IRELAND AFTER SIX YEARS
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Your correspondent, " Agrippa," states that thirteen years' purchase is to be given by the Irish Free State for com- pulsory sale to tenants. My information is that it works out from ten to twelve years. Perhaps a reader whose property has been thus dealt with by the Irish Free State will give data. Meanwhile your correspondent admits that just previously seventeen and eighteen years has been the rate of purchase, so that even fifteen years cannot nearly represent the market value to-day. He says that twenty years' purchase was, about twenty years ago, " sometimes obtainable." At that time I myself and thousands of others sold to tenants under the English Land Act at twenty years' purchase and a " bonus ; and those terms still obtain across the Ulster border to-day. It is nonsense to say : " No ' War apprecia- tion' has ever been recognized by ' upright England.' " It would not appear in that manner, but only when the property
was sold in the market. Upright England " says to those across the border : You may come in under the Land Act at twenty years' purchase and bonus, or you may sell in open market." A good deal of landed property has since the War been sold in open market in Ulster and has realized well on to thirty years' purchase. Irish Free State says : " You may, not sell what is yours in open market, but only to the tenant and upon such-terms as we decide, in any case twenty-five per cent.
less than market value." For a State to take its subjects' land except at fullest market value is contrary to all principles of jurisprudence and justice.—I am, Sir, &c., THIRTY YEARS' READER.
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