Now we Irish taxpayers own the banks, who owns the land of Ireland?

IRISH PEOPLE have an astonishing emotional attachment to the land. It pervades our literature, art and psyche. Remember the play The Field and the poem, The Old Woman of the Roads. Every Irish person seems to have an inner need to own land and those who know say this need has driven our other desire, to own property.

Growing up, I remember the old people saying: “Get land. They are not making any more of it.” Then there are the historical reasons for what we are. A country invaded and its people evicted from their lands in a saga that continued for more than 700 years.

The website failteromhat.com lists all the landowners in Ireland in 1876, by county, in alphabetical order. Suffice to say the list does not contain many Os or Macs because at that time, the land was held by the aristocracy, a situation that led to land wars.

A policy of appeasement by successive British governments saw Irish people become the first peasant people in Europe to own their own land, 10 years before the Easter Rising.

The land area of the Republic of Ireland is 6.9 million hectares of which 4.2 million hectares is used for agriculture, our largest indigenous industry. There is a further 737,000 hectares (by the way, a hectare is 2.47 acres) under forestry and roughly 300,000 hectares under tillage.

The rest of the land of Ireland is built on and according to the EU CORINE database of landcover in Ireland, what they call “artificial surfaces”: buildings, road and railway.

This increased in area from 1.5 per cent to 1.9 per cent per cent of total land cover between 1990 and 2000. This, it says, was caused by urban sprawl and developments in infrastructure and sports facilities.

It adds that in the six years between 2000 and 2006 there was a further 0.3 per cent increase in artificial surfaces bringing the total to 2.2 per cent of land surface in the State.

Coillte, the commercial State-owned company, is the largest landowner in the country. It owns a total of 445,000 hectares of the land, an enormous 7 per cent of the total.

Bord na Móna, the peat development organisation, is in the ha’penny place when it comes to land ownership when set beside Coillte. The board owns 80,000 hectares of land, mainly bogland in the Midlands and the west of the country.

Speaking to auctioneers, farmers and solicitors, the consensus is there are two to three major estates in each of the 26 counties that pre-date Independence. Most of these are now greatly reduced in size and many of the estates have been turned to forestry or tourist or recreational use and are not farmed as in the past.

While some local authorities are sizeable landowners, many of them are leasing back land to the people from which they purchased it, as development has slowed dramatically.

So the bulk of Irish land is in the hands of Irish farmers. The most up-to-date information comes from the CSO’s Farm Structure Survey carried out in 2007. It shows a dramatic decline in the number of holdings, which dropped from 419,500 in 1855 to 263,600 in 1980. It estimated there were 233,500 farms in 1980.

In the 1991 Census of Agriculture, this went down to 170,6002 holdings and in 2007, there were 128,200. Between 1991 and 2007 there was a decrease of 42,400, an average of 2,650 holdings each year.

This evolution reflects the general trend observed in the European Union (EU). The number of agricultural holdings in the EU (15 countries) dropped from 6,770,670 in 2000 to 5,843,050 in 2005, a decrease of 14 per cent, against a decline of 6 per cent in Ireland in the same period.

Only 4 per cent of Irish agricultural holdings are over 100 hectares in size and the largest number of farms are in the 10 to 20 hectare class, representing nearly a quarter of all farms.

There is a clear contrast between farms in the south and east and farms in the north and west. Larger farms are more likely to be located in the south and east and smaller farms in the north and west.

Farm work is still mainly a male occupation. Holders were mostly in the over 55 years age group whereas non-family workers are strongly represented in the 15-35 years age group. It is estimated more than 12 per cent of farms are owned by women.

The holders in the oldest groups (55 years or over) represented 45 per cent of the holder population in 1991 as against 51 per cent in 2007. In the west region there was a greater ratio of holders 65 years and over to holders less than 35 years (more than seven to one) than in any other region. The survey found that in 2007, 42,500 farms (33 per cent of all farms) rented a total of 762,000 hectares of agricultural land, an average of 17.9 hectares per farm.