Irish Land Question and Sectarian Violence
The Irish Land Question and Sectarian Violence Raymond Crotty
1. Introduction
Changed circumstances are bringing ineluctably to an end the old political links between Britain and Ireland. Forged when Britain's was a leading role in the expansion of capitalism from its European heartland to encompass the globe, the link was strategically essential to safeguard maritime Britain communications with its world-wide possessions, and to secure the outlying island that lay across Britain's exposed western flank against occupation by enemies who were aware that "he who would England win, let him in Ireland first begin". Those overriding strategic considerations no longer obtain in post-colonial Britain and in an age of superpowers. General recognition of this fact is expressed by opinion polls that indicate that 70 per cent of Britons no longer wish to maintain the present link with Northern Ireland.<1>
The problem is to terminate expeditiously a link that has always been distasteful to the majority of Irish and has now become so also for the majority of British, but to do so without excessive political, social and economic cost A precipitous British withdrawal from Northern Ireland now, however understandable, would almost certainly lead to civil war there, which would involve the whole island and would most likely spread to Britain itself. A British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, though desired by the majority of the peoples in both islands, if precipitous would be irresponsible. The context of this paper then is that, while the majority of British people wish to rid themselves of an otiose surviving link with Ireland, they are not prepared to do so irresponsibly, nor yet to maintain the link indefinitely at enormous expense.
The paper is concerned (a) to show the central relevance of the neglected Irish land question to Britain's problems in Northern Ireland; and (b) to suggest that dealing rationally with the Irish land question offers by far the best -- the only -- prospect of Britain's being able to withdraw expeditiously and without excessive cost from its Irish involvement, and of leaving after that withdrawal a harmonious and prosperous Ireland that will in due course wish to enter into new, agreed and mutually profitable relations with Britain.
2. The Nature of Irish Sectarian Violence
Sectarian violence in Northern Ireland is political. It cannot plausibly be dismissed as the doings of a small, unrepresentative group who, if they had not the passive acceptance, if not active support, of a considerable section of the population, would long ago have been isolated and destroyed. Sectarian violence reflects the disaffection of the Catholics, who are the largest religious denomination and account for one-third of the population of the are Catholics perceive government in Northern Ireland to be the institutionalise force that in the past stripped them of their land and that continues to deprive them of a reasonable opportunity to earn a livelihood. The clearest and most comprehensive evidence of the continued deprivation of the indigenous Catholic population of Northern Ireland is contained in the Census of Population 1971 Religion Tables, Northern Ireland (HMSO Belfast 1975). This shows a strong, consistent bias in favour of the non-Catholic population, who have a disproportionately large share of all jobs and of the better jobs; and a similarly strong, consistent bias against Catholics, of whom a disproportionately large number are unemployed or are in the poorest paid and least attractive employment. Sectarian violence in Northern Ireland is firmly grounded in the use of political power to secure a livelihood for Protestants on preferential terms by denying Catholics their fair share of opportunities.
The level of political violence at any time depends on (a) the degree of deprivation; (b) the articulateness of the deprived; and (c) the force used to suppress violence. The degree of deprivation of Catholics in Northern Ireland is less now than at any time since the Reformation; it is far less than at times of prolonged and profound civic peace in the past; and it has a persistent tendency to diminish. The other two variables, however, have a no less persistent tendency to change in directions that are conducive to greater violence. As the incomes and the level of education of Northern Ireland Catholics rise, they, like all people in similar circumstances, perceive more clearly the injustice of their situation; and they become less tolerant of that injustice and more ready and able to protest against it. A Britain that grows increasingly democratic and that no longer has a strategic need to retain a foothold in Ireland also becomes, and will continue to become, increasingly reluctant to exercise force in suppressing political violence there. The agonising in Britain now about whether the army in Northern Ireland should be equipped with plastic bullets instead of rubber ones is a far cry from the thanks offered by Oliver Cromwell to God for enabling him to slaughter every man, woman and child in Drogheda, in order to teach the rest of the Irish the inexpediency of resisting British power. Violence in Northern Ireland must persist and will probably worsen so long as the incomes and educational status of Catholics there rise, so long as Britain becomes increasingly democratised and reluctant to exercise repressive force, and so long as any substantial remnant of discrimination against Catholics survives.
