DAVID LAWLOR,
Madam, - Imagine the trouble we would have saved ourselves by adopting the Kenny Report on the price of building land in the 1970s. It proposed a reasonable 25 per cent premium on the existing use value of land rezoned for development to minimise temptation for landowners, property speculators, planners and politicians. But, after some excuses about interfering with the constitutional protection of private property rights, the proposal was dropped.
It is understandable that people should try to enhance the value of their property, but when the common good is assailed by a combination of corrupt politicians and escalating house prices governments should act, even belatedly. They would have excellent precedents: when James Fintan Lalor was attacking English landlordism in Ireland in Famine times, he was not the first to distinguish between the right to own what you yourself had made and the immorality of claiming exclusive ownership of what had been created.
Michael Davitt, father of the Land League, later recalled implementing Lalor's doctrine: "We went down to Mayo and we preached the eternal truth. . .that the land of a country, the air of a country, the water of a country, belong to no man. They were not made by any man and they belong to all the human race. . .If the people of Ireland really decide to settle the land question. . .they must strike at the root of the evil. . the system of landlordism."
Davitt, who favoured nationalising the land, said Parnell later endorsed a peasant propriety because "the farmers and priests were more favourable to the less radical plan." One Catholic cleric who thought like Davitt, however, and defended the League at the height of the land war was Thomas Nulty, Bishop of Meath. He wrote in 1881: "No individual or class of individuals can hold a right of private property in the land of a country. . .The people of that country, in their public, corporate capacity, are and must always be the real owners of the land of their country - holding an indisputable title to it in the fact that they received it as a free gift from its Creator and as a necessary means for preserving and enjoying the life he has bestowed upon them."
Our current bias towards individual property rights is unfortunately at the expense of the community, including home buyers, commuters and hill-walkers. Other countries have a more balanced approach to property rights.
They manage to minimise the ills we suffer - of exorbitant land prices, planning and political corruption, excessive house prices, delays to urgent public projects, extravagant compensation awards and restriction of access to uplands, not to mention expensive tribunals.
Shouldn't we change our attitudes and laws before the new landlordism reduces us again to serfdom? - Yours, etc.,
DAVID LAWLOR, Donnybrook, Dublin 4.