Soon after the famine, the Incumbered Estates Act was passed, by which
the creditors of incumbered landlords could force a sale. This in
effect worked a silent revolution; for whatever might have been said
up to that time about the landed proprietors being the representatives
of those who acquired their estates through the Cromwellian
confiscations, after those proprietors had been forced to sell and the
purchasers had obtained a statutory title by buying in the Court, the
charge became obsolete. The motive of the Act was a good one; it
was hoped that land would thus pass out of the hands of impoverished
owners and be purchased by English capitalists who would be able to
execute improvements on their estates and thus benefit the country
as a whole. But the scheme brought with it disadvantages which the
framers of the Act had not foreseen. The new purchasers had none of
the local feelings of the dispossessed owners; they regarded their
purchases as an investment, which they wished to make as profitable as
possible, and treated the occupants of the land with a harshness which
the old proprietors would never have exercised. Like most things in
Ireland, however, this has been much exaggerated. It is constantly
assumed that the whole soil of Ireland after this belonged to absentee
proprietors who took no interest in the country. That absenteeism is a
great evil to any country, and to Ireland especially, no one can deny;
but a Parliamentary enquiry in 1869 elicited the fact that the number
of landed proprietors in the rural area of Ireland then (and there
is no reason to suppose that any great change had taken place in
the previous eighteen years) was 19,547, of whom only 1,443 could
be described as "rarely or never resident in Ireland"; and these
represented 15.7 per cent. of the rural area, and only 15.1 per cent.
of the total poor-law valuation of that area.