Violent sectarian conflict for a livelihood that is unique in Christendom is explicable only in the context of a decline in opportunities that is unique in the world. The number getting a livelihood in the whole of Ireland, or the island's workforce, in 1971 was 1,732,000. This is less than at any time in the past 250 years. It is less than half the number who got a livelihood there 140 years ago, which was 3,771,000.<2> The number getting a livelihood in Ireland has declined during a period when the number so doing in Britain increased sixfold; when the workforce of every other country in the world for which information is available was also increasing; and when the population and the workforce of the world as a whole increased more than threefold. Political privilege has enabled Protestants to increase their share of the island's declining workforce from 20 per cent to 30 per cent, with a corresponding decline in the Catholic share of the island's jobs. Protestant privilege has also contributed in important ways to the debacle that has reduced by more than half during the past 140 years the number of people getting a livelihood in Ireland.
3. The Colonial Origins of Sectarian Violence
It is impossible to begin to understand the causes of the massive decline in the number of people getting a livelihood in Ireland that has proceeded now for 140 years without understanding aspects of the conquest by Britain of Ireland and the implications of that conquest for the social role of Irish land. Land, according to the indigenous, tribal, gaelic concept was a social asset, available for use by all members of society. It was, in practice, an economically inefficient and unproductive form of land use, but a socially integrative one. The concept of the role of land held by the Tudor, Stuart and Cromwellian capitalist conquerors of Ireland was of land as a source of profit for the individuals who succeeded in appropriating it. That concept has since been implemented in Ireland to a degree without parallel anywhere else in the world. Social interests have been subordinated to private profit from land more thoroughly, more consistently, more disastrously and for a longer time in Ireland than anywhere else.
The implications in Ireland of using land for profit were most clearly perceived and expressed by Sir William Petty, the greatest economic philosopher prior to Adam Smith and himself a successful appropriator of extensive tracts of Irish land. Petty proposed that, in order to maximise profit from Irish land, the people should be cleared from it and replaced by cattle, to be reared and duly sold to England.<3> Petty's proposals had in fact been implemented under the early Stuarts, but the resulting flood of cattle into England cut straight across the political and economic interests of England's ascendant landed oligarchy, so that one of the first Acts of the Restoration Parliament was to ban the entry to England of all Irish pastoral products.<4> With direct access to the English market barred, for Irish land to yield a profit its produce, in the form of beef, butter and bacon, had to be diverted via the triangular trade to the West Indies, where it was used to maintain the slaves on the plantations and was exchanged for the, tropical produce of the slaves' labour, which was acceptable in England.<5> The triangular trade required much more labour than raising and shipping cattle to Britain, so it was necessary to suffer the survival of the defeated but rebellious Irish, rather than their extinction as proposed by Petty. If the Irish were to be retained to work land profitably for its English appropriators. it was necessary to disarm them and to garrison the island with .an armed Protestant ascendancy, most of whom were settled in Ulster.
The century following the Restoration of Charles II was a period of steady growth in Ireland. It was a period of growth and development such as has occurred also in most other colonies - in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in Asia and in Africa -- following their initial capitalist colonisation and prior to the onset in them of the more recent phenomenon of economic under- development. Matters changed in Ireland with the onset of the industrial revolution, which transformed Britain from a grain exporter to a grain importer and caused it to repeal the Cattle Acts and to welcome the Irish pastoral products that had been excluded by them. The effect was to create in Ireland conditions in which profit from land was maximised by its cultivation by capital-less, coolie, Irish labourers, who subsisted on some of the potatoes they grew on land worked with their spades and fattened pigs for export with the surplus. They grew cereals, also using spades, on the land improved by the potato crop, and sold the grain for export and the straw for the winter keep of cows that produced butter for export.<6> A unique combination of farm production conditions, land tenure conditions, and market conditions in which beef prices were low and grain and butter prices were high, obtained in Ireland through the reign of George III, from 1760 to 1820. That combination brought into existence and expanded into the largest class in the land an agricultural proletariat such as has not existed elsewhere above 30 degrees latitude. The market conditions that made profitable and brought into existence this agricultural proletariat lasted only for the duration of George Ill's reign. Beef prices since then have risen threefold relative to the price of butter and fivefold relative to the price of grain.<7> The price change made it profitable to replace people growing grain and potatoes with cattle and sheep, and cattle exports, which had not changed from 1660 to 1820, increased tenfold within fifty years.<8> The agricultural proletariat, brought into existence during the course of George Ill's reign, was obliterated by starvation, enforced celibacy and emigration during the succeeding reign of Queen Victoria.
