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Carlow Launch
John Shortall, County Librarian; Oliver Whelan; Jennifer Murnane O’Connor, Minister of State at the Department of Health; Turtle.
On Thursday 20 August 2026, it was my great pleasure to launch Oliver Whelan’s new book, Landlords and Tenants in County Carlow, 1879–1960, published by Four Courts Press, at Carlow County Library.
It was a merry occasion, with contributions from Oliver, John Shortall, the County Librarian, and myself. The book is a substantial and pioneering study of the ending of landlordism in County Carlow.
Oliver was born, bred and educated in Hacketstown, County Carlow, before continuing his education at Knockbeg College. After a short period in Canada, he returned to Ireland, settled in Malahide and embarked upon a distinguished public-service career, first with the Department of Finance and later with the National Treasury Management Agency, where he became Head of Debt and Fund Management.
His interest in this subject has deep roots. Growing up on a farm near Hacketstown, close to the Carlow-Wicklow border, Oliver was conscious of the many big houses and gentry houses scattered through the country around Baltinglass, Kiltegan, Aughavannagh, Rathvilly, Tullow and Carlow. He became interested not simply in those houses themselves, but in their relationship with the ordinary farms and holdings around them. In retirement, that interest developed into a systematic study of how landownership evolved through the generations.
Our paths first crossed in 2015, when Oliver contacted me shortly after retiring. He was then undertaking an MA in Irish history at Maynooth under Dr Michael Potterton, homing in on changes in landownership in the barony of Rathvilly from the Cromwellian settlement to about 1850. That research was, in many ways, the seed from which this book grew.
For this project, Oliver made the hazardous decision to ask whether he might consult the archives at Lisnavagh, our family place near Rathvilly. I duly submerged the poor fellow in papers and left him to make sense of it all. There are two adjoining fields at Lisnavagh known as Whelan’s Bank and Whelan’s Bog, so my principal hope was that Oliver would not uncover definitive proof that those fields belonged to his ancestors. If he did discover anything along those lines, he was generous enough to keep it to himself.
His MA thesis was ultimately published in 2019 as Landholding in the New English Settlement of Hacketstown. By then, he was pursuing a PhD, again at Maynooth, under the supervision of the mighty Professor Terence Dooley. His subject was Land, Society and Politics in Co. Carlow.
While researching my book on Naas Racecourse, I found that one of its founders in 1920 was Thomas Whelan of Hacketstown, a first cousin of Oliver’s father. We met from time to time and, in due course, Oliver asked whether I might launch his book.
The word “land” tends to trigger memories of Wylie’s Land Law, a hefty work of about 1,400 pages which I was obliged to study during my short and useless attempt to become a lawyer. When Oliver’s book arrived, I therefore wondered how I might fare. It runs to 218 pages of text, with a further sixty or so pages of appendices, bibliography and index. I thought: “I can manage this.” And I did. I did not fall asleep once, and I emerged much the better for having read it.
Quiet Revolution
When we think about the Irish Revolution, our minds tend towards the Easter Rising, the Proclamation, Bloody Sunday, the War of Independence and all the great political drama of the period. Yet behind those familiar events was another, quieter revolution: the transfer of agricultural land from landlords to the tenant farmers who worked it.
Oliver’s book chronicles the ending of landlordism in Carlow. It begins amid the severe agricultural depression of the late 1870s and follows the story through the Land League campaigns, the land courts, tenant purchase, the Wyndham Act, the Free State’s compulsory acquisition of remaining estates and the final work of the Land Commission in the decades after independence.
By 1920, approximately 13 million acres had passed from landlords to tenant purchasers—about half of Ireland’s agricultural land.
Little Famine Begins
The crisis had not been inevitable. In the mid-1870s, Irish farmers had largely recovered from the effects of the Great Hunger. Prices were good, farms were comparatively prosperous and tenants could, however reluctantly, meet rents that had in many cases been sharply increased by their landlords.
Then came the succession of poor harvests between 1877 and 1879. Farm incomes fell dramatically. Farmers could no longer afford to employ labourers, leaving many without work. The income from small farms was no longer enough to sustain a family. The distress and hunger of those years became known as the “little famine”.
