a version based on the factual identification of who the Irish people – the people who actually inhabit the island of Ireland – are and were; what land they actually owned in 1876, and for all of history before that; and what they own now, which is most of their portion of the island.

The words of Joyce also invoke that crucial observation by George Santayana, often mistakenly attributed to Sir Winston Churchill, that those who do not learn history are bound to repeat it. And we are repeating it, if indirectly.

About 90,000 families in Ireland face potential eviction from their homes as a result of the reckless negligence of Irish bankers and the Irish state in 2008. These families now face an aspect of the same fate, minus the troops with guns, that the famine victims faced – eviction. Eviction may not now kill as it did in famine times, but it splits families and not infrequently causes suicide after years of intolerable misery – ultimately, through little fault of the home owners themselves. Evictions are now the result of chronic government failure. In this matter, the modern Irish state stands like the landlords of old, inflicting injury without acknowledging responsibility, or indeed duty.

The Irish state has a duty to keep the roofs over the heads of its citizens, especially when they are under threat of being ripped off by carpetbaggers from foreign tax havens, supported by Irish laws inherited from the time of the landlords. The landlords were the people who made the land waste for its inhabitants because they owned the land, the law, the military, and ultimately the state. And as for modern ‘law’ and those clinging to its archaic skeleton, they often forget the words of that eminent doctor of the Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas, who tells us, following Aristotle, ‘There is no obligation to obey bad laws.’

Laws, as most lay people will tell you, are mostly unintelligible nowadays. This isn’t an accident. It’s the modern way of concealing skulduggery, injustice, fraud and a raft of other crimes. If it was anything else, laws would be transparent and accessible, not opaque and unintelligible.

Where you detect obscurity, drive through it to the crime that lies behind it, the commonest of which is, like the famine, state irresponsibility. The thread, more like the rotten rope that links the famine, is irresponsibility by those with power – and unaccountability.

On the night of 28 September 2008, as the banking crisis came to a head in the Irish Republic, the Irish Government put the nation in hock for a subsequent thirty years, to the tune of $64 billion, without proper explanation, then or later. The investigation into the event didn’t start until 2015, seven years on. And guess what? No one had any written records of events that night. The governors of probably the most literate nation on earth didn’t find the time to make even a note on the back of an envelope.

Renting is a Valuable Part of a Mixed Economy in a Well-Governed State

Now, there is a place in every economy for people who rent land and buildings to others. But they should not be the same people who are governing the state, making the laws of the state and controlling the police, the judiciary and the military in the state. That was why the time of the landlords, of which I write, was not the best of times, but was the worst of times for most (meaning 99 per cent), though not quite all (meaning less than 1 per cent), of the people of Ireland.

Where This Book is Coming From: The Numbers, Big Empires and Little Empires

The story in this book begins with a long-forgotten survey of landownership, the first ever Irish Domesday. (England had the first one in 1086 and none thereafter until the Return.) It’s called the Return of Owners of Land and started life in Imperial Great Britain, in the second house of that countries bicameral Parliament, the House of Lords. It was an attempt by the landowners – the landlords – who totally dominated the House of Lords, to head off a raucous reformer in the House of Commons, John Bright MP. The time was 1872 and Great Britain was the imperial heart of the largest land empire the world had ever known, an expanse of land encompassing over a quarter of the planet and about a fifth of the planetary population. This vast expanse of territory and population was governed from London by the Parliament of Great Britain, an inner union of just four countries: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Empire itself ran to about 6,600,000,000 acres, out of the earth’s total land acreage of 33,558,000,000 acres, excluding Antarctica, most of which is currently a legal possession of the British Crown. Out on the dark edge of Europe, this small agglomeration of just four countries, England, Ireland Scotland and Wales, with a total land surface of about 77,686,209 acres, had its own internal landownership problems at the time of the Return of Owners of Land in 1872.

The origins of the problems in Ireland were historic. Beginning with an extension of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the descendants of the same Norman landgrabbers turned up on the neighbouring island, Ireland, between 1169 and 1171, there to attempt to impose what they had so successfully imposed in England. This was absolute ownership of all land by the reigning monarch, and that monarch’s divine right to decide who held tenure on any land within the sovereign’s dominions.

At its core, then, the main issues of Irish history subsequent to 1169 were an issue of the English Crown’s right to the ownership and allocation of land within its declared domains. Ireland was persistently treated as a dominion of the reigning monarch in England for most of the period 1169 to 1922. Issues of nationality affected this underlying reality, but were diffused by the partial acquiescence of the native Irish aristocracy – and landowners themselves – to the Crown’s claim.

The issue of land was an issue of power and wealth amongst aristocrats, some English and some born in Ireland. Beneath the squabbles of the powerful, however, there was a native Irish population, almost entirely landless and, as with all peasants everywhere until modern times, with virtually no access to the law and virtually no legal rights, which were reserved for landowners.

The Native Irish: Nationality, Identity, Power and Land

The native Irish, aristocratic chieftans excluded, were a mass of people who were called Irish because they were born on the island. They shared the historic condition of the bulk of populations everywhere on the planet – they were landless. They fairly consistently numbered between 98 and 99 per cent of the population of the island. They lived, as did most of the planet’s population, without the benefit of law, with their lives, like the land, entirely in the hands of their landlords, in the same way that the mass of the population in England, Scotland and Wales also lived, if under slightly milder regimes. Irish history, in the sense of the history of the people on the island after 1169, is, in one narrative, an issue of Irish national resistance to foreign occupation.