The Protestants of Ulster were insulated by their "ascendancy" or "garrison" status from the operation of the market forces that created and destroyed a Catholic agricultural proletariat. To hold Ireland for England, it was necessary to arm the Protestant settlers while disarming the hostile, Catholic Irish. Armed Protestants acquired rights to land different from those of the disarmed Catholics. The latter had no rights other than those they could win on a freely working market; the former were accorded prescriptive rights of security of tenure, fair rents, etc. that were enshrined in the "Ulster Custom".<9>
The Protestant farmers of Ulster, insulated by the Ulster Custom from the free working of the market, were spared from competition for land by capital-less young people. These young people were instead held, like peers in the rest of Europe, dependent on their capital-owning parents.<10> Ulster farmers, as a result, had both the land and the family labour to respond to the demand for cloth, that was growing in England no less rapidly than the demand for food, by expanding the relatively capital-intensive production of linen. They were helped in expanding the production of linen cloth in no small way by the procurement of yarn from "the linen counties" of the south which, under ±he new dispensation, were no longer able to work up the yarn into cloth.<11>
Farmers outside Ulster, during George III's reign, were under the dual pressure of competition for land from capital-less young people (the emerging Irish coolie class) and the inability to compel their own children to operate the family holding when these could achieve a modicum of social independence by acquiring their own potato patch. Farmers outside Ulster were forced by these pressures to abandon linen production, or to carry the enterprise no farther than the production and sale of linen yarn. The coolie labourers on their potato patches were forced by extreme poverty to use their resources to produce pigs, grain and straw products that came to market vital months earlier than linen yarn.<12>
The initial divergence between Ulster and the rest of Ireland, based firmly on the different terms of access to land secured by armed and disarmed peasants, widened with time. As the agricultural proletariat of the south was being wiped out by the changed market conditions of Victoria's reign, the cottage linen industry of the north became concentrated into the linen factories of Belfast, which were duly served by Belfast' s new, specialised linen engineering industry. Belfast's newly acquired factory discipline and engineering skills provided the technical base for a shipbuilding industry that was highly innovative at a time of radical change from the craft building of small timber ships to the factory scale building of large iron and steel ships. Three factors in particular contributed to the innovativeness that was the key to the success of the Belfast shipyards: first, there was no traditional, craft shipbuilding industry in the city, which itself came into existence with the late eighteenth century growth of the linen industry; second, the residual Catholic population of Northern Ireland was available as a helot class of unskilled, casual labour to undertake the least pleasant, least secure, worst paid chores and to bear the main brunt of innovative adjustment; and third, Protestant management and Protestant workers in Belfast's shipyards were united, in a way that occurred nowhere else in the British Isles, by the common threat of being overwhelmed by the Catholic Irish masses, whose hostility intensified with their debasement and with their displacement to make way for more profitable cattle and sheep during the nineteenth century.
4. Two Irish Nations
Two nations existed in Ireland at the end of Queen Victoria's reign. The proletariat had been wiped out in the south, and there was left there a society dichotomised into an Irish, Catholic, grazier class with urban affiliates, and a handful of Anglo-Irish Protestant landlords. Northern society consisted of a more stable, predominantly Protestant, peasantry that had escaped the worst of the holocaust that had swept the south; a large manufacturing centre in Belfast, which was again predominantly Protestant; and a Catholic minority the successors of the dispossessed original occupiers of the land, who eked out a usually hazardous existence as the helots of the Protestant garrison.
The destruction of the agricultural proletariat in the south and the emergence of a bourgeois grazier class transformed political relationships. Though a proletariat might be created and destroyed with impunity for the profit of landlords, the graziers who, within fifty years from the death of George III, had increased annual cattle exports from 70,000 to 700,000, and of sheep from nothing to 800,000, did not for long accept the appropriation of the economic surplus of this large, lucrative and expanding trade by a tiny group of alien, Protestant landowners. The United Kingdom government was forced, under the threat of Irish secession from the Union, to expropriate the expropriators and, despite the urgings of individuals like Michael Davitt and Henry George<13> that the surplus be appropriated through a land tax for common purposes, re-allocated the nation's land to another, somewhat larger, but still small, privileged minority. Following "land reform", one per cent of the Irish people now own half the land and over 90 per cent own no land.
The threat of secession from the United Kingdom was sufficient in the 1880's to secure for the bourgeois graziers of southern Ireland effective ownership of the land they operated. A continuing, widening divergence between the interests of the overwhelming bourgeois, Catholic southern Irish, concerned above all to protect and to enhance the value of their newly acquired property, and the rest of an increasingly radical United Kingdom underlay more romantic and ephemeral nationalist movements at the turn of the century. This divergence surfaced when Britain attempted in 1917 to conscript the sons of the bourgeoisie, the remnant of the proletariat having been previously driven by hunger to Flanders and the remnant of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy having been induced there by noblesse oblige. An independent state was established in southern Ireland where, following the destruction of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie were more firmly in control than anywhere else in the world.
