The Liberal Party and Gladstone's Land Purchase Bill of 1886

Abstract

It is hardly surprising that, for many years, historians of the political crisis of 1885–6 gave relatively little attention to the land purchase proposals which accompanied Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill. For the Land Purchase Bill progressed no further than its first reading on 16 April 1886, one week after that of its partner. Within weeks it was recognized by its sponsors as a political liability and, unlike the Home Rule Bill, never reached a parliamentary division. In recent years, there has been a re-evaluation of its significance as a policy initiative for Ireland. Two major works published in the centenary year of the crisis challenged Professor John Vincent's claim, in an article which appeared just over a decade ago, that the Land Bill was a ‘dummy’ whose place in Gladstone's scale of priorities was dictated by the exigencies of the parliamentary timetable and of internal cabinet manoeuvrings. Both Dr James Loughlin and Dr Alan O'Day see purchase as part of a coherent policy designed by Gladstone to tackle the problem of agrarian violence and to lay the foundations of a more secure social order in Ireland. For the first time, then, the content of the Bill has received serious and lengthy treatment. What remains to be discussed in some depth is its reception in the country in the spring and summer of 1886.