But in practice it is also a story of resistance by one bunch of landowners born in Ireland to the English, later British Crown, and the Crown’s landowners who had been sent to Ireland to enforce Crown landownership there. Had the rebel Irish landlords ever defeated the English Crown decisively between 1169 and 1922, the lot of the Irish peasantry would, almost certainly, have changed but little. They would have remained de facto serfs and landless, just paying rent to local-born land thieves instead of foreign ones.

Skipping, then, the periodic local aristocratic Irish opposition to English (later British) landownership in Ireland, at its most turbulent between the Elizabethan and Cromwellian period, we arrive at two unusual occurrences. The first was the population explosion on the island between 1800 and 1840, when the numbers of people living on the island rose from about 4 million to either 6.5 million or 8.5 million (both figures are cited in the main sources). The 1841 Census was for the whole island, including that portion now described as Northern Ireland, and the 8.5 million is the more commonly accepted figure for the 1841 population.

Within that figure, and not disclosed by the census, was an economic bombshell that would start killing the native Irish by the hundreds of thousands from 1845 onwards. This was the nature of landownership and the scale of landlessness on the island. Using the 1872 figures from the Return of Owners of Land, we can say that about 99 per cent of this population possessed no means of independent economic survival if the main food staple of this huge group of human beings, the potato, failed.

Coin or ordinary currency was also almost unknown amongst this group, who were the overwhelming majority of the population. They mostly paid rent in kind, with the crops they grew, retaining potatoes as a dietary staple on the plots they held at the will of their landlord. It was this discretion on the part of the Irish landlords and government in London that turned a natural disaster – potato blight – into a lethal, killer famine.

Figures from the Return of Owners of Land for 1872

Out of a total rateable acreage for the island of 20,159,768 acres, there were 32,614 owners of more than 1 acre of land, whose total holdings came to 20,150,612 acres. There were 36,144 owners of less than 1 acre, whose total holdings came to 9,605 acres. Together, all the people who owned land in Ireland came to 68,758. What’s missing from the summary in the Return of Owners of Land for the island as a whole is the population of the island. The population figure for 1872 is given with each of the thirty-two counties in the Return, but not repeated in the summaries. It comes to approximately 4,989,919 people. If this figure is correct, the population of the island fell from 8.5 million in 1841 to 4.9 million just over thirty years later. The official figure given by the government for famine deaths between 1845 and 1850, is 21,720. This figure has never been officially corrected.

It is reasonable to believe that the failure to summarise the population figures in the Return was a further official attempt to conceal the sudden, apparently inexplicable, halving of the population of the island over a period of just thirty years. It also conceals something else, however, which is the scale and nature of landownership on the island, something that had not changed in recorded Irish history up to that point.

A maximum of 68,000 people owned all of the land on the island, out of a population of 4.89 million. The percentage of landowners to landless was 1.3 per cent owning every acre of the island, and 98.7 per cent owning not a blade of grass. If the cottagers with up to 1 acre are removed, the ratio moves to 0.6 per cent of the population owning over 99 per cent of all land on the island and 99.4 per cent of the population owning nothing at all.

Because almost no historic discussion has ever taken these basic figures into account, and most historic discussions fail to identify or address the actual population of the island and the real status of that population, most historic narratives about Ireland come close to fiction, and do, however accidentally, falsify the reality. The reality was best addressed when the American reformer Henry George visited Ireland in 1879. He described the condition of the Irish population, almost twenty years after the famine, as one of ‘abject slavery’. Elsewhere, he compared the Irish rural population to that of the Russian serfs.

But it was his economic comment that is most important of all. He wrote that it was not, as English economists asserted, ‘the imprudence of the Irish peasants that made them make the potato the staple of their food … they lived on the potato because rack rents stripped everything else from them’.

The morally barbaric and economically absurd system of rent and tenure in Ireland was an economic decision of the ruling government in London, dominated by landlords, and the landlords in Ireland, many of whom were members of the House of Lords in the British Parliament. Faced with a catastrophe entirely of their own construction over time, the average solution of the average owner of land to the famine was to hunt the tenants out onto the side of the road, where over a million of them died, and tear down what little shelter they had, so that even more died. It was, in the words of Lord Clarendon, the British Viceroy in Ireland, ‘a policy of extermination’. His words – not those of any apologist or critic.

That history is recounted here. Not for any moral reason – history has no morality and the primary beneficiaries of history, the landowners, to judge by their conduct in the face of famine in Ireland and equally regularly in India, had no morality either.

This is not primarily an issue of morality, then, but an issue of unaccountable power and how it behaves. And of the powerlessness of those it affects. There were native Irish members in the House of Commons during the famine; people like Daniel O’Connell. Their voices were drowned out by the elegant ‘yahoos’ in the House of Lords, who preferred the trappings of wealth in London and shopping in Mayfair to the care of their fellow human beings and tenants in Ireland.

Henry George, already mentioned, made the other key economic and governance point about the famine when he wrote, ‘The potato blight might have come and gone without stinting a single human being of a full meal’ if the government had halted or modified food exports from the island and not sent in 100,000 soldiers (many of them Irish) to exacerbate the food shortages and add hugely to costs that would have been more humanely spent on saving people’s lives. Indeed, it is often mentioned in famine literature that soldiers sometimes gave part of their pay to the tenants they were helping to evict, to try and alleviate the misery they were being ordered to cause.

Officialdom in London sought, as Hitler was later to do with the Jews, to blame the victims for their own deaths. Indeed, the last word on those same imperial civil servants goes to the historian Simon Schama in his History of Britain (2002), ‘While there had been some handwringing over the loss of an eighth of the Irish population during the hunger of 1845–49, the equivalent of nearly the entire population of Ireland had died (of famine) in India in 1877–78.’ And it was, as Schama shows, virtually the same imperial civil servants and their immediate successors who had improved their kill rate by 800 per cent on the meagre results of their administrative murders in Ireland thirty years earlier.

So, how did the famine affect the underlying issue of landownership? The famine cut Irish history in half. There was a ‘before’, where 99 per cent of the population muddled along in a survival mode. And then there was an ‘after’. The after was simple enough – the landless Irish population, as enumerated above, had learned, in the worst possible of ways, that the only security for human life, for a natural term of life, lay in the possession of land. Tenants were at the mercy of landlords and died in their hundreds of thousands when the landlords threw them out.

This understanding was almost entirely subconscious. It achieved its conscious expression in political activity, but the real truth, the real deep desperation that drove the Irish population into that political activity, was the trauma of the famine itself. Perhaps the most extraordinary outcome is the stable parliamentary democracy that is the Irish Republic. The tipping of the famine into ‘a policy of extermination’ was government and landlord inspired, in the presence of a Parliament that totally ignored what was happening in Ireland and did nothing effective to stop it.

The Irish population were not the first nor the only people this has happened to, but they were the only ones to achieve something between an 85 and 95 per cent conversion from landlords to small peasant farmers. A great deal of the prosperity of modern Ireland, north and south, originated with that event, notwithstanding episodic financial disasters such as that of 2008 or Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Eamon De Valera’s fantastical economic war against the UK in the 1930s.

Land Redistribution

But is there a way to measure the effect of this land redistribution that is perhaps partly objective? Here is a suggestion.

The Republic of Ireland occupies a very unusual and little commented upon place in the modern world. In 2019, it was ranked fourth in the world by the World Bank in its league of countries by GDP per capita. The figure was $78,661 per person. GDP per capita is a measure of a country’s economic output. It divides the country’s GDP by its total population. That makes it a reasonably good measure of a country’s standard of living. According to one think tank, ‘It tells you how prosperous a country feels to each of its citizens.’ (Doesn’t seem to work in Ireland though, despite this fact.)

The two key world financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, publish the annual GDP of most of the world’s countries and territories each year. Wikipedia also publishes the two institutions’ lists each year. There are no World Bank figures for 2020 available yet, but in the equally prestigious International Monetry Fund rankings, the Republic of Ireland comes fourth again, with an average per capita figure of $77,771. The two institutions create their tables in slightly different ways, of which the IMF is reckoned to be the tougher and more rigid. But these are not league tables. This is not a competition. This method is the closest to showing how well economies are actually functioning that the world has so far established.

Here is a table that shows where Ireland sat in the rankings in 2018 and 2019:

GDP per capita (World Bank 2018 and International Monetary Fund 2019)

Country/Area

World Bank 2018 ($)

Rank

IMF 2019 ($)

Rank

Population

Qatar

126,898

1

69,687

5

2,687,871

Macau

123,892

(2)

81,151

(–)

623,000

Luxembourg

113,337

2

113,196

1

613,894

Singapore

101531

3

63,987

8

5,700,000

Ireland (Republic)

83,203

4

77,771

4

4,830,000

Brunei

80,920

(5)

(–)

(–)

451,970

UAE

75,075

6

(–)

(–)

9,680,000

Kuwait

72,897

7

(–)

(–)

4,700,000

Switzerland

68,060

8

83,716

2

8,570,000

Norway

65,510

9

77,975

3

5,357,000

Hong Kong

64,596

(–)

49,334

(–)

7,436,154

San Marino

63,037

10

(–)

(–)

33,376

United States

62,794

11

65,111

7

329,450,000

Iceland

57,303

12

67,037

6

362,860

Netherlands

56,238

13

52,367

11

17,000,000

Denmark

55,671

14

59,795

9

5,800,000

Austria

55,454

15

50,022

13

8,795,000

Saudi Arabia

55,335

16

(–)

(–)

34,140,000

Sweden

53,208

17

51,241

12

10,120,000

Germany

53,074

18

46,563

16

82,900,000

Australia

51,663

19

53,825

10

25,415,000

Belgium

51,408

20

45,175

18

11,400,000

Finland

48,416

21

48,868

14

5,520,000

Canada

48,130

22

46,212

17

37,590,000

Bahrain

47,303

23

(–)

(–)

1,442,659

United Kingdom

45,973

24

41,030

21

66,870,000

The more natural home for Ireland as a country is in the IMF 2019 rankings. It is No. 4, with Switzerland at No. 2 and Norway at No. 3. Both these latter countries have small populations and have substantial agricultural sectors. Norway has oil and Switzerland has finance, as has Ireland. This suggests that small countries, with a balance between industry sectors in the domestic economy, do best economically in the modern world.

While the full role of land distribution in economic structures remains to be properly documented by historians and economists, a final glance towards Asia further indicates its importance. In 1980, the GDP per capita of India was $263, and its estimated ranking in either of the lists was around No. 120. In 2020, forty years later, India ranked No. 126 in the world lists, with a GDP per capita of $2,041 in the 2019 IMF list. In 1980, China ranked a little above India with a GDP per capita of $317. It was one of the world’s poorest countries. In 2020, China has a GDP per capita of $7,755 and ranks No. 73 in the IMF list. This is the fastest rise in prosperity ever seen on planet earth, through all of history.

One factor that clearly contributed was China’s redistribution of rural land. All land up to the 1990s in China was held by the state in various forms of collectives. But in the late 1990s China granted families leases of up to thirty years on their holdings. These leases are now being extended in practice. Despite its extraordinary technological success, this one move has probably done more to end poverty in China than anything else occurring in the economic spectrum. India, on the other hand, has remained marooned in a land-holding structure that is corrupt and wholly inequitable, much of which predates even the British Raj (Empire) with some land debts going back centuries, into medieval times.

But the most striking figure of all in the table is the position of the United Kingdom, at No. 24 in the 2018 World Bank list and No. 21 in the 2019 IMF list. The UK has almost fourteen times the population of the Republic, but has only a little under half of the Republic’s GDP per capita. Most critically, what the UK has never done is redistribute land.

The bulk of UK freehold land is in the hands of the same tiny ‘counsinhoods’ that have held it for generations, many related to the Irish landlords of old. The table also demonstrates the economic mountain the newly elected Conservative Government in the UK will have to climb to make good on the core economic promises it made to win the vote in December 2019 and to leave the EU. If it cannot shift GDP, it cannot keep its promises.

One of the Conservative promises was about a new emphasis on science and technology post Brexit. There, too, the UK will have to overtake its small neighbouring republic, which has remained in the EU. In the November 2019 list of the world’s 500 top supercomputers, the Republic of Ireland ranked seventh in the world, with fourteen supercomputers in the country – all Chinese, and mostly installed in American corporations. The UK ranked eighth in the world with just eleven supercomputers. Small may not always be beautiful, but it certainly seems to work economically.

An Objective Way to Examine Irish and UK Economics After the Land Reforms That Transferred Landownership to the People of the Republic

The World Gross Domestic Product Per Capita Rankings

One purpose of this book is to apply history to the present. One very simple way to do that is to take the three countries involved in our story – Britain, Ireland and India, and see how they are doing now. Two eminent organisations (and one dubious one) produce GDP per capita figures: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the CIA, the US espionage organisation. Here are the rankings for our three key countries for 2018 and 2017:

GDP Per Capita and Rank Out of 193 Countries and Territories

Country

The International Monetary Fund 2018

The World Bank 2017

Ireland

$78,785, 5th

$76,305, 5th

UK

$45,705, 26th

$43,877, 24th

India

$7,874, 119th

$7,056, 120th

Noting that this is Ireland after the financial crash of 2008, there is only one other characteristic that Ireland shares with almost no other country in the world – between about 1870 and 1960, it cleared its murderous landlords, domestic and foreign, out of the part of the island that constitutes the Republic. It is not a major oil producer (yet) and it is not entirely an offshore banking centre, either. It remains a place still largely living off the land bought by its own people, for themselves – if with huge mortgage assistance from the very same British Government that let them down so badly during the famine years. History is nothing if not repetitive, lethally ironic, and mostly misguided by incompetence in government. It seems as though government inflicts a hit on its occupants, driving their collective IQ down to that of a severely challenged infant.

The international media have made much of a modern economic boom in India, but much less of how that boom is distributed on the subcontinent. About 20 per cent of the Indian population are inside the boom tent. But 80 per cent or the population are not. They remain in the clutches of landlords, with perpetual loan bondage being commonplace. That 80 per cent of the excluded Indian population still live on $2 a day, the equivalent of what their ancestors were living, or, dying, on in 1872.

The Irish, contrary to the opinion of their landlords of old, are neither feckless nor lazy. But they are no more hardworking than the people of most other countries. Their extraordinary ranking in the modern economic world has to be attributable to something else, and the only thing Ireland has that makes it different from most countries is possession of its own land, by its own people, in plots sufficiently large to be economic. An Indian peasant’s day is as long now as it was in 1872, and hugely onerous, for the same awful reward as in 1872.

China

In 2007 a small delegation visited the author in Devon from the Chinese Embassy in London to chat about the forthcoming book, Who Owns the World. A central question from the Chinese, whose own government had recently begun to grant leases to peasant families, was how the figures had worked in Ireland. They were given an early version of this chapter. They were then shown the roadblock created in India by the hereditary loans and landlords, and the 80 per cent of the Indian population that was excluded from modern economic progress.

The author forecast that Chinese growth, if leases were extended to give peasant farming families security (as the Chinese Government was doing anyhow), would enable China to hugely outstrip India’s growth, as indeed it has. In 2000, China was approximately No. 169 in the world economic rankings, with a GDP per capita of $2,932, while India was much where it is now at No. 119. But in just twenty years, between 2000 and 2020 China has risen to No. 73 in the world economic ranking, with a GDP per capita of $9,769, having in the meantime created long-term inheritable and tradable leases for family farms.

The Republic of Ireland may be a small country on the dark edge of Europe, but its history in relation to what land reform can mean is both unique and capable of powering those countries prepared to engage in it way up the economic ladder – and leaving stagnant those that retain the landlord system.

So, it would help to let the Irish people see that the issue of who bought 2 acres from the pre-Land Commission landlords in 1870 is not an issue of Irish national security in 2019. Set the records free.

Kevin Cahill, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Fellow of the British Computer Society,

Exeter,August 2020.

