HL Deb 14 March 1870 vol 199 cc1857-60
LORD DUFFERIN

I am very sorry to trespass upon your Lordships' attention, or to interpose between the House and the noble Marquess who has given notice of a Motion (the Marquess of Clanricarde); but I trust I may be allowed an opportunity of correcting a very serious misapprehension affecting my personal conduct, to which currency has been given by an eminent Gentleman in "another place" in reference to certain leases which some time ago I issued to a portion of my tenantry. The Gentleman to whom I refer is Sir John Gray, the Member for Kilkenny; and as I am anxious to be both concise and accurate, perhaps the readiest way to place your Lordships in possesion of the facts of the case will be for me to read a few paragraphs from a letter I felt it my duty to address to the hon. Gentleman in reference to this matter— 8, Grosvenor Square, March 11, 1870. My dear Sir John Gray,—I am sure you will forgive me for at once correcting some grave misapprehensions into which you have fallen with respect to a lease of mine, and some other matters connected with the management of my property, to which you referred during last night's debate. Your words, as reported in The Times, are as follows:— The leases under which the tenants held, however, contained some remarkable clauses, and it was to be hoped that the courts that were to have jurisdiction under this Bill would not adopt them as models to be followed. For instance, even the very sea weed, the waste thrown up by he waves, was reserved under those clauses as he property of the landlord, who was also to have he right to take back any portion of the land he night require for planting or other purposes whenever he thought fit to do so—in fact, he was really to be master of the land.' Now, with regard to sea weed, it is by no means 'waste,' as you imply, but a very valuable property, and on all estates bordering on the seashore it is invariably reserved by the owner. On my estate it is reserved solely and entirely in the interests of the tenantry. But for such a reservation, it would be monopolized and wasted by the one or two tenants whose farms lay along the seashore, instead of being shared by their neighbours in the vicinity, as is now done under regulations which the tenantry, if appealed to, would acknowledge to be for their common benefit. The further statement that I have reserved to myself the right of resuming any portion or the whole of a tenant's leasehold, and kept myself master of the land, is quite without foundation. What I have done has been to reserve to myself the right of resuming a piece of land not exceeding one acre in extent on any farm; but in the exercise of this right I have also bound myself to pay to the tenant from whom the parcel of and has been taken compensation at the rate of £18, £17, £16 an acre, according to the circumstances of the case. The object I had in view in the foregoing arrangement was to retain facilities for erecting labourers' cottages, and for putting down a little planting wherever either might be required upon the estate. Again you say that I have expended such and such sums upon the improvement of my property, and that I have invariably charged 5 per cent on such expenditure. This, again, is inaccurate. The real circumstances of the case are these—On coming of age my first act was to announce to my tenantry a reduction of rent to the amount of £2,000 a, year, to be maintained for a definite period. I have since considered that this concession was rather precipitate and unnecessary, and that the £30,000 thus dealt with might have been more judiciously applied. Since then I have expended on the property in compensation to tenants, in the erection of farm steading, in cottages, in draining, fencing, estate roads, and schools, a sum of £60,000, exclusive of an additional sum of £17,000 guaranteed to my tenants on account of certain improvements executed by them in the very leases to which you have referred in such severe terms. Such having been my expenditure, I now come to my rental. My rental at the present time is exactly the same as it was twenty-five years ago, and as it will be for the next twenty years. These figures will show that it is not correct to say that I have invariably exacted 5 per cent from my tenants on account of the money I have expended for their benefit. What I have done has been to undertake to pay for all existing improvements, and for the time to come to execute any permanent improvement the tenant may desire to have put upon his farm, on his consenting to allow interest at the rate of 5 per cent to be added on that account to his rent. … Believe me, &c., DUFFERIN. Having, as I trust, satisfied your Lordships on the points referred to, it is but common justice to Sir John Gray that I should state that I believe it was in perfect good faith, and with a full conviction of the authenticity of the information transmitted to him, that he made the statement of which I complain, and his misapprehension may be readily accounted for—namely, by the fact that he had been furnished by his correspondent, not with a perfected or complete lease, but with the mere printed portions of a lease, in which all the blanