In Part 14, we started with the barriers people experience that block or limit their access to home stability – even when they have a steady income.

We also covered the basics of your Level UP Housing Stability App, its components and goals. 

And then we reviewed HomeWorks and Crystal and Damien’s success in transitioning homeless people to homeowners.

Yes. All vital initiatives.

In this section I’d like to tell my family’s story which illustrates the advantages home ownership brings over many generations.

Yes – I know this story and agree it fits well here.

It starts a long time ago – centuries really but we’ll pick it up with my father’s grandmother, Margaret Stafford from Old Bannow. Margaret was more than a match for most people. She was tough and uncompromising and was renowned for her stoic resolve and business acumen.

Margaret’s husband, John Furlong was crippled in 1903 when he fell from a high haystack on a local estate where he had been a skilled laborer since 1878. Margaret negotiated a payoff, which gave her a downpayment to purchase our home farm of 48 acres about 3 miles from Wexford town. The farm is called Larkinstown and is the place where I grew up.

Can we place this family story in the historical context of land ownership in Ireland?

Good idea. 

This also gives an opportunity to see “the degenerative cycle” and “the system that profits from poverty” in a different context – Ireland.

It’s important to prepare the listener with an often-overlooked truth, which is that the oppressors of people are a cog in the system, similar to how those oppressed are its raw material. Each plays a role. Blaming people or countries as perpetrators distracts us from the source of oppression, which is the embedded system that profits from poverty.

In this story, I know you are referring to the English colonizing system. But don’t the oppressors have the choice to not participate?

The system is animated and intelligent, and its goal is to protect itself and maximize profit. It has manipulated every society to make it difficult for any participant to escape. That said, it is true that many of the individuals involved in historic oppression had the choice, but not the incentive, to lessen their role.

OK. Let’s continue the story.

Before the infamous “Irish Holocaust” 1845-1850, Ireland was essentially entirely owned by English landlords, many of them Lords in absence, with second homes in London and Europe. These Irish estates were typically thousands of acres, some tens of thousands. Their “ownership” was historically awarded by the English monarchy as a reward for “service to the crown”, but always with the stipulation of ongoing royalties to London – and continued repression of Catholics, a practice that had been in place since the Act of Supremacy in 1534 which gave the King or Queen Supremacy of the Church of England. 

On these estates, the Irish were tenants-at-will, with few possessions and no protections, on holdings of around five acres. The rent was paid in “forced labor”, typically 250-260 days of unpaid work each year on the landlord’s estate.

In the previous centuries under British rule, the Irish were non-persons, stripped of legal personhood. As murder requires personhood, the Irish were thus legally killable by any English person at will. Education was prohibited by law. 

So far, what you have shared seems to summarize “the degenerative cycle” as it was applied and systemized for profit, at least throughout the colonized world – which of course included the Plantations in the “young Americas”.

Yes – same systems, same reward - profit.

Legal Personhood (thus land ownership) was restored to Ireland’s Catholics in 1778. But it took well over 100 years for this restoration to make any significant change to “life on the ground.”

In 1870, approximately 97.5% of Ireland’s land was in effect still English owned and worked by Irish labor under English and Irish bailiffs or rent collectors. The system having moved forward from forced labor to sharecropping, where the landlord took 75% of the yield, and the working family 25%. From there it moved to an equally harsh annual rent system, with terms that translated to “pay or go”, rent or eviction.

This indicates how entrenched a system is when it is producing profits – basically, the system must and will continue under any guise necessary. Thus transforming from socially unacceptable slavery to “share” crops, to socially acceptable “rent” – with little change for the workers, but it seems, ever-increasing profits for its beneficiaries.

That’s right.

Maybe a little insight into the centuries-old lifestyles of many English Landlords in Ireland might be enlightening. These lifestyles seemed to closely parallel today’s dramatized period pieces on TV, such as “Upstairs Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey”.

First, well over one hundred of today’s smaller but well-known Irish towns, from Clonmel to Castlerea, from Tralee to Tramore, were established and grew around English Landlord estates. They have or had large homes with servant quarters and support businesses, such as blacksmiths, farriers, and grain mills at their core. This is logical because the Landlord owned and extracted most of the surrounding resources, and that, with what little remained in the hands of the local labor force, was the financial engine for the local economy.

They kept homes and lived much of the year, or at least vacationed in London and Europe. They entertained family and friends in their Irish estates with dinner parties, balls, and theatrical evenings. They provided shooting parties. Fox hunting on horseback was a favored sport.

And there was the origin of my father’s, and many common Irish people’s disdain for the “hunt”. He demonstrated this disdain when he caught the local hunt club in action. By then the club was composed of local Irish upper crust, prominent farmers, and businesspeople emulating the old English system and practice, by galloping after a fox through the local countryside. They would unconcernedly damage and tear up smaller farmers’ fields, crops, and ditch boundaries. In the Spring of 1990 or thereabouts Dad happened to meet them as they were exiting our field to the road. He proceeded to, loudly and with much gesticulation, baptize every red-coated, horse- ensconced, member with personalized explicatives from his extensive vocabulary.

That little incident was the origin of one of many Sean Reynolds tales oft told in pubs and parties over the ensuing years.

English Landlords in Ireland educated their children in Eton and Harrow in England, or when cost prohibited, then Trinity in Dublin. The estates and their income passed to the oldest son, and thus younger siblings vied for inclusion in English society. And if unsuccessful, or lacking in sufficient wealth, fell back on other professions – often in Dublin, and almost always within the English administrative system. Through the following generations, most of these descendant families became the upper class of Irish society.