A final footnote or, maybe, heel note. Jimmy Joyce was a very fine Irish fellow, as fine Irish fellows go. But behind the jokes was serial seriousness, and seldom more serious than when he comments on history. In Ulysses, he ‘tin-canned’ Irish history into a single day, securely encapsulating a great deal of Irish history. All of Dublin is there in all its ‘durty’ glory.

Right now certain things in Ireland feel like famine things: 90,000 people in the Republic live in imminent fear of repossession of their homes; they fear the arrival of an agent, always Irish, but representing absentee tax dodgers mostly. You can make land mystical, mythical even, but it’s always mundane in the end. In Ireland we’ve done all three to it, without noticing that we’re still here and it’s still here and we remain its occupants …

ANTRIM

INCLUDING CARRICKFERGUS

1876

2020 est

Population in County Antrim plus Carrickfergus

404,070

615,364

All owners of land

5,570

-

Percentage of the population

1.37

-

Owners of nothing at all

398,500

-

Percentage of the population

98.63

-

Size of County

708,405 acres

715,520 acres

Number of dwellings (of which rented)

71,229 (65,659)

Figures not available

Number of owned farm holdings over one acre

2,249

4,285

County Comparisons

Acreage 1876

Population 1876

County Antrim, Ireland

708,405 acres

404,070

Gloucestershire, England

733,640 acres

534,640

Ayrshire, Scotland

721,947 acres

220,908

Carmarthenshire, Wales

510,574 acres

115,714

The Rt Hon. Lord O’Neill of Shane’s Castle had 64,153 acres in the county in 1876, with a valuation of £44,947 about £3,775,548 in current money. By the time Bateman makes his entry in The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland for this musical aristocrat, the acreage is amended to 65,919 acres, and the valuation to £44,000. By 1883 Lord O’Neill had become a reverend. This title is still extant and is held by Raymond Arthur Clanaboy O’Neill, the 4th Baron. He was educated at Eton and was an honorary colonel in the North Irish Horse. He was Lord Lieutenant of Antrim from 1994 to 2008. His ancestor in 1876 inherited the estates of the Earl O’Neill when that title became extinct in 1855. He also changed his name to O’Neill, having been born William Chichester. He was made a baron in the peerage of the United Kingdom in 1868. These O’Neills are descendants of the Rev. Edward Chichester, a relative of the Marquis of Donegal. The seat is still Shane’s Castle. According to Timothy William Ferres, a blogger from Belfast, the estate is still over 3,000 acres in extent.

Sir Richard Wallace Bart MP of Antrim Castle, County Antrim, had 58,365 acres in the county in 1876, with a valuation of £67,954 about £5,708,136 in current money. Sir Richard sat for Lisburn as an MP and was one of the richest men in Ireland in 1876. He outranked the Marquis of Downshire by over £100,000 p.a. in modern money. Bateman gives the Baronet’s home as Sudbourne Hall, Wickham Market. He was a man of huge means with 11,224 acres in Suffolk, 25 acres in Cambridge, and 2,693 acres in County Down, which – with the Antrim estate – gave him a total of 72,307 acres, with a valuation of £85,737. He was the seventy-third largest landowner in the United Kingdom, and the twenty-fourth richest man in the country based on his land valuation. The estate, slightly confusingly, is referred to as the Hertford Estate. It originated with Sir Fulke Conway, the Hertford ancestor in the 1600s. Sir Richard was the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquis and inherited the estates when his father died. The title went to a cousin. Sir Richard had a son but Ferres tells us nothing about him and the Baronetcy became extinct when Sir Richard died.

Sir Richard’s enduring mark on the United Kingdom is the Wallace art collection at Manchester Square in London. No details of what happened to the estate are publicly available but the estate of the 4th Marquis’s cousin, who got the Marquisate, came to 12,289 acres in Warwick and Worcester with about 1,700 acres in Antrim and Down. He was Queen Victoria’s Lord Chamberlain.

The Earl of Antrim of Glenarm Castle, Glenarm, had 34,292 acres in the county in 1876, with a valuation of £20,837 about £1,750,308 in current money. The Eton-educated Earl had, alongside the Antrim acres, 112 acres in Londonderry for a total estate of 34,404 acres with a valuation of £20,910. The title is the Earldom of Antrim of the second creation, the previous Earldom – which had advanced to a Marquisate – having become extinct. The title is still extant and is held by Alexander Randal Mark McDonnell, the 9th Earl. The estate is now down to the demesne around the castle, which is lived in by the Earl’s son, Viscount Dunluce, and his family. The family history is romantic and goes back to Scotland in the thirteenth century. The occupant of the estate in 1876 was the 6th Earl.

The Rev. Arthur Hercules Pakenham of Langford Lodge, Crumlin, County Antrim, had 14,629 acres in the county in 1876, with a valuation of £15,601 about £1,310,484 in current moeny. Bateman merely notes this huge estate and its clerical owner, who acquired it in 1854. The Pakenham family are directly connected to the Earls of Longford (see Longford) but were also related to the highest levels of the land-owning British aristocracy, a daughter of the family having married the Duke of Wellington. The estate was created for Roger Langford from confiscated O’Neill lands by Chichester in the 1600s, alongside grants for Hugh Clotworthy and Henry Upton. The family were military and sold the estate to the Air Ministry in 1940. It became first an airfield, then a site for the Martin-Baker aircraft company. The house was blown up by the British army in 1959. There is a Neolithic site near the lodge.

George Carthenac Macartney of Lissanoure Castle, had 12,532 acres in the county in 1876, with a valuation of £6,355 about £533,820 in current money. Bateman gives no biographical details of the George Macartney who inherited the estate in 1874, just as the Returns were commencing. Bateman records him having 310 acres in County Meath and 276 acres in County Londonderry for a total estate of 13,118 acres, with a valuation of £6,783. The site is beautiful and it was held in the eighteenth century by Sir George Macartney, who became successively a Baron in 1770 and an Earl and Viscount in 1792. He was Chief Secretary of Ireland from 1769 to 1772, Ambassador to Russia and Governor of Madras. He also headed the first British mission to China in 1772. He married a daughter of the Earl of Bute but died in 1806 without heirs and all the titles became extinct.

The estate at Lissanure was a grant made at the end of the Cromwellian settlement in 1649 to Captain Macartney, who became Mayor of Belfast and an MP, but later lost the estates when he sided with William of Orange in 1689. He did not get them back until after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. At the beginning of the Second World War, the Mackie family of Belfast bid for the estate but had to wait until 1946 to take possession. During the war it was used as a military base, hospital and prisoner of war camp. The Mackie family still live at the castle, which they have restored.

Viscount Massereene and Ferrard of Oriel Temple, County Louth, had 11,777 acres in the county in 1876, with a valuation of £8,649 about £726,516 in current money. Lord Massereene is more properly described in Bateman as Viscount Massereene and Ferrard, Oriel Temple, County Louth.

Bateman records the then Viscount – having 11,777 acres in Antrim, 2,045 acres in Meath and 9 acres in Monaghan, together with the Louth land – possessed a total of 21,024 acres with a valuation of £15,031. The address given in Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage is Antrim Castle, which was burnt down by the IRA in 1922. The Massereenes had an estate in Kent in Yorkshire at the time of the Returns.

The title and confirmation of the estates in Ireland were a gift from Charles II when the Restoration occurred in England in 1660. The children of the 3rd Viscount then made the classic Irish landowner moves. The eldest daughter Jane married a landowner, Sir Hans Hamilton Bart, of Mount Hamilton in Armagh. The next daughter, Rachel, married the 4th Earl of Antrim, whose descendants had over 34,000 acres in 1876, and the third daughter, Mary, married the Bishop of Down and Connor. The 4th Viscount married Lady Catherine Chichester, the eldest daughter of the 4th Earl of Donegall, who had almost 23,000 acres in 1876. In 1756 the then Viscount was made the Earl of Massareene, although this title became extinct in 1816. The other titles were inherited by his daughter, Harriett, Viscountess Massereene. She married the Viscount Ferrard, which is where the merged titles come from. Ferres tells us:

In 1668, the Massereenes owned about 45,000 acres in Ireland; however, by 1701, the land appears to have shrunk to 10,000 acres; and, by 1713, the County Antrim estates comprised 8,178 acres.

Land acquisition through marriage etc. meant that the land-holdings amounted to 11,778 acres in 1887. In the 1600s the Massereene’s possessed the lucrative fishing rights to Lough Neagh by means of a 99-year lease and they were also accorded the honour Captains of Lough Neagh for a period.

The current peer, the 14th Viscount Massereene John David Clotworthy Whyte-Melville Foster, is one of the hereditaries dispossessed from the House of Lords in 1999. He lives in Yorkshire, served in the Grenadier Guards and has been a stockbroker. He further describes himself as a landowner.

Lieutenant General the Viscount Templetown of Castle Upton, Templepatrick, County Antrim, had 10,239 acres in the county in 1876, with a valuation of £8,902 about £747,768 in current money. This Eton-educated Guards officer represents the third allocation of land by Chichester in 1649, being a member of the Upton family. He commanded the Coldstream Guards in the Crimea. General the Viscount Templetown, Knight Commander of the Bath, of Castle Upton, Templepatrick, County Antrim, had 12,845 acres in County Monaghan in 1876, to give him a total estate of 24,769 acres, with a valuation of £19,217. Afterwards he commanded the 60th Rifles and the 2nd Life Guards, and finished his military career as a general in command of Western and Southern districts. He sat as MP for County Antrim before he succeeded.

The 3rd Marquis of Donegall KP, GCH, CB, the Castle Belfast, had 14,011 acres in Antrim in 1876, with a valuation of £14,011 about £1,176924 in current money. The 3rd Marquis of Donegal was a descendant of Sir Arthur Chichester (see Londonderry) who arrived in Ulster in the seventeenth century and, while creating great estates for others, also created a huge one for himself and his descendants. At the time of the Returns he had, together with the Antrim acreage, 8,155 acres in Donegal, 193 acres in Londonderry and 31 acres in Down, a total estate of 22,996 acres with a valuation of £41,649. He was certainly rich enough to have the Palace appointments that Bateman records for him. He was educated at Eton and was a cavalry officer. Bateman notes that he was an aide de camp to Queen Victoria, Vice Chamberlain of the Royal Household and Captain of the Yeoman of the Guard. These were critical appointments in the power structure of Great Britain at the time. The Empire was at its peak, the largest the world had ever known in terms of land held, and Victoria was Empress of India, the largest country in the Empire. He would have had access to unlimited influence, and perhaps more importantly, all the key financial information of the time. It cost to be in Royal service, but it also conferred advantages.

Bateman makes an interesting note about the Donegal acreage: ‘The above rental partly arises from nearly 140,000 acres, chiefly in Donegal, let on leases forever.’

The 3rd Marquis was also MP for Carrickfergus, Belfast and for County Antrim.

The title is still extant and is held by Arthur Patrick Chichester, the 8th Marquis. He gives his residence as Dunbrody Park, County Wexford. This estate is still owned by the Chichester family and the records of the Antrim and Donegal estates are held in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland.

William Agnew of Kilwaughter Castle, Larne, County Antrim, had 9,770 acres in the county in 1876, with a valuation of £5,845 about £490,980 in current money. According to Ferres, the Agnews started out as the King’s rent collectors in County Antrim and built a castle at Kilwaughter in 1622. They were Presbyterians (dissenters) and no titles came their way. But by the time we get to the Returns there is a question as to who owned the estate and castle. Ferres gives us a last Agnew owner by the name of William Agnew, but the dates are wrong. Bateman’s William was born in 1799, Ferres was born in 1824, but died unmarried and the estate passed to his niece, the Countess Balzani (an Agnew who married her music teacher, an Italian Count). In 1916 on the death of the Count the estate went to his two daughters, who lived in Italy. The estate was seized at the beginning of the Second World War as ‘enemy property’. It became an American military base. The castle was bought for scrap by a Belfast company in 1951, but is now owned by an Agnew descendant in Australia and there are moves by local historians to have it restored. There is no record of what happened to the land in the public domain.

Mrs Legge of Malone House, Belfast had 8,565 acres in the county in 1876, with a valuation of £4,844 about £406,896 in current money. There is no Bateman entry for Mrs Legge but Ferres tells us that in 1868 the property was acquired by Viscount Harberton. According to Bateman, the Viscount lived at Lyston Court Ross in Hereford. However, Bateman only gives an estate of 5,223 acres in County Kildare; no mention of Antrim or Belfast. The Legge family were sugar merchants in Belfast in the eighteenth century and leased land from the Earl of Donegall around what is now Legge Lane and the Malone Road.

Top 121 owners of land in County Antrim in 1876 ranked by acreage

Acreage

Valuation 1876 (£)

Current Valuation Est(£)

1

O’Neill, The Rt Hon. the Lord, Shane’s Castle, Antrim

64,163

44,947

3,775,548

2

Wallace, Sir Richard Bart, Antrim Castle, Co. Antrim

58,365

67,945

5,707,380

3

Antrim Earl of, Glenarm Castle, Glenarm

34,292

20,837

1,750,308

4

Pakenham Rev. A.H., Longford Lodge, Crumlin

14,629

15,601

1,310,484

5

Macartney, George T., Lisanoure Castle

12,532

6,355

533,820

6

Massereene and Ferrard, Viscount, Oriel Temple, Co. Louth

11,777

8,649

726,516

7

Templetown, Lieutenant General Lord, Templepatrick, Co. Antrim

10,239

8,902

747,768

8

Donegall, Marquess of, Grosvenor Sq., London

9,788

14,011

1,176,924

9

Agnew William, Kilwaughter, Larne

9,770

5,845

490,980

10

Legge, Mrs, Malone House, Belfast

8,565

4,844

406,896

11

Moore, James Stewart, Ballydinnity, Dervock

8,242

3,334

280,056

12

Crommelin, Samuel D., Carrowdore Castle, Donghadee

7,549

967

81,228

13

Leslie, James E., Leslie Hill, Ballymoney

7,428

5,449

457,716

14

Macnaghten, Sir E.C.W., Bart, Dundarave, Bushmills

7,134

7,062

593,208

15

M’Neill Henry H., Parkmount, Belfast

7,011

4,300

361,200

16

Magenis, R.H., Finvery House

6,816

3,698

310,632

17

Montgomery, John, Benvarden, Ballymoney

6,792

3,481

292,404

18

Waveny, Lord, The Castle, Ballymena

6,546

6,810

572,040

19

White, Major, -

5,996

1,535

128,940

20

Fullerton, Alex G., Bournmouth and London

5,611

2,919

245,195

21

Smyth, Robert, Gaybrook, Mullingar

5,592

2,641

221,844

22

Cuppage, Alexander, -

5,560

1,962

164,808

23

Dobbs, Conway Edward, Leeson St, Dublin

5,348

539

45,276

24

Boyd, Sir Harley Hugh Bart, The Mansion, Ballycastle

5,304

3,501

294,084

25

Coey, Sir Edward, Merville Whitehouse, Belfast

5,257

5,183

435,372

26

Dobbs, Conway Richard, Castle Dobbs, Carrickfergus

5,060

5,065

452,460

27

Chaine, James, Ballycraigy, Antrim

5,010

4,972

417,648

28

Gray, George, Graymount, Belfast

4,531

3,985

334,740

29

Alexander, Robert J., Portglenone House, Portglenone

4,215

3,576

300,384

30

Cramsie James, Ballymoney

4,036

2,173

182,532

31

Hill-Trevor, Lord A.E., Brynkinalt, Chirk, N. Wales

3,949

2,669

224,196

32

Montgomery, H. Reps, Ballydrain, Belfast

3,909

2,295

192,780

33

M’Gildowney, John, Clarepark, Ballycastle

3,811

2,449

205,716

34

Cromie, John, Cromore

3,756

2,912

244,608

35

Montgomery, Alexander, Potters Walk Antrim

3,736

2,511

210,924

36

Downshire Marquess of, Hillsborough, Co. Down

3,717

3,501

294,084

37

Wardlaw, General, Dublin

3,696

3,094

259,896

38

Greg, Thomas, Ballymenock and London

3,546

4,683

393,372

39

M’Garel, Charles, Belgrave Square, London

3,541

4,083

342,972

40

Rowan, Rev. R.W., Mount Davey’s, Ballymena

3,423

3,299

277,116

41

Benn George, Glenraville, Ballymena

3,393

1,115

93,660

42

Hutchinson, Thomas L., Ballymoney

3,390

1,891

158,844

43

Casement, John, Churchfield, Ballycastle

3,312

1,824

153,216

44

Gage, Robert, Rathlin Island, Ballycastle

3,311

869

72,996

45

Halliday, A.H. Reps, Dublin

3,228

3,054

256,536

46

Watson, William, Co. Wicklow

2,991

938

78,792

47

Macauley, Alexander, Willmount, Blessington, Co. Wicklow

2,965

1,033

86,772

48

White, John, Whitehall, Broughshane

2,897

821

68,964

49

Thompson, Samuel, Muckamore Abbey, Antrim

2,853

2,497

209,748

50

Hutchinson, W.F., Stranocum

2,730

2,219

186,396

51

Dyott, Richard and others, -

2,714

1,767

148,428

52

Owens, James, Holestone, Doagh

2,571

2,548

214,032

53

Cuppage Adam, Glenbank, Ballycastle

2,424

883

74,172

54

Clarke, George J,, The Steeples, Antrim

2,422

2,313

194,292

55

Fulton, Captain, Braidjule, Lisburn

2,297

1,189

99,876

56

Henry, Captain Fred H., Lodge Park, Straffan, Co. Kildare

2,289

2,008

168,672

57

Donegall, Marquess of, The Castle, Belfast

2,275

2,923

245,532

58

Smith, John, Belfast

2,219

1,005

84,420

59

Hamilton-Jones, Thos, Moneyglass House, Toombridge

2,212

2,306

193,704

60

Fergueson, Thomas Reps, -

2,204

824

69,216

61

Fitzsimmons, George, Dunsona, Belfast

2,144

2,244

188,496

62

Commissioners, Carrickfergus Municipal

2,136

715

60,060

63

Orr, Wm Reps, Hugomont, Ballymena

2,083

716

60,144

64

Casement, Thomas, Ballee House, Ballymena

2,073

2,143

180,012

65

Adair, Henry, Carnlough

2,071

1,930

162,120

66

Downshire, Marquess, Hillsborough, Co. Down

2,070

1,424

119,616

67

Fergueson, John F., Donegall Place, Belfast

1,992

1,292

108,528

68

Lanyon, Sir Charles, The Abbey, Whiteabbey

1,951

2,158

181,272

69

Hassard, Robert, Parkmore, Cushendall

1,830

160

13,440

70

Stewart, Alexander, Ballyedmond, Rostrevor

1,806

786

66,024

71

Casement, Rev. Robert, Ballymena

1,763

486

40,824

72

Jackson, A. Wray, Somerset, Coleraine

1,723

1,344

112,896

73

Wiley, Mrs, Bray, Co. Wicklow

1,692

270

22,680

74

Patrick, John, Ballymena

1,664

971

81,564

75

Getty, Samuel G., -

1,657

308

25,872

76

Young, John, Galgorm Castle, Ballymena

1,649

2,027

173,880

77

Miller, Campbell, Gilgad, Ballymena

1,642

1,720

144,480

78

Hunter, James, Dunnaney

1,640

325

27,300

79

Bruce, Edward S., 39th Regiment

1,622

824

69,216

80

Dalway, Marriott R., Bellahill, Carrickfergus

1,617

1,216

102,144

81

Montgomery, Thomas, Birdhill, Antrim

1,610

622

52,248

82

Dunseath, Mrs, Knockanure, Ballymona

1,596

1,061

89,124

83

Cuppage, Frances, Silverwood, Lurgan

1,502

821

68,964

84

Graham, George, Ballymena

1,493

371

31,164

85

Leckey, Hugh Junior, Berdivelle, Coleraine

1,492

959

80,556

86

Lyons, William T.B., Brookhill, Lisburn

1,491

2,070

173,880

87

Fisher, John, Cleggan, Ballymena

1,489

192

16,128

88

Moore, William, Merrion Square, Dublin

1,470

965

81,060

89

Allen, Henry E., Kingstown

1,454

1,045

87,780

90

Batt, Robert A., -

1,438

938

78,792

91

Traill, William, Ballylough, Bushmills

1,402

1,177

98,868

92

Hannay, Raymond A., Portrush

1,400

1,231

103,404

93

Gage Marcus, Ballynacree, Ballymoney

1,396

1,080

90,720

94

Anderson, J.C., -

1,392

75

6,300

95

Caruth, Robert, Craigywarren, Ballymena

1,350

169

14,196

96

Tome, Rev. Henry Joy, Co. Wicklow

1,334

547

45,948

97

Langtry, Charles Reps, Co. Antrim

1,329

779

65,436

98

Murray, Alexander, Drumadoon

1,281

661

55,524

99

Boyd, Jane C., Ballycastle

1,249

416

34,944

100

Beers, J. Leslie, Balleymoney

1,244

782

65,688

101

M’Donnell, John m.d., 32 Fitzwilliam St, Dublin

1,235

496

41,664

102

Casement, George, Ballymena

1,233

847

71,148

103

Torrens, James, Greenesland, Belfast

1,232

1,961

164,724