The character of a state is to be judged not by any founding declaration; nor by its constitution; nor by the statements of its politicians. The character of a state, like that of a person, is to be judged by what it does. The achievements of the Irish state in its sixty years' existence make perfectly clear its bourgeois character. The value of the property that Irish law and order protect has increased, since the state's foundation, by 150 times at current prices. More realistically in an age of inflation, the value of property in Ireland, which in 1922 was worth less than twice current Gross National Product, is now worth five times current GNP.<15> The value of property in relation to GNP is more than twice as great in Ireland as in any other country.<16>
The Irish state has been less successful in securing a livelihood for its citizens. Birth rates have exceeded death rates by about one per cent annually throughout the state's existence. Had this natural growth of population secured a livelihood in Ireland, the Republic's workforce which was 1,360,000 in 1921, would be nearly 2,500,000 now.<17> However, not merely did none of the natural growth of population succeed in getting a livelihood in Ireland, but the number of jobs continued to decline after the state' s foundation just as it did in the preceding eighty years. The number at work in the state is now 1,050,000.<18> This number would be far less but for massive deficit spending by the state, which now requires foreign borrowing well in excess of £l per head of population, every day of every year.<19> Successive Irish governments have consistently sought to secure and enhance property values. Every other consideration, including the securing of a livelihood for its citizens and the stability of the public finances, has been subordinated to that overriding objective.
The loss in the Republic of over 60 per cent of the livelihoods that existed there in 1841; the occurrence in the Republic of 90 per cent of the island's total loss of livelihoods; the continuous loss of livelihoods in the Republic, so that fewer people now get a livelihood there than at any time in the past 250 years;<20> and the imminent collapse of the Republic's public finances, which is likely to result in the further loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs -- these are the conditions that cause Northern Ireland Protestants to cling tenaciously to the privileges that have secured for them the livelihood in their own area of the country that has been denied to millions of Catholics in the North but even more so in the South. These are the conditions in the Republic that make the unification of Ireland outside the United Kingdom abhorrent to the great majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The pursuit of policies by the Republic' s political establishment that increased the private value of Irish land that was first created by the Tudor, Stuart and Cromwellian conquerors of Ireland, at the cost of the continuing loss of livelihoods, gives rise to the situation where rational northern Protestants must fight to retain partition and their privileges, and where rational northern Catholics must fight to end partition and Protestant privileges. The certainty of Catholic reaction to Protestant privilege is increased and its acrimony is heightened by the regular practice of the Republic' s political establishment -- anxious to deflect criticism from its own failure to provide a livelihood for its citizens - of ascribing that failure to the continuation of the effects of British rule under the rubric of "neo-colonialism"; or, following the established practise of incompetent regimes, of harping on the problems of neighbouring territories.
The nub of the problem of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland is that it is bound to continue and probably to worsen for as long as a high proportion of the Irish people cannot get a livelihood in Ireland. A necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for terminating sectarian violence in Northern Ireland is the ending in Ireland of the loss of livelihoods that has persisted there for 140 years and the creation there instead of a sustainable approach to full employment. These are tasks that need to be accomplished principally in the Republic, where 90 per cent of the loss of livelihoods since 1841 and all of the loss since 1921 have occurred.
5. Sustainable Full Employment
A necessary condition for an approach to sustainable full employment in the Republic is the rejection of the concept of land as a source of private profit, which was imposed on Ireland by Tudor, Stuart and Cromwellian conquerors, and the restoration of the indigenous concept of land as a social resource, appropriately adapted for modern requirements. A tax appropriating for common purposes the whole current surplus from land would achieve the required transformation in the role of land. It would also transform the economy of the Republic, which relative to its workforce has five times, and relative to its GNP has eiqht times, as much land as the rest of the European Economic Community.<21> A tax appropriating for society the economic surplus from land would force its release by that high proportion of present occupiers who, by reason of age, incompetence, having excessive land, or other reasons, use land inefficiently; and who take the benefit of their valuable property rights in the form of leisure, inflexibility and conservatism, with the result that the volume of Irish agricultural production is no greater now than it was 140 years ago,<22> although world agricultural output has mean while increased at least fourfold. Such a tax would make land available to the many tens of thousands of highly competent young Irish people who have not the savings to pay the high market price of land; but who would be able to pay the recurrent taxes on land, would be glad to operate it as self- employed farmers, and, if supported by a rational agricultural credit service would quickly double output from Irish land.<23>
An agriculture producing twice as much as now, with virtually all of the additional output exported, would comparably expand the demand for inputs and for the consumer goods and services of Irish manufacturing and service industries. This would provide the employment in non-agricultural industries which it is now sought to generate by subsidising foreign manufacturers to produce in Ireland goods for export to the foreign countries that loan the money to finance the export subsidies. A greatly increased demand from an expanded agriculture would make it possible to dispense with subsidies for manufactured exports. The public exchequer would simultaneously be augmented by. the proceeds of a land tax likely to be in the region of 20 per cent of GNP.<24> The combined effect of the termination of subsidies for manufactured exports and the augmentation of revenue by a land tax would be to transform the Republic' s public finance system and to make it possible to place it on a sound, sustainable basis.
