In raising the issue of the increase in rent paid by Knockmealdown hill farmers to the Duke of Devonshire last week, Sinn Féin TD for Waterford, Conor McGuinness, referred to “echoes of darker times in our history when absentee landlords pushed farmers off the land”.
(We shall park for the moment the fact that increasing numbers of ‘absentee landlords’ – overseas investment funds – are encroaching ever more into the residential housing market here. At least you could put a face to the Lords and Ladies of Castle Rackrent in the days of ‘Auld Dacency.)
The facts of the matter are that the current Duck of Devonshire – as Gene Hackman might have styled him – one Peregrine ‘Stoker’ Cavendish has steeply hiked the rents charged to his tenants on his Lismore properties, to €5,200 per hectare in some reported cases. The farmers are refusing to pay what they say is a 900% increased rent.
That new demand is vastly more than the average rent charged for farmland other than, interestingly, for commercial forestry land – a sector that the Devonshire group is involved in, including on a relatively small scale around the estate lands in Waterford. Watch that space perhaps.
There is a related issue where the Lismore estate is apparently refusing to issue the tenants with the proof of lease that is required for them to claim their single farm payments under the Common Agricultural Policy.
The estate itself is owned by the Devonshire/Cavendish family through Lismore Holdings which is registered in St. Helier, Jersey. They still have more than 7,700 acres which is a bit of a decline from the old days when they had over 60,000 acres. Much of that was sold through favourable deals initiated after the Land War of the 1879 – 82 when the settler landlords were mostly bought out.
How did these chaps come to own all this land in the first place?
There had been a famous abbey based in Lismore before the Norman Conquest and its name became attached to Leabhar Leasa Móir which was compiled at the end of the 15th century under the patronage of Mac Cárthaigh Riabhach in Kilbrittan.
It was called after Lismore because when it was found hidden in the walls of Kilbrittan Castle during the war of the early 1640s it was basically stolen by Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork who was based in Lismore and who had bought the Castle from Sir Walter Raleigh.
Previously it had been part of the Gaelicised Norman Desmond lands which were confiscated following their defeat in the horrific destruction of the territory of the Munster Desmonds and their Gaelic allies in the 1580s. It was said that you could walk for days without meeting a living person or beast following the savagery of the Elizabethan soldiers and planters.
Raleigh was a friend – and co-beneficiary of the expropriations – of the poet Edmund Spenser. Spenser was the author of the tiresome dirge The Faerie Queen as well as A View of the Present State of Irelande in 1596 in which Spenser outlines his claim to an intellectual basis supporting the cultural and physical liquidation of the Irish people.
The Devonshires, then the humble Cavendishes, managed to get a hold of the place in 1753 when the Cavenishes inherited the Earl of Cork’s stolen lands through marriage. That event is happily preserved through the Earldom of Burlington whose current holder is William Cavendish son of the current Duck of Devonshire, Peregrine Cavendish. He is the main owner of the estate and of their Charco investment fund.
Perhaps the best known of the Devonshires in historical memory is Lord Frederick Cavendish, son of the 7th Duke who was executed by the Invincibles in the Phoenix Park on May 6, 1882, just hours after being sworn in as the new Chief Secretary for Ireland in Dublin Castle. The killing was intended as revenge for state killings of protesters during Land League meetings.
The Devonshire estates were impacted by the Land War although the Cavendish family themselves rarely visited other than to fish the rich Blackwater salmon stream which they still control along about 20 miles from the tidal limit to Lismore Castle and slightly beyond. You need to get a license from the Duck if you want to fish along that stretch.
By the time of An Gorta Mór, the Cavendish family had largely become absentee landlords based at Chatsworth in the mother country. While they are not among the worst examples of those who took advantage of the catastrophe, they still evicted people and continued to do so throughout the succeeding decades as the English state implemented a series of Land Acts to mostly buy the ascendency landlords out. The Devonshires are unusual in that they retained such a large and lucrative holding.
Any serious nationalist revolution would have expropriated without compensation the surviving colonial landlords and divided the land between the tenants, many of whom would have claims going back in time to when the land was first expropriated.
Instead, the Land Acts and the annuities allowed the successors of the plantation landlords to exit on favourable terms or to remain – and the Treaty ensured that the Protestant settler descended landlord and banking class retained a significant influence on the new state after 1922. That was to its detriment as it was starved of investment funds through their control of the banks.
What is happening now is another one of the residual effects of all of that. Irish farmers having to pay any rent – let alone the greatly increased one now demanded – to these people is an historical anachronism. They are doing well enough from their offshore investment funds without having to extract more from their Irish holdings.
It may appear quaint as it comes at a time when new faceless corporate landlords acquire a growing share of the Irish residential property sector. Neither are quaint nor desirable.