The Failed Modernisation of Ireland in the Late Nineteenth Century

Raymond Crotty

[Reprinted from Land & Liberty, July-August 1987]

Raymond Crotty challenged the view that Ireland's modernisation has been anything more than cosmetic (May-June, Land and Liberty). In Part II of his critique, he assesses T. W. Moody's Davitt and Irish Revolution,1846-1882.

MICHAEL DAVITT was born in 1846 into one of those families, accounting for almost half of all Irish families, that have failed to get a livelihood in Ireland since, following the transformation of relative prices that commenced in the 1820s, cattle and sheep have taken possession of Irish land.

Davitt emigrated with his family to the small textile town of Haslingden in Lancashire, where his family joined an established Irish colony. A factory accident of the sort then common in English mills that cost the eleven-year-old Davitt his right arm, combined with the literacy acquired from his father, diverted the young Davitt from the mainstream of Irish factory or building labourers and towards clerical work.

A white-collar occupation combined with his family background marked Davitt for a role of some importance in the Fenians, an organization mainly of Irish exiles in Britain and the USA, who were bitterly opposed to British rule in Ireland, which they perceived as the cause of Irish degradation and their own exile. The Fenians sought to end that rule by means that were perceived as being necessarily violent. The exiled Irish political radicals in the Fenian movement found themselves in uneasy alliance over the years with an assortment of individuals of varied origins who, from the passing of Daniel O'Connell in the 1840s to the emergence of William Cosgrave in the 1920s, acquired the political leadership of an Ireland that was drained by emigration of all indigenous radicalism.

Davitt, having fallen foul of the authorities for his revolutionary activities in England and having served seven years out of a 15-year prison sentence, emerged from jail in 1877 at the age of 31 to find himself a folk hero of a new Ireland that had come into existence during his own lifetime. It was the Ireland of the bourgeoisie.

The Irish bourgeoisie had been thrust into the background for 160 years after the restoration of Charles II, and especially during the last 60 years when George III reigned. They had been squeezed between the upper millstone of a protestant landlord class that was supported by the colonizing English power, and the nether millstone of a burgeoning coolie class that was favoured by the course of market demand. Bourgeois tenants were forced by an exceptionally freely operating land market to grow the grain and to keep the cows that the market demanded; and in order to do so, they were forced to sublet to the coolies the exhausted land for potato-growing. The bourgeois tenants could not themselves rehabilitate land that was quickly exhausted by grain-growing in a cold, wet climate, in the normal way by leaving the land longer under pasture and grazing the pasture with labour-extensive cattle.

William Tighe, describing conditions in the relatively prosperous county Kilkenny in 1800, captures well the shifts to which poor people, experiencing rapid population growth, are driven. All available animal power was mobilized into numerically large, assorted teams of ill-nourished horses, asses and oxen for the interminable ploughings and cultivations that sought to dredge the last ounce of fertility from an exhausted soil. Street sweepings were valued for the desperately needed fertility they yielded. 'The street dung of Kilkenny is sold at a good price; the sweeping of John-street is rented at four guineas a year, and that of other streets in proportion'.

Similar desperate, capital-saving expedients have since become commonplace among other poor, rapidly expanding peasant populations in the Third World.

The transformation of agricultural price ratios after 1820 and the related chronic failure of the potato crop through the 1820s, 1830 and 1840s turned the tide against the coolies. The bourgeoisie came into their own. Cattle exports, which had remained static for 160 years previously, increased almost sixfold between 1821-25 and 1866-70. Exports of sheep, 'the poor man's cattle' increased twice as rapidly, from 50,000 to 681,000 annually over the same period.

There are few parallels for the sustained, intensive capitalization of agriculture that occurred in Ireland during the 60 or so years following the death of George III. It was moreover capital formation of a distinctive, pastoral character, for which the closest parallel is 20th century Latin America. It resulted in higher profits, as was made clear to the Devon Commission; 'You have stated the rent to be for tillage thirty shillings per acre; what would you say was the rent of the same quality of land for grazing?' The reply: 'Higher, from thirty shillings to forty'.

Davitt's release from prison coincided with a concatenation of circumstances that spelled the end of Anglo-Irish, protestant ascendancy rule in Ireland. The industrial and commercial classes were becoming increasingly dominant in Britain, as reflected especially by the extension of the franchise, and they were not loath to see some diminution of the power of the Anglo-Irish landowners, who were the most reactionary group in the Westminster parliament.

The pressure of cattle on people in Ireland had acquired a new aspect and was creating new areas of destitution about which public and official opinion in Britain, after the holocaust of the 1840s, was sensitive. A situation arose in the Irish cattle industry by the 1870s that was directly opposite to that of the mid-18th century. That is, the number of dairy cows had stabilized around 1820 (and was to remain so until around 1970) while protracted, rapid increase in cattle exports had occurred. With an unchanging supply of, and a rapid increase in the demand for, young cattle, prices of these had at last commenced to rise. This, coupled with the rapidly expanding sheep trade, offered new opportunities for profit from the poor pasturelands of the west, which were generally unsuited for dairying or cattle fattening but were quite adequate for grazing sheep and young cattle.

But of most importance, the Irish bourgeois graziers, after a half century of extremely rapid economic growth that had made them the most substantial economic power in the land, were in no mood to suffer longer the sharing of profits from the booming livestock trade with an Anglo-Irish protestant elite whose title to that share rested on the increasingly anachronistic grounds of conquest, confiscation and royal munificence in an increasingly distant and irrelevant past. The time for account settling had come.

It was fortuitous that a local agrarian protest movement in 1877 in Davitt's native county Mayo became the nub around which a country-wide Land League movement grew. A similar movement could, and almost certainly would, have developed around any of a dozen other local protests. The League embraced three discrete elements.

The first and most powerful was the grazier interest, which was ready to break the political link with Britain if that was necessary to change the land tenure system.

The second element was the Fenian movement, the members of which in Britain mobilized political support for the League, and in the USA, financial support for it; and which was ready to destroy the land tenure system if that seemed the best way to break the political link with Britain.

The third element was the mass of the Irish rural landless or virtually landless - the farm labourers, the relatives assisting on farms, and the 'farmers' of less than IS acres, who comprised two-thirds of the agricultural workforce. The demand for the labour that was all that this class had to offer declined as land was transferred from crop to pasture in order to accommodate the growing stocks of cattle and sheep.

The number of the rural landless had been adjusting rapidly downwards since the Great Famine of the 1840s, through enforced celibacy and emigration; but meanwhile this class filled the role of 'infantry' in the 'land war'. The landless committed the innumerable agrarian outrages and suffered the wholesale evictions that captured public attention in Britain and America. The near landless of the west, whose potato and oats economy was subjected to intolerable stress through the combined effects of rising prices for competing young cattle and sheep and unusually adverse weather, especially provided the material for startling and well-publicized evictions, outrages and poverty bordering on famine.

THE CHARACTER of rural distress in the late 1870s and the role this distress played in bringing about land reform were not quite as Professor Moody perceives them.

Professor Moody emphasizes reduced output resulting from unfavourable prices and weather as causes of distress that precipitated agrarian unrest. Production of crops, and especially of the potato crop which was still important for subsistence, certainly declined in the late 1870s. But Professor Moody overlooks the important relation between distress resulting from crop failure on the one hand and expanding cattle and sheep stocks on the other.

Professor Moody omits the critically important point that the distress of the capital-less was the mirror image of the rising power and wealth of the graziers of young cattle and sheep.

Professor Moody uses a measure of the value of agricultural output that leads him, as it has led other writers on this period of Irish history, into error. He takes the value of on-farm consumption and off-farm sales as the value of agricultural output in any year. This may be adequate for crop production, but it can give a very erroneous picture of the situation when applied to the livestock farming on which Ireland was increasingly concentrating. There changes of stock, which are ignored by Professor Moody, are of paramount importance. Allowance for stock changes would show that the value of agricultural output, particularly of the livestock component, varied much less in the 1870s than Professor Moody suggests; and that the value of that output in real terms was moving strongly upwards.

Probably the most sensitive barometer of the prosperity, confidence and liquidity of cattle producers is the ratio of the price of young cattle to that of old cattle. That ratio soared to an unprecedentedly high and unsustainable level ten years ago on Ireland joining the EEC, when there was also a drastic decline in sales of livestock as farmers held on to stocks in the confident expectation of still higher prices in the future. Something of the same sort happened in the 1870s.

The Irish bourgeoisie, in alliance with the exiled Irish political radicals in the Fenian movement and using the remnants of the Irish coolies as foot-soldiers, routed within a few campaign years the forces of English protestant colonialism that had been established in Ireland under the Tudors. The Land Act of 1881 gave explicit recognition to the tenants' right in land. It was thereafter only a matter of winding up the landlords' interest, which was achieved without difficulty over the following quarter century.

Davitt's role in the 'land war' was to be the presentable, reasonably principled and intelligent representative of historic forces that he very imperfectly understood and hardly at all controlled. Nothing illustrates these points better than his belated and unsuccessful espousal of the cause of land nationalisation. None but the 10,000 Anglo-Irish landlords could have objected to the early Land League catchcry, 'the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland'.

DISAGREEMENT, however, arose when Davitt and one or two others, including the American Henry George, proceeded to interpret "the people of Ireland" as "all the people of Ireland equally", and to advocate not only the cessation of rental payments to the Anglo-Irish landlords, but their transfer to the state as land taxes to be used for common purposes.

The 20,000 Irish cattle and sheep graziers who occupied almost half the land and who by 1881 had achieved the dominance in the country that they have since retained, were content that the first part only of Davitt's programme should be executed and that 95% of the Irish people should continue as landless as they were made by the Tudor conquest and the confiscation of the clan lands.

Davitt, who reached the high point of his popularity during the intense agrarian agitation that preceded the 1881 legislation, was left stranded in his radical position as the tide of Irish agrarian agitation receded.

The exiled political radicals of the Fenian movement lost interest in further institutional change that offered no prospect of breaking the constitutional link with Britain; the bourgeoisie, having inherited the land of Ireland, were not disposed to see it pass from their hands; and it was easier for those of the landless majority who were discontented with social conditions in Ireland to change their place of residence, as almost half the Irish born since 1820 have done, than to attempt to change the Irish socio-economic order.

The transfer of the proprietorship of Irish land from landlords to graziers was scarcely avoidable in the late 19th century, given the social, economic and political circumstances of Britain and Ireland at that time. Contrary, therefore, to Professor Moody's opinion that though the 'success of the land war is conceivable without Egan, Brennan, or Kettle, or Dillon, but not without both Davitt and Parnell', neither Davitt nor Parnell played any greater role in the Irish land reform movement of 1877-82 than does the husbandman attending the birth of a calf when the cow has gone full time.

Davitt's presence at the birth of Irish owner occupancy thrust greatness on an otherwise not very remarkable person - as is indeed clear from Professor Moody's biography.

The transfer itself scarcely achieved the 'momentous results' ascribed to it by Professor Moody. The number of persons getting a livelihood in Ireland has declined during the century following the 1881 Land Act as it did during the preceding 40 years. Living standards for the residual population have risen in line with those in neighbouring countries, as they did for decades before the Act, for long because of the outward mobility of the Irish people but more recently because of the country's willingness and ability to borrow abroad.

The principal distributional effect of the 1881 and subsequent land acts has been to broaden, and thereby make more durable, the proprietorship of Irish land. They hardly transformed that proprietorship. Instead of 10,000 Anglo-Irish landlords owning all the land, now some 20,000 graziers own half of it and 95% of the people continue to own none of it. The principal production effects of the land acts has been to make Irish agriculture, which had been highly responsive to market forces, quite unresponsive to those forces.

An unbroken strand running through Irish colonial and post-colonial history is the key to much that is otherwise inexplicable in that history. That strand has been the pursuit of profit from the land confiscated from the clans and made the property of a privileged class, which was the onee of colonialism.

A similar strand runs through the colonial and post-colonial histories of the countries of the Third World, where universally the most significant and durable cultural transfer has been the institution of property in land, which has everywhere dichotomized society into landed and landless.

Ireland is distinguished from the other countries of the Third World, apart from its European location, in the intensity and singlemindedness of the pursuit of profit from the property in land that was created by the colonial power. That was made possible initially by the uninhibited application of colonial force, and subsequently for the past 140 years by the removal of opposition through the emigration of almost every second person born in Ireland and surviving childhood.

The clearest measure of the success achieved in making Irish land profitable is the fact that Irish farmland, which was sold in London for as little as one old penny an acre in the 1650s to finance Cromwell's reconquest of the island rose to £4,000 an acre. This millionfold appreciation represents an annual average three % capital gain, in addition to an inordinately large share of current national income over the centuries.

Ireland now, a century after the land reform with which Davitt was associated and 60 years after the foundation of an independent state, retains within its socio-economic system those fatal structural flaws that, during the reign of King George III, brought into existence the Irish coolies and made them the largest social class in the land; and that, during the subsequent reign of Queen Victoria, caused the obliteration of that class.

Those flaws derive from the unresolved conflicts between an indigenous, tribal pastoralism and a superimposed capitalism. They persist beneath a veneer of 'modernization' acquired during the past four centuries, including the most recent quarter century of 'programmes of economic growth and development' financed by government borrowing. Similar flaws exist in all the other former colonies where, as in Ireland, an alien capitalism was superimposed on earlier, indigenous, non-capitalist cultures and which now comprise the undeveloping Third World.

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