The suggested structural reform of using the Republic's extraordinarily rich and abundant land resources for public purposes instead of, as now, extremely inefficiently for the private benefit of the small minority who own most of it, could reverse the 140 year old decline in the number getting a livelihood in Ireland. It would create a good prospect of securing full employment, while simultaneously placing the public finance system on-a sound footing. The effects of this transformation of the situation in the Republic would radically change also the situation in Northern Ireland.
Accelerated economic growth in the Republic, leading towards conditions of full employment, would cause a much increased demand in the Republic for the products of Northern Ireland, resulting in some of the benefits of economic reform in the Republic passing to Northern Ireland and increasing economic activity and employment there also. Second, rapid growth in the Republic and the establishment there of sustainable full employment would provide Northern Ireland Catholics with the convenient and congenial option of migrating to work in the Republic as an alternative to continuing to live as second class citizens in Northern Ireland. This, and the Republic's increased demand for Northern Ireland products which would lower unemployment there, would reduce the hardship that now results from discrimination against Catholics. Third, the establishment of conditions of soundly based economic development in the Republic would lessen, if not remove, the present compulsion on southern politicians to meddle in Northern Ireland affairs, either to distract attention from the Republic' s difficulties or to ascribe these difficulties to "British neo-colonialism". Finally and most important: an approach towards sustainable full employment in the Republic would effectively remove the significance of Protestant privilege in Northern Ireland, the essence of which has been the ability to increase the proportion of all jobs and of better jobs that Protestants hold in an island where the number of jobs has declined by more than half in the past 140 years and continues to decline. Given conditions of sustainable full employment in the Republic, it is likely that the ending of Irish partition would cease to be an issue. In the unlikely event that it did continue to be an issue, Northern Ireland Protestants would no longer have reason to fear, as they now fear, the loss of Protestant privilege, and fewer and poorer jobs, from the political unification of the island. The establishment of conditions of sustainable full employment in the Republic would make Protestant privilege in Northern Ireland obsolete, worth neither defending nor attacking.
6. Resistance to Taxing Land
The potential benefits of a tax that would appropriate land' s value are exceptionally great in Ireland, probably greater than in any other country. This is largely the corollary of the fact that the pursuit of individual profit from land has done more social harm, over a longer term in Ireland than elsewhere. It is largely because of the harm done in the past, and particular> the destruction of livelihoods since 1841, that the value of land resources per head of population or in relation to GNP is much greater in Ireland than elsewhere. Given the outstanding potential social benefits from a land tax in Ireland, it is pertinent to inquire why successive Irish governments since 1921 have studiously refrained from taxing land. It is unnecessary to dwell on the general capacity of an established landed interest to resist taxation. There are, however, three particular points that need to be made here: one that applies equally to taxing land in all the former colonies that now comprise the Third World; a second that applies to all former colonies, but to Ireland especially; and a third that applies specifically to Ireland.
First, the institution of property in land that originated in the European heartland of capitalism and that flowered in England, acquired a different and far more malign character in those colonies where the capitalist system was superimposed on indigenous pastoral or crop-growing cultures and that now comprise the Third World. Though the landless victims of that institution in the former colonies, who are excluded from access to the land on which their livelihood depends, may from time to time protest and claim, like the ruined Irish proletariat of the nineteenth century, "the land for the people and the road for the bullock", they are for the most part impotent and inarticulate. The social scientists, who might be thought to appreciate the significance of property in land in developing countries, are, in most cases urban born and based, and, in virtually every case, have a metropolitan, developed country bias that insulates them from the peasant agriculture that is the basis of the economies of all developing countries. This is the central, fatal weakness of development studies, which explains the lack of progress, the increase in the scale and intensity of poverty in the Third World. This central weakness of the social sciences explains too why, in the extensive literature on the development process, taxing land, though a sine qua non of efficient land use and development, hardly rates a mention.
Second, the need for radical change and the pressure to secure that change, which would involve former colonies using more efficiently their own resources and particularly their relatively abundant land, are lessened by transfers from metropolitan countries under favourable trading arrangements, or as grants or loans. These transfers into a situation of structural maladjustment lead to the waste of the resources and delay in effecting the necessary structural adjustments. Relative to population or GNP, the Republic of Ireland has secured more transferred resources than any other country. These resources have come partly through high EEC prices for agricultural produce, much of which like dairy produce is unwanted. How ever , resources have been made available on much vaster scale for Irish public expenditure through borrowing, initially on the home market but inevitably and increasingly abroad. Irish governments now regularly borrow annually the equivalent of 15% of GNP, including overseas borrowing of some 12% of GNP.<25> Successive governments of the Republic have, in thirty years, created a national debt that, relative to GNP is by far the most costly to service in the world. The governments did so with the declared objective of creating jobs; yet, the Republic is the only country in the world where the workforce is less now than it was thirty years ago, and much less than it was 140 years ago. The transferred resources have been wasted, with no hope of repaying outstanding debt other than by rolling it over. Pressures for radical change in Ireland have meanwhile been more easily contained.
Finally, and of exclusive Irish relevance, every other person born in the Republic during the past 140 years has emigrated from it. By definition, those who left were the less contented and those who remained were the more contented. This selection process, operating over six generations, has resulted in a politically complacent population which exists in a political vacuum. There is virtually no distinction between the policies advocated by the main Irish political parties; there are only differences in the personalities who seek to implement common policies. The removal through emigration of the discontented half of the population has left a residual "fat cat" society that is disinclined for the radicalism of a land tax.
This paper has identified the cause of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland as competition for a livelihood in an island where the number getting a livelihood has declined by more than half in 140 years and continues to decline Virtually all the decline has occurred in the southern, or Republic, part of the island. The loss of livelihood is attributable basically to the use of the island's extensive and rich land resources for private profit. Ending sectarian violence in Northern Ireland is conditional on ending the decline in the island' s employment opportunities and on an approach towards full employment. This is essentially a task for the Republic, where virtually all of the job loss has occurred. An approach towards sustained full employment in the Republic can be achieved through a land tax that appropriates the full value, and only through such a tax. The Republic, while having a generally penal tax system, has refrained hitherto from taxing land. It will not lightly be induced now to tax land, notwithstanding the great social cost of failing to do so. Because these social costs are mainly externalised, in the form of the social disruption of the lives of the Irish forced to emigrate and of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, they bear little on decision making in the Republic.
There are, however, aspects of the present situation that make the prospect of imposing a land tax in the Republic better now than at any time since the state's foundation. First, it is clear and becoming increasingly widely recognised, that the massive and accelerating public borrowing that has been the keystone to the Republic's economic policies for thirty years, can not be sustained much longer. The credibility of the public finance system grows daily more questionable. The balance of international payments, which has been in chronic deficit for decades, is expected to have a deficit of £1.3 billions in 1981. Allowing for differences in GNP, an equivalent British deficit would be £34 billions, or about ten times greater than in the crisis year for the British economy of 1974.<26> Second, the safety valve of emigration, which has removed from the Republic almost half of the oncoming population stream during the past 140 years, is working less freely. For a number of reasons, relating basically to the ending of capitalist colonialism, the Irish without a livelihood can no longer easily emigrate. Population in the Republic is increasing for the first time in 140 years, and is now growing more rapidly than in any other European country. But though population is increasing, the number of jobs continues to decrease, as it has for 140 years, and a great lake of unemployment is building up such as never previously occurred in Ireland, where those who could not get work at home, emigrated to get it. Third and finally, the Labour Party, which is the third largest political party in the country, made the introduction of a resource or land tax a part of its policy in the recent general elections. (It should, however, be borne in mind that neither the Labour Party's advocacy of a land tax nor the electorate's response to that advocacy was enthusiastic; nor are they likely to be otherwise for as long as Irish governments can finance a third or more of their expenditure by borrowing).
