Absentee Landlord - Absentee Landlords in Ireland

Absentee Landlords in Ireland

Absentee Landlords were a highly significant issue in the History of Ireland. During the course of 16th and 17th centuries, most of the land in Ireland was confiscated from Irish Catholic landowners during the Plantations of Ireland and granted to English settlers who were members of the established churches (the Church of England and the Church of Ireland at the time); in Ulster, many of the landowners were Presbyterians, also known as English Dissenters. Seized land was given to English nobles and soldiers, some of whom rented it out to the Irish, while they themselves remained residents of England. By 1782 the Irish patriot Henry Grattan deplored that some £800,000 was transferred annually to such landlords. He attempted to place an extra tax on remittances to England. But many absentees also reinvested part of their rents into roads and bridges, to improve local economies, that are still seen today. A notable beneficial absentee in the 19th century was Lord Palmerston, who went into debt to develop his part of Sligo; an investment that eventually paid off.

By the 1800s resentment grew as not only were the absentee landlords Protestant (while most tenants were Catholic and forbidden to own land), but their existence meant that the wealth of the land was always exported. This system became particularly detrimental to the native population during the Great Irish Famine when, despite Ireland being a net exporter of food, millions starved, died of disease, or fled the country. In the years following, the land issue with the Irish Land League's Land War became a significant issue in Ireland. The land issue was one of the historic factors which resulted in Ireland's troubled history until the 1920s, though it had largely been addressed legislatively by 1903 in the Irish Land Acts.

A survey of the 5,000 largest Irish landlords in 1872 revealed that 71% lived on their estates, and by then 43% had converted to Catholicism. This suggests that the use of such terms as "absentee landlord", and categorising all landlords as being members of a "Protestant Ascendancy", did not entirely reflect the reality on the ground after the middle of the 19th century, and may have been used thereafter for emotive effect as a reminder of centuries of earlier abuses.