There were efforts in Carlow and elsewhere to alleviate the crisis. Landlords, shopkeepers, larger farmers and local bodies sometimes combined to relieve the worst hardship. But the central grievance remained: many landlords failed to reduce rents sufficiently to reflect the collapse in farm incomes. That failure was critical.
A Movement Gathers Force
Charles Stewart Parnell.
At first, the objective was simple enough. Tenants wanted rent reductions so that they could hold onto their land through an exceptionally difficult depression. But the objective changed. What began as a campaign for fairer rents became a movement for the ending of landlordism itself. I am reminded of the British American colonists and how a dispute about taxation and representation morphed into a revolution and the creation of the United States. In Ireland, a struggle over rent, security and tenure developed into one of the most profound redistributions of property in the country’s history.
In Carlow, the movement gained real momentum after a major demonstration in Tullow in September 1879, called to protest against the refusal of many landlords to reduce rents. Parnell was the star attraction, but the platform also included men who would become leading local figures in the movement: the Tullow hoteliers James L. White and Daniel Lennon; Patrick Hanlon of Grangeford; John Kealy of Ballon; and the Rathvilly schoolteacher Edward O’Toole.
IThe campaign was not simply an eruption of spontaneous rural anger. It was becoming organised, articulate and localised, drawing together farmers, traders, publicans, teachers and others with the confidence and capacity to turn discontent into a political movement.
Beyond Simple Binaries
The Land War was not simply a mass uprising that set tenants against landlords in two opposing blocs. Oliver’s book reveals a more intricate landscape, shaped by prosperous farmers, struggling smallholders, shopkeepers, clergy, indebted landlords and competing local interests.
As Oliver writes: “The land movement in Carlow sought to form a coherent and unified movement, partly by creating a narrative of an imagined history where a rapacious, grasping and alien landlord class bitterly opposed a downtrodden native peasantry.”
His point is not that hardship or grievance were invented, but that movements need narratives. The reality was more complicated: there were indebted landlords, prosperous farmers, tenant families in terrible difficulty, competing local interests and a rapidly evolving political atmosphere. That said, there were stacks of horrible evictions and the occasional psycho-lord to help stir things up.
Rural Middle Network
At the centre of the Carlow movement stood a rising and formidable Catholic rural middle class. These were prosperous farmers, but they were connected through kinship, commerce and parish life to shopkeepers, publicans, traders and priests who came from much the same social background. The town shopkeepers who supported the Land League were often sons of farmers themselves, while supplying local farming families formed an important part of their business.
In modern terms, one might call it a rural network. In nineteenth-century Carlow, it was a formidable family-and-business alliance, with a long memory and a very definite view on rent.
These people possessed the education, confidence, local influence and organisational capacity to turn widespread discontent into a political force. It is fascinating to watch the movement mushroom: not merely an abstract national campaign arriving in Carlow, but a movement built through personal connections, commercial ties, parish loyalties and neighbourhood solidarity.
Solidarity, Pressure & Politics
Eviction scene, Vandeleur Estate, County Clare, c. 1880–1900. Men prepare to force entry into a thatched cottage during an eviction, while defenders gather nearby; the original caption, “Ready for Hot Water,” refers to resistance anticipated from within the house. Photograph from the Lawrence Collection, attributed to Robert French.
There was also a remarkable degree of mutual support. Farmers stood together, and when someone was struggling financially, others might club together—sometimes at considerable risk to their own finances—to lend money and help them hold on. Yet the movement could also be stern in its discipline. Those who rented land from which another tenant had been evicted could be branded “land grabbers” and boycotted. Those who did not join the Land League might find their names published in the newspapers.
The Land League began principally as a tenant-farmer movement and largely excluded farm labourers. This is an important reminder that the rural population was not one homogenous body with identical interests. The prosperous farming and clerical middle classes opposed infiltration by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and it is perhaps not surprising that IRB support was consequently strongest among groups more marginal to the mainstream tenant-farmer movement: shopworkers, servant boys and agricultural labourers.
