January 15 1925
AN anonymous writer in one of the local morning papers thoughtfully “arranges” the Unbought Tenants of the Six Counties “into four categories”. So might an anthropologist classify the various races of the human family, or a natural historian distinguish between the varied and diverse forms of life on earth, and sea, and air. To their own minds, and as a matter of “practical politics”, the Unbought Tenants of the Six Counties and the Tenants who were Unbought in the Twenty-six Counties until the Free State Land Act of 1923 became operative are, and were, farmers who had been, through the obstinacy and greed of landlords, denied the rights and privileges which the British Legislature, acting under the compulsion of a great Irish National Movement and the pressure of the Irish Nationalist Party at Westminster, decreed for all those who paid rent for agricultural land in this country 22 years ago. But as the local emulator of Bertillon or Carl Linnaeus made the effort, his performance deserves attention at this stage of the struggle. He says: -
“The first of these consists of tenants whose landlords absolutely declined to sell their interest to them. They have been paying from twenty to twenty-five per cent for above twenty years more than they should have had to pay had they not been deprived of the advantages which the Land Purchase Acts – and notably the great enactment of 1903 – were passed to confer. Nor is this all. Every tenant-farmer who has been converted into a tenant purchaser passes a milestone on the way to absolute ownership every time he pays his annuity, while the rent-payer never moves an inch nearer that desirable goal when he lays down his rent”.
It is a perfectly correct description of the “class” which includes about 95 per cent – perhaps more – of the 28,000 Unbought Tenants in the Six Counties (a Correspondent put the number at 30,000 last week). But the “classification”, so far, should be familiar to readers of the Irish News; the “classifier” is, obviously, a diligent student of its pages.
He points out that the “Die-Hards” amongst the landlords who refused to sell under any circumstances have been profiting heavily by their unjust conduct: it has frequently been asserted here that the tenants have paid at least four years’ rents over and above the payments made by their neighbours.
Irish News editorial on the plight of Unbought Tenants in the North, an active issue during the April 1925 election to the Northern Parliament, with George Henderson elected under the Unbought Tenants banner in Antrim.
