The Irish Land Annuities
INTEREST in the deplorable dispute over the Irish Annuities is at present concentrated on the efforts to find a scheme of arbitration or negotiation acceptable to both parties. It is tending to ignore the legal and other issues which the Court, however constituted, would be called upon to judge. Something, however, should be known of the main contentions of the respective eases, though pending judicial decision it would be presumptuous to hazard an opinion regarding their relative merits.
Neither side has fully shown its hand, but Mr. Thomas has indicated the British attitude in two published dispatches and in speeches in the House of Commons. England would, too, presumably accept much of the legal argumentation of the sixty-five page document, published last December by Mr. Cosgrave's Government and setting out to demonstrate the obligation of Southern Ireland to continue to pay the Annuities. On the Irish side the legal arguments can best be studied in the reply to this document published in the spring of this year by the Executive of the Fianna Fail. (Both these documents are difficult to obtain in England and so far appear to have been ignored by the English Press.) The broader aspects have been presented in public speeches by Mr. de Valera and other Ministers.
The British case rests on two supports. First on formal and explicit undertakings to pay the annuities given on February 12th, 1923, and March 19th, 1926, by the representatives of the Free State : secondly, on what is conceived to be the whole nature and history of the Annuities. Mr. Thomas recalls in his dispatches how money was to be raised from the investing public and lent to the Irish tenant to enable him to buy his land, and how the part played by the British Government consisted solely of providing the investors with an inter- mediary and with a guarantor that their money should be repaid with interest.
As the second dispatch puts it :
" These are not payments from Government to Government. In principle the main transaction is not one between the two Governments at all, but between the Irish tenant-purchaser and the holder of the Land Stock which is, of course, held both in Great Britain and in the Irish Free State. The position is that the annuities are collected by the Irish Free State Government from the tenant-purchasers and are distributed through the National Debt Commissioners to the holders of the Stock."
Looking at the matter in this way and quite apart from the Agreements of 1923 and 1926, England sees no justification for a course of action whose result would be that the Irish farmer would continue to pay and the holder of land stock continue to be paid, while the British Government would become poorer by three million pounds a year, and the Irish Government would become three million pounds richer. This is the course which the Irish Government claim that they are legally justified in pursuing.
The Irish case shows scant respect for the 1920 And 1926 Agreements. Both of these were agreements entered into by the respective Treasuries, and neither was ratified by the Dail. The 1923 Agreement, to which Mr. Thomas apparently pins his faith, was kept so secret that it was not laid before the House of Commons until April of the present year, after the discussions had begun ; while its very existence remained unknown to Mr. de Valera's Party until Mr. Thomas' despatches instigated a search among the records left by their predecessors in office. Further and more significant, there has been no allusion to it in all the sixty-five pages of the Cosgrave Memorandum. How the Irish attack will develop from this point is not yet clear, but it will presumably attempt to get the 1923 Agreement dismissed as either purely informal or else as intentionally concealed from the Dail and the people of Southern Ireland. (It has been suggested that a motive for concealment lay in Clause B (2) of the same document, in which the British Government agreed to guarantee the interest of a new land loan then about to be issued. It may have been thought impolitic, alike by the British and Irish Governments of the time, to inform the Dail that the Free State was having to " submit " to this amount of British patronage.) The Agreement of 1926 is soon dismissed by the Fianna Fail lawyers. They quote the Cosgrave document to prove that " the above clauses have no relation to, nor are they any authority for, such payments. They relate solely to payments in full without deduction," referring as they do to the settlement of an Income Tax dispute that arose between the two countries.
So much then for the negative part of the Irish case with its rejection of the " formal and explicit under- takings." The positive part is complex and certain to suffer from abbreviation. But its main argument can be sketched in outline here. By the Agreement of Decem- ber 3rd, 1925, ratified by both Parliaments, the Irish Free State became completely absolved from all liability for the " Public Debt of the United Kingdom." It therefore became absolved from liability to pay the land annuities if, as the Irish lawyers assert, the land annuities were part of the Public Debt (alleged to be a wider term than National Debt) of the United Kingdom. It is round this question of whether the annuities were or were not part of the public debt of the United Kingdom that the legal argument rages and spreads itself.
There may be a tendency in this country to regard the Irish case as likely to succeed, if at all, on a rather unworthy quibble. But one should, in fairness, recall the Irish attitude to the Agreement of 1925. For years Ireland has claimed that she was over-taxed, and she presented England after the Financial Relations Com- mission of 1894 with formidable claims for compensation. Under the 1925 Agreement the Free State abandoned all such claims, as well as all those for a revision of the frontier, in exchange for a discharge from her liability for a share of the public debt of the United Kingdom. The loss that she feels that she has suffered on balance is her excuse for clinging to that interpretation of the Agreement, which Is at once most favourable to herself and in her view most strictly legal,
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