7. Fostering Change
What, if anything, can be done constructively by those who accept the analysis of this presentation, and who wish for an end to sectarian violence in the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland and for a reduction in the cost of containing that violence? The primary need is the creation of a more informed public opinion on the subject in Britain, in both parts of Ireland, in the USA and the EEC, and in the world at large. There is a special need to make clear the nature and the origin of the violence, to emphasise "the Irish dimension" of the violence, and to point to the need for radical change in the Republic if the violence is to be ended. There is a need, in this context, to persuade the British media to adopt a better informed, more critical and more responsible attitude towards events in the Republic, which seem often to be viewed by foreign media through spectacles that are tinted rose by the Republic's public relations efforts. The uncritical approach of the foreign media to the Republic's "economic progress", on the one hand helps to perpetuate the illusion of progress on the part of the Irish who implement it and of the foreigners who finance it; and on the other hand it fails to do justice to the rightly critical, not to say sceptical, attitude of Northern Ireland Protestants to the Republic's "economic miracle", completely and absolutely based as that "miracle" is on massive, accelerating and unsustainable borrowing.
There is a pressing need for competent, purposeful research into the political economy of violence in Northern Ireland. The cost to Britain of containing violence in Northern Ireland now exceeds £1.3 billions annually; yet no worthwhile research is proceeding in the United Kingdom or elsewhere into the causes and possible means of ending that violence. There is no skilled, competent, reasonably endowed research being carried on into such issues as (a) the relation between violence and sectarian discrimination in job allocation; (b) the relation between sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and the decline in jobs in both parts of Ireland; (c) the nature and the causes of the 140 year old loss of jobs in Ireland; and (d) possible methods of halting and reversing the loss of jobs. Joint studies of these matters by the British and Irish Labour Parties and the British and Irish trade union movements promises to be particularly fruitful in view of the recent recognition by the Irish Labour Party and trade union movement of the economic need to tax land.
Radical change that could reverse the loss of jobs in the Republic, which is perceived here as the root cause of violence in Northern Ireland, is unlikely so long as there is a massive inflow of borrowed funds to sustain present policies in the Republic. Creating a more critical, better informed attitude towards the political and commercial expediency of these massive international loans to the Republic would be highly constructive, in as much as the restriction of foreign borrowing would force the Irish authorities to adopt the more radical, available measures that would lead towards fuller employment and, therefore, less sectarian violence.
The principal beneficiaries of change leading to fuller employment and less sectarian violence in Ireland would, of course, be the people of Ireland, north and south, Catholic and Protestant. There would, however, be immediate and substantial gains to Britain from the creation of an awareness of the connection between sectarian violence, the loss of livelihoods, and the land question in Ireland. Fostering this awareness would answer the increasingly widespread and insistent demand for new initiatives by British politicians in relation to Northern Ireland. Fostering this awareness is an initiative that is both imaginative and intellectually sound, that is consistent with the need to limit public expenditure, and that offers by far the best -- indeed, the only -- prospect of ending sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Appraising people better of the causes of, and the possible remedies for, this violence will serve to show that in as much as violence results from the loss of livelihoods in Ireland, British governments can no longer be held responsible for it; that only 10% of the island's total job loss has occurred in Northern Ireland; and none of the job loss since 1921 has occurred there. Had the rest of Ireland since 1921 succeeded as well as Northern Ireland in providing a livelihood for the Irish people, there would be far less violence, if any, in Northern Ireland now. Once the relationship between sectarian violence and job loss is established, it will be recognised that prime responsibility for the violence must rest with the political establishment of the Republic which, consistently since 1921, has chosen policies designed to raise land values at the cost of the continuing loss of livelihoods for the people.
Finally, opening up the debate on the causes and the remedies for violence in Northern Ireland and directing that debate along new and more analytical lines offers the prospect of an early reduction in violence. There is in Ireland now no realistic prospect of a reduction in unemployment and an end to the loss of livelihoods; and therefore there is no realistic prospect of an end to Protestant insistence on privilege or of Catholic opposition to that privilege. Rather, as economic crisis deepens in Britain and Ireland and as the Irish public finances approach complete collapse, the prospect of economic growth lifting Ireland into a new era of employment for all, of abundance and equality for all becomes more remote and chimerical than it has been for decades. Given these circumstances of shattered hopes, of disillusion and of an unrelieved prospect of continuing loss of jobs and continuing sectarian discrimination, Irish nationalists will be increasingly attracted to the simplistic view that Britain and Britain' s Protestant garrison are responsible for Irish failure. It will be increasingly easy to persuade young Irish idealists that violence against Protestants and against British personnel in Northern Ireland is the most effective means available of removing British influence as the prerequisite for Irish prosperity. No plausible alternative to this simplistic nationalist thesis exists now. The analysis of this paper does, however, suggest an alternative thesis. Restructuring along the lines of an evolved, indigenous Gaelic system that perceived land as a social asset, the existing land holding system, which was imposed by Tudor, Stuart and Cromwellian conquerors, would halt and reverse the decline in jobs that is the underlying cause of Protestant privilege, Catholic deprivation and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Young Irish nationalists so persuaded would perceive that there is a way to secure a livelihood and equity for all, that is more effective, more certain and more honourable than the sectarian violence that now appears to be the only grim way to the realisation of legitimate national aspirations. This perception should bring about a redirection of patriotic effort from violence to constructive, constitutional, but radical change.
References
1. The Sunday Times 21.12.1980.
2. R. Crotty, "Capitalist Colonialism and Peripheralisation: the Irish Case", in D. Seer set al (Eds) Underdeveloped Europe: Studies in Core Periphery Relations (Hassocks, 1979), p.227.
3. William Petty, "A Treatise of Ireland", in C.H. Hull (Ed) The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, Vol. 2, (Cambridge, 1899).
4. D.M. Woodward, "The Anglo-Irish Livestock Trade in the Seventeenth Century", in Irish Historical Studies, xviii, no.72 (1973), p.495; and C.A. Edie, "The Irish Cattle Bills", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 60, part 2, 1970.
5. R. Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production: Its Volume and Structure, (Cork, 1966), p.15-7.
6. W. Tighe, A Statistical Survey of the County Kilkenny in the Years 1800 and 1801 (Dublin, 1802) p.216,473. The price of straw in Kilkenny in 1800 was 2s.2d. per cwt. and a day's wages was l0d.
7. R. Crotty, Cattle, Economics and Development (Slough, 1980) p.32.
8. R. Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production, p. 16 and 277; and BPP (1890/91) XCI (C.6524) "Agricultural Returns of Great Britain 1891, p.78-9.
9. See, for example, D.J. Hickey and J.E. Doherty, A Dictionary of Irish History since 1800, p. 575. (Dublin, 1980).
10. R. Crotty, Cattle, Economics & Development, p. 21-2.
11. C. Gill, The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry (Oxford, 1925) p. 17 and 38.
12. Major differences in the agricultural and demographic structures of Ulster and rest of Ireland are clearly perceptible in the Census Reports for 1821 and 1831, the earliest but largely neglected census reports for Ireland.
13. See, for example, F. Sheehy-Skeffington, Michael Davitt (London, 1967), p.122.
14. Based on an estimated total population of 3,450,000, and a normal distribution of farm holdings within size categories as given in Statistical Abstract of Ireland 1974 and 1975. (Stationery Office, Dublin, 1976), p.93.
15. The estimated value of Irish land was £240 mn. and of Irish GNP was £140 mn. in 1922. These values in 1980 are estimated respectively at £38 billion and £8 billion.
16. The next highest ratio appears to be that in India, where the value of land is of the order of US$144 billion and GNP is US$72 billion.
17. This assumes the same participation rates in 1921 and 1926. The population and workforce in 1926 are given in Saorstat Eireann, Census of Population 1926, Vol. II (Stationery Office, Dublin). The estimated population in 1921 is from Report on Vital Statistics, 1966, (Prl.88).
18. Annual Report of Irish Central Bank, for 1980, (Dublin 1981) Statistical Appendix, p.84. Figure adjusted for subsequent reports of unemployment data.
19. Ibid, p.21. The estimated international payments deficit for 1981 is £1,316 mn.
20. Based on estimates of the population derived from data of pig exports, with which the Irish population was closely correlated up to 1841. R. Crotty, "Britain's Irish Periphery", IDS Bulletin, Vol. 9 No.2, December, 1977.
21. OECD Labour Force Statistics, 1967-1978 (Paris, 1980); and R. Crotty, Cattle, Economics & Development, p.213.
22. R. Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production, p. 162.
23. Those from a large representative sample of Irish farmers in the 1950"s who rented any part of the land they operated, produced 55% more than the average per acre. R. Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production, p.242. It is reasonable to expect that if land taxes equivalent to competitive rent were paid on all land farmed, output would be considerably higher still.
24. Estimated GNP in 1981 is £9.8 billion. (Central Bank Report, 1980). The competitive rents on Irish farmland are about £1.2 billion annually The annual value of urban land would raise this figure to near £2 billion annually.
25. Annual Report of Irish Central Bank, 1980 p. 14, and Statistical Appendix, p. 68 and 88.
26. UK Statistical Abstract, 1980.
The Irish Land Question and Sectarian Violence Raymond Crotty