Who Owns Britain (and Ireland)

The 26 counties of the Irish Republic, created in 1922 as a Free State and as a full Republic in 1949, have boundaries almost identical in every respect to those of 1872. This enables an extraordinary picture to emerge in two respects. The first is the almost total lack of estates over 500 acres in modern Ireland. This is despite the shrinking of the farming community from about 450,000 farms shortly after independence, to about 145,000 farms today (and still falling fast, by 7% in 2000/1). It pays homage to the operation of a partially free market in land, but one which has evolved naturally from a significant redistribution via the Land Commission, and which does not remain bottlenecked by huge estates protected by biased statutes. It may be a major contributor to Ireland's decade of 10% per annum growth in GDP. The other picture is even more startling.

Just by looking at the population figures in 1872 and now, with but a few exceptions, the terrible shadow of the famine can still be seen in huge, fertile but under-populated areas like Laois, Offaly, Mayo, Sligo and Donegal. The 1872 record was made more than a quarter of a century after the famine, but the underlying cause of the destruction invoked by the loss of the staple food, the potato, is there for all to see. Over 98% of the rapidly declining population owned nothing at all. They were strangers in their own land, a land owned by strangers. In some counties the population is declining still and has never recovered.