There was the Land League and then the Irish National League, both operating in a world where national politics and intensely local concerns were closely intertwined.
Griffith’s Valuation was an official property valuation compiled for local taxation and based on assessments made in 1849–51. As I understand it, it became the benchmark against which rents were judged: after remaining broadly stable for many years, rents rose during the economic boom of the 1870s, sometimes substantially. I had not fully appreciated that, for the Land League, a rent above Griffith’s figure could be condemned as a rack rent. The valuation carried enormous moral and political weight. Whatever the technicalities, the essential point was clear: tenants believed they were being asked to pay rents that bore little relation to their changed circumstances.
Government Reshapes Ownership
The British government is a major presence in this story. Gladstone’s administration sought to reshape Irish landownership, establishing land courts to adjudicate on rents and providing loans to tenants to purchase their holdings. Later Conservative governments played their own part, most notably through the Wyndham Act of 1903.
The motives were complex. There was a genuine attempt to address a chronic and destabilising social crisis, but there was also the political hope that a more prosperous class of small Irish proprietors might lessen the appeal of Home Rule and separatism. This was part of the broader effort to kill Home Rule with kindness—or, at least, with land purchase.
Many landlords, by then heavily indebted, were only too ready to sell. In some cases, they could scarcely believe their luck. The proceeds enabled them to discharge liabilities that had become increasingly difficult to manage. The Land Commission became, in effect, a virtual land bank for Ireland: acquiring estates, financing purchase and, in time, dividing land among tenants and smallholders.
A Long Transition
When the story begins, virtually all land in Ireland was owned by landlords and worked by tenants. By the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, landlordism had largely disappeared from the scene. This amounted to a social revolution of immense scale.
Carlow was exceptional in the durability of its landlord system. Although the Irish Free State was established in 1921, landlords still owned about 60 per cent of the county’s land at that point—more than in any other county in Ireland. The process of transfer was therefore slower, more entrenched and, in some ways, more revealing in Carlow than elsewhere.
When Oliver’s story opens in the 1870s, much of County Carlow was held by the great landed families: the Kavanaghs and the ‘Six B’s’ – Bruen, , Butler, Brewster, Beresford, Browne-Clayton and my own Rathdonnell and Bunbury forebears. It can make for uncomfortable reading at times. Yet Oliver is a judicious writer. He does not seek out heroes and villains. He simply explains how the system worked, how it came under pressure and how it changed over the course of eight decades.
Rathdonnell and Lisnavagh
Tom Rathdonnell photographed in later life, perhaps at a horse racing
event or at the Dublin Horse Show. (Thanks to Patricia Bruen)
Oliver Whelan’s book also casts a compelling light on Lisnavagh during this period. The agitation which culminated in the great Tullow demonstration of September 1879 (attended by Parnell) was, Oliver shows, triggered, in no small part, by Lord Rathdonnell’s refusal to grant rent reductions to his Carlow tenants.
At the time, Tom Rathdonnell held 6,733 acres in Carlow, mainly in Lisnavagh. Some of his tenants in Roscat had already experienced very substantial rent increases in the 1870s, in certain cases on the understanding that they would sign new leases or face eviction. Eleven Roscat tenants were required to sign new leases in 1874, with rent increases of roughly 20 to 50 per cent, while six tenants in Hacketstown saw rents rise by an average of 43 per cent.
The Rathdonnell estate inevitably became an important focal point in the opening phase of the Land War. The initial organisers in the Rathvilly area were looking for an estate that could crystallise local grievance, and Rathdonnell’s proved a natural choice. Oliver also makes clear that this was much more layered than a melodrama of villainous landlord and downtrodden tenant. While resisting collective rent demands, Rathdonnell was also involved in local relief during the “little famine” crisis. The Hacketstown relief committee, struggling amid severe distress in 1879–80, received contributions from a number of local landowners, including Lord Rathdonnell, who gave £5. That does not cancel out the grievances of tenants, but it does underline Oliver’s broader point that the local world of landlord and tenant was not always morally simple or politically tidy.
The book is particularly strong on the financial pressures that bore down on landlords as well as tenants in the 1880s. Rathdonnell was badly hit by rent reductions, arrears and the general agricultural depression. During the years 1881 to 1887, total expenditure on the Lisnavagh estate exceeded receipts by 33 per cent, creating a cash shortfall of £7,480, with the worst of it concentrated in the years 1884 to 1887. By 1890 Rathdonnell had borrowed almost £1,600 from his land agent. The estate at Lisnavagh was under considerable financial strain.
And yet Rathdonnell did not respond as some others did by liquidating the core Carlow estate at an early stage. Like other major Carlow landlords, he sold land outside the county while retaining the social and symbolic heart of his position at home. Rathdonnell sold over 8,000 acres outside Carlow under the land acts, chiefly in Fermanagh, Louth, Tyrone and Monaghan, while in Carlow he was far more cautious. Before independence he sold 1,872 acres in the county, roughly one-third of his Carlow lands; these were all at some distance from Lisnavagh itself.
That pattern is central to Oliver’s interpretation of why County Carlow lagged behind so many other counties in land purchase. The major resident landlords—Bruen, Kavanagh and Rathdonnell—were willing enough to take advantage of the Wyndham Act, but often by disposing of outlying properties while preserving their Carlow demesnes and their local standing. Rathdonnell, as Oliver notes, kept his Lisnavagh lands because farming was his major interest; he was deeply involved in agricultural affairs and by 1914 was president of the RDS council and chairman of its committee of agriculture.
Ultimately, even Lisnavagh could not remain untouched by the longer revolution in landownership. In 1931, the Land Commission acquired 3,570 acres of the Lisnavagh estate from the 3rd Baron Rathdonnell for vesting in approximately eighty tenants, while Rathdonnell retained a demesne of 1,291 acres. Lisnavagh survived, but in a transformed world – diminished but ready to try its hand in the new Ireland that emerged from the long land question.
Complex Tales
There are positive and more complicated stories within that transformation, including figures such as Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh and the role played by individual landlords who attempted, in different ways, to adapt to that changing world. One of the virtues of Oliver’s book is that it makes room for complexity: reformers and resisters, decent intentions and naked self-interest, tenants seeking security and proprietors seeking survival.
The transformation did not benefit everyone equally. Oliver’s research shows that only 31 evicted tenants in County Carlow were ever reinstated—perhaps 20 to 25 per cent of those evicted during the Land War. The ending of landlordism was a profound revolution, but it did not resolve every grievance or restore every dispossessed family.
Final Divisions
Butler, Bunbury, Kavanagh. The Comeback Tour?
The land question remained controversial in Carlow until about 1960. The last major interventions by the Land Commission included the division of the Browne’s Hill estate outside Carlow town and half of the Bruen estate at Oak Park. Kathleen Brady of the Tinryland Land Club played an important role in persuading the government to divide these lands among local smallholders.
The other half of the Bruen estate at Oak Park passed to Teagasc for research, development, training and advisory work. Browne’s Hill and Oak Park were the final substantial land divisions in County Carlow by the Land Commission, though smaller parcels were dealt with later. The fact that such work continued so late underlines just how prolonged the transformation in landownership proved to be.
A Rich Local History
Oliver’s book is the first comprehensive study of the land question in County Carlow, tracing the evolution of landownership from the opening of the Land War in 1879 through to 1960. It also places Carlow’s experience within the broader social, political and economic history of Ireland, as well as acknowledging connections with adjoining parts of Laois, Wicklow and Kildare.
It is a maze of legislation, personalities, holdings, rents, debts, evictions and settlements. But Oliver is an excellent sherpa through that terrain: methodical, forensic, balanced and clear. He has written a rich local history that takes on a story of major national significance—perhaps not quite field by field, but not far off.
Acknowledgements
Congratulations to Anthony Tierney and Martin Fanning at Four Courts Press for their work in producing and preparing the volume, and to John Shortall, Christopher Power and the staff of Carlow County Library for their support and for hosting such a fitting occasion. Oliver’s work also benefited from the generosity and scholarship of Morgan Kavanagh, Jim Shannon, Felix Larkin and Christopher McQuinn.