Up until the 1970’s, in a generalized sense, it was easy to distinguish their lofty origins; by their attitudes and accents, by the schools they chose for their children, the sports they followed, their profession, and home location. But now 50 years later, all of that has melted away. This originally English aristocratic class has “become as Irish as the Irish themselves”. Which coincidentally was the fate of all previous invaders, including the Danes (Denmark), the Vikings (Scandinavia), the Normans (France), and the Spaniards.

The Romans stopped a few watery miles away in old Wales – but left their mark when the Roman youth Patrick was captured there in 417 A.D. by a raiding Irish party, initiating his 6 years of slavery among the “pagan” Irish tribes. After his escape, he spent some years in Wales and Europe, before returning to dangerous Ireland where he tactfully began the long and ultimately “successful” process of converting the savage Irish tribes to Christianity.

I’ve heard that term before “as Irish as the Irish themselves”.

Yes. It’s used by almost every history teacher in any recount of Irish history.

Let’s return to Ireland of 1870 – where 97.5% of the land and society was under English ownership and control.

Over the next 60 years, up to 1930, this land ownership reversed – largely due to various coordinated protests in Ireland and in England that resulted in Irish land reform acts passed in London. But as you’ll hear or read next, there was no free pass.

The 20th century brought about the 1903 Land Act which was an English parliament law designed over many years of good and brave public work both in Ireland and in England that was sold in part to the English House of Lords as a means to “kill Irish demands for Home Rule by kindness”. The law allowed Irish tenants to buy parcels of land (back) from their landlords who had previously held the land and earned rent for their families for hundreds of years.

The Law assisted the sale by providing Government-backed low-interest loans, 3.75% over 68 years, to the Irish buyers to meet the sale price, which on average was set at 22 times the previous annual rent. Thus if an English landlord previously made 1,000 pounds annual rent on their Irish estate, then they were now asked by the English Government to sell the entire estate for 22,000 pounds – with a 12% bonus added and paid by the government.

For the Irish tenants, this was an attractive offer. Previously, they had no security, and depending on the weather and subsequent harvest, they paid between 30 and 100% of their holding’s earnings in direct rent. With this new purchase agreement, their annual payments were cut dramatically – but these payments extended beyond their lifetimes.

So, the transition from slavery to ownership took hundreds of years – and eventually, it was structured as a buy-out, where the native owners, the Irish, paid off the system, with 2 or 3 further generations of labor.

Are there other unexamined consequences?

Yes, there are. As we have revealed through reverse engineering, these exploitative systems train their subjects, even their victims, to continue the system. This is the rule that came into play worldwide as colonizers were forced out. The new authorities of those countries, which were former colonies, continued the same bureaucracy – almost always finding a segment of their population to similarly exploit. This is exactly what happened in my family.

OK – That’s great historical context – let’s return to the story.

Yes – we can pick up where we left off.

Notoriously, great-grandmother Margaret purchased the farm in 1904, with the above-mentioned settlement money as a downpayment and a 40-year note on the balance, from a land agent who had evicted the previous tenants. For Margaret and her young family, this was a highly unpopular move – to participate in any way in an eviction – which led to her lifelong boycott by the community.

Although tough, she wasn’t all bad and gave the evicted Murphy family 2 acres of land to build a house and live on so that our farm became 46 acres holding from that point. The Murphy’s, and their 14 children had a hard time of it anyway, most falling to consequences of malnutrition. Notably, that 2-acre field was later “walked daily” and thus claimed by another neighbor, and my family did not object.

It’s a very valuable site today as it has views of both the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean - along with its tragic history.

Margaret had five daughters and two sons that survived till adulthood. Only one of these children was allowed to leave home. That was my father’s mother, and she paid more than half her small income back to Margaret for years. Two others escaped to Belfast and London.

The remaining 4 worked the 46 acres for their entire lives. Margaret gave them no freedom and no payment. They were not allowed to marry, although their mother had potential husbands come to broker a marriage with her daughters until they were well into their 40s. This treatment was perhaps more extractive than that of the English landlords. The system teaches its subjects well.

I grew up on our small farm with these women, my elderly great-aunts. They kept nothing from the past - no photos, no records, and no happy memories.

From an early age, my dad, the only male grandchild was a willing worker. This was before Ireland had farm mechanization, which meant that all farm tasks were done by hand, or by horse or ox.

The farm boasted many farm creatures, seven cows, goats, geese, 200 chickens, pigs, and various crops from potatoes, cabbage, berries, barley, oats plus more. There were no vets and relatively few educated experts, so the care of crops and animals, including the management of disease was knowledge passed down from generation to generation. My father Sean, born 1933, was imbued with this knowledge from an early age.

Sean was 12 when Margaret passed in 1946. Because he had helped her to dry the notes in the sun every summer, he was the only one who knew where she hid the money – consequently, his uncle and aunts got some benefit from their years of forced labor.

My siblings and I were born on the family farm in the 1960s and 70s – and we grew up in a 3 generational household, but from birth, we were “landed”. My parents paid state taxes but no rent on their own land.

This paid off for me and my siblings when it came time for college. Previous generations of Irish people only received 3rd level education through scholarships – as my mother and her siblings had. My parents were enabled, by being landholders, to cover the cost of 7 children’s education through annual farm loans that Dad took from the local bank manager based on a handshake – and luckily, thanks to the EEC (European Economic Community) based boom, and with earnings from 2 jobs, his as a lab technician and my mother’s as a teacher - they always managed to pay. Families without land had no such access and struggled to pay for, or forfeited these college opportunities.

Further, as a direct result of our family’s small holdings which even today, most Irish people do not have, 3 of us were able to build and own homes, and all 7 of us own our homes today.

This homeownership was eased by the earning opportunities established by our early work history and our college educations, and of course by access to generational funds, however small.