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INCORPORATED LAW SOCIETY OF IRELAND
GAZETTE
Vol. 78 No. 7
September 1984
Abolition of Land Commission
T
HE recent announcement by the Government of its
intention to abolish the Land Commission will be
received with mixed feelings by the Solicitors' profession.
To many the Land Commission is almost an old friend,
certainly a familiar institution. To others it will have been
an anachronistic nuisance, notable chiefly for spoiling
auctions of farming land by the last minute service of
Inspection Notices.
In its time, the Land Commission, as successor to the
Congested Districts Board, served the Irish community
well. The system of land acquisition from big estates and
its re-allocation among the local farming community has,
in the course of not so many generations, transformed the
Irish rural population from almost total serfdom to being
independent, land owning, conservative capitalists. With
the ever-increasing spread of bureaucracy into our daily
lives, the Land Commission became the body charged
with responsibility for administering such diverse
concepts as the approval of land purchases by non-
nationals and the farmer's voluntary retirement scheme.
To date, official explanation of what the dismantling of
the Land Commission will involve has, to say the least,
been scant. Little or no reference seems to have been made
to the setting up of the Inter-Departmental Committee on
Land Structure Reform, which delivered its Final Report
in May 1978, nor to the Government White Paper "Land
Policy" published in December 1980. Interestingly, the
fnter-Departmental Committee found that the Land
Commission, which was established to deal with the
problems of an entirely different era, was not the
appropriate body to implement future land policy, and
recommended the establishment of a new land agency for
the purpose. The White Paper, however, chose to ignore
the r e commenda t i on and, instead, stated that
Government policy was to
strengthen
the powers of the
Land Commission by two additional mechanisms,
separate but complementary, consisting of Fiscal
measures and a direct control of the right to purchase
land. The White Paper went even further and made a
number of strong and fundamental recommendations in
the context of the continued utilisation of the Land
Commission. In particular, it envisaged a continuing need
for compulsory acquisition as long as a substantial
acreage of land remained under-utilised in the hands of
owners who were not interested in its development —
which was in no way an attack on the idle rich, or "hobby
farmers". The White Paper stated that over 30 per cent of
the land of the country is taken up by farms which have
shown no significant growth in recent years. One has only
to drive through the Irish countryside to see the number
of fields covered in gorse or brambles which could, at little
cost, be restored to productivity.
In the face of the 1980 White Paper, the abolition of the
Land Commission seems something of a volte face.
Socially, it may be argued that the loss of the Land
Commission's compulsory powers of acquisition may
have the effect of raising the price of land. Against this it
can be said that market forces, including the state of the
economy and the money supply from time to time, will
themselves regulate the price of land. The areas of the
country in which very large areas of land will be
purchased for very large sums of money are small and are,
in the main, areas in which compulsory purchase and re-
allocation is not a major factor. In other areas, the
absence of the Land Commission as a purchaser of large
farms should simply result in those farms being offered
for sale in smaller lots, thus, in effect, making land
available to more farmers. It is also possible that farmers
who have purchased additional land out of their own
hard-earned cash would be more concerned to farm it to
its best advantage than would the farmer who has the land
allocated to him through the Land Commission and who
pays for it over 30 years on the "never never".
At least it can be recorded that one key recommenda-
tion of both the Inter-Departmental Committee and the
White Paper has found favour with the Government,
namely, that steps be taken to make more land available
to those who need it — existing farmers and intending
farmers — through the medium of leasing. While this
proposal has a great deal to recommend it, it faces the
obstacle of a historically entrenched and entirely under-
standable "anti landlord" attitude which must be
surmounted. It also faces the obstacle of a residual body
of old and largely dormant law, passed over the years for
the protection of tenants and which both the Inter-
Departmental Committee and the White Paper stated
should be identified and repealed. The Land Bill, 1984,
introduced earlier this year marks the Government's first
positive action in this regard, by excluding leases of
agricultural land from the application of a number of old
enactments and by modifying Section 80 of the Building
Societies Act, 1976, so as to provide that the expression
"prior mortgage" shall not extend to or include certain
charges on agricultural land. The entrenched fear of
"Landlordism" may be harder to dispel.
As far as the profession is concerned, it would welcome
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