The Start of the Story
Every story has to start somewhere and like many stories about Ireland the story presented in this book starts in a conflict regarding land. This conflict is the mass revolt against the landownership system by tenant farmers, which began in 1879, petered out by 1902 and is popularly known as the “Land War”. Conflicts between the (mainly Protestant and unionist in political orientation) landlords who owned most of the land and the (mainly Catholic and increasingly nationalist) farmers who rented it had of course shaped Irish history for a long period prior to this. However, between the late 1870s and early 1890s, this conflict was manifested in an unprecedented mass agrarian tenants’ movement, which was led initially by the Irish National Land League and subsequently by a series of successor organisations. Irish nationalist members of the UK parliament realised that taking up the cause of land reform had the potential to unite the bulk of the population behind their banner and provide clear evidence of the practical benefits of supporting the nationalist movement (Clark, 1987). While, depending on their political hue, different UK governments supported Irish land reform in order to procure nationalist support in parliament, smother nationalist sentiment or simply because they could see no alternative way to foster a sustainable agricultural economy in Ireland (Hudson, 2003).
These political pressures inspired a series of radical legislative interventions (the Land Acts) which first regulated the letting of land and then enabled and finally subsidised the transfer of landownership from landlords to tenant farmers (Clark, 1987). When the first major Land Act was introduced in 1870, only 3 per cent of Irish farmers owned their land and fewer than 800 landlords owned half the country. By the time Ireland seceded from the UK and an independent Irish state was founded in 1922, some two-thirds of tenant farmers had bought their holdings and the ownership of over 316,000 holdings, comprising 11 million acres, had been transferred from landlords to tenant farmers (Aalen, 1993).
The Irish land reform policies were not unique. Governments in many European countries introduced measures to support the replacement of previously widespread large capitalist farms with small family farms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This action was inspired primarily by the widespread depression in agriculture triggered by imports from the new world which undermined the economic viability of the farming model (see Koning, 1994). However, compared to Britain and the rest of Europe, the Irish land reform experiment was unparalleled in terms of its scale, cost to the exchequer and long-term impact (Swinnen, 2002). Land redistribution in many Central and Eastern European countries was rolled back by communist regimes, and Swinnen’s (2002) study of land redistribution in Ireland, England, Scotland, Belgium, France and the Netherlands since 1880 demonstrates that this policy was historically most ambitious in Ireland with the result that, by the late 1990s, far more Irish farmland was owner occupied (rather than leased) than in any other of these countries.
Despite its significance, the Land War is just the starting point of the story presented here. The primary focus of this book is on the long-term development and (until recent decades) distinctive character of Ireland’s social policies and system of welfare provision. Therefore, this story’s starting point in the 1870s reflects not only the emergence of the land reform movement, but also of the government interventions in the economy and society which would provide the foundations for the comprehensive welfare states which emerged in Europe and several other developed countries during the twentieth century. Around this time in Germany, Bismarck established the first system of social insurance benefits, encompassing: health insurance (introduced in 1883), accident insurance (1884) and old age and disability insurance (1889), and this model was subsequently copied across Western Europe (Balier, 2010). Concurrently, Western European governments began to intervene in housing provision by regulating private rented housing, clearing urban slums and, in some cases, making provision for the construction of replacement social rented housing for the poor (Pooley, 1992). Also in the late nineteenth century, government funding of health care was introduced or significantly extended in Britain (non-paupers gained access to public hospitals from 1886), Sweden (health insurance system established in 1891) and France (medical assistance provided to the poor from 1893) (Freeman, 2000).
European Stories
Stories about European welfare state development do not typically commence in agrarian politics and land redistribution policy. This is because most historians and social policy analysts link the establishment and expansion of public welfare systems to the emergence and growth of the urban labour movement – working-class agitation, trade unions and social democratic parties – which followed industrialisation, urbanisation and also the extension of the franchise to non-property owners during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (e.g. Esping-Andersen, 1999; Castles, 1978; Korpi, 1978, among many others: Baldwin, 1990, is an exception). The imprint of these urban labourist influences is evident both in the long-run development of European welfare systems and also in the academic research which examines them.
For instance, early public health and housing policies in Europe were strongly focused on urban slums; examples of significant government intervention in rural housing are rare (Pooley, 1992). Furthermore, access to early social insurance schemes (such as Bismarck’s 1883 and 1884 programmes) was generally limited to industrial employees and often to employees of businesses above a certain size. These arrangements benefitted many urban males but excluded self-employed farmers, the large number assisting relatives who also worked on farms and the female-dominated domestic service workforce. Land redistribution policies are not typically included within the remit of social policy and thus are largely ignored by welfare state historians. Indeed, public spending on capital goods such as housing is also largely excluded from comparative studies of welfare systems, which are heavily focused on current public expenditure on the redistribution of income (by means of taxes, social security benefits) and, to a lesser extent, on social services such as health care and education (Kemeny, 2001). This tendency is exemplified by Esping-Andersen’s (1990) highly influential typology of welfare states in OECD countries which is derived mainly from analysis of social security policies. On this basis, he categorises Ireland and other Anglophone countries as “liberal welfare regimes” where households rely mainly on the market to maintain their standard of living (or his parlance living standards are not “decommodified”) and government income support is minimalist and strongly targeted at the poorest households. However, this current spending bias in the social policy literature and the associated focus on social security benefits and social services does reflect the structure of most modern welfare states. Housing policy is often described as the “wobbly pillar under the welfare state” on the grounds that government spending on housing never came close to expenditure on the other elements of welfare and, unlike health care, education and social security, in all European countries most housing is provided by the private sector (Malpass, 2008; Torgersen, 1987). In 2009, OECD members devoted an average of only 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to public spending on housing, but they devoted 7.3 per cent of GDP to old-age pensions and 6.6 per cent to health care (OECD, various years).
A Distinctive Irish Story
As its unusual beginning in agrarian politics and land redistribution policy suggests, this book tells a story about the development of the Irish welfare system which differs significantly from the dominant narrative in the literature about Western European welfare states. The key insight offered here is that the land reform policies which emerged in Ireland in the late nineteenth century were not only highly significant progressively redistributive and decommodifying social policies in their own right, they had a defining influence on the welfare and broader social system which developed in Ireland during the twentieth century. This is because, by conceding the principle of significant government involvement in the redistribution of landownership from landlords to tenant farmers, the Land Acts opened a floodgate of knock-on demands firstly for the provision of higher and higher public subsidies for peasant proprietorship and subsequently for subsidisation of the redistribution of other types of property, principally dwellings, with the result that property redistribution became a major focus of government activity for most of the twentieth century.
Thus, rather than developing weakly, this book suggests that for most of the twentieth century the Irish welfare system developed differently from most other North Western European countries. Ireland’s regime was distinctive firstly in terms of focus – which was primarily on property redistribution while the redistribution of incomes and provision of social services were relegated to a less important role than in neighbouring countries (Castles, 2002). The Irish welfare system was also distinctive in terms of purpose. Whereas welfare states in most other European countries were intended to operationalise the “grand bargain” between capital and the urban labour movement, Ireland’s system of State subsidised property redistribution was intended to support a familist social order in which individual interests, values and prerogatives were subordinated to those of the family (Fahey, 2002; McCullagh, 1991).
The atypical early focus of the Irish welfare system is illustrated by the scale of spending on property redistribution prior to the foundation of the independent Irish state in 1922. By 1921, UK government loans to enable Irish tenant farmers purchase their farms amounted to £101 million, whereas Irish GDP in 1914 has been estimated at £135 million (Fahey, 2002). The extent of the government support enjoyed by tenant farmers inspired knock-on demands centred on providing social housing for large population of landless farm labourers who were excluded from the benefits of land reform but sufficiently numerous to merit the attention of politicians particularly as the franchise was extended to include all non-property-owning men. Consequently, in the early twentieth century, social housebuilding rates in rural Ireland far exceeded output in Britain and Western Europe (Fraser, 1996; Fahey, 2002).
After Irish independence, land reform spending declined...
