Land Tenure
Generally speaking, agriculture in Ireland was underdeveloped compared to England (Donnolly, 2001). Connacht was the least developed province. Tuke regarded Mayo as 'the poorest and most destitute' county in Connacht ( 1848, p. 9). Fragmentation of the land is regarded as being the main cause of the lack of development. Of the 46,000 farms in Mayo, 44,000 thousand consisted of less than 15 acres (Tuke, 1848), while more than a quarter of farms were less than five acres. According to Donnoly (2001), a minimum of 20 acres was needed to sustain a decent life.
Mayo was one of the few areas in the country where the Rundale system still persisted in the nineteenth century. Land was rented, not to a single tenant, but to a group of people, usually an extended family, who lived in clusters of poor houses (clachans) without any of the amenities of a village (Ó Tuathaigh, 1991). Even worse off were the landless labourers, who rented a field or two on the conacre system, paying rent in labour owed, not by cash, often at up to eight times the cash rent value. They had no leases or legal rights and lived in shacks (Somerville, 1994). |
The population was almost totally dependent on the potato, grown in labour intensive lazy beds. The potato was a nourishing food and allowed people to sustain life on a very small portion of land, which had contributed to the population explosion of the late eighteenth century. Other crops grown were cash crops, sold to pay rent, rates and tithes. Flax was a very important crop, which thrived in the damp climate of Mayo. The linen industry was very important and most cottages had a loom. Poverty was exasperated by the slump in tillage prices following the Napoleonic wars and by the industrialisation of linen manufacturing, which destroyed the cottage based linen industry (Ó Tuathaigh, 1991). The Act of Union also affected poverty, as the seat of Government was physically and politically too far removed from the west.
The Rundale and conacre systems suited the landlords. They obtained a maximum amount of rent from poor land and had an unlimited supply of unpaid or poorly paid labour. They also had control of a greater number of votes, which increased their political power (Tuke, 1848). However, by the outbreak of the Famine, many were considering clearing their estates and modernising farming methods. Click HERE for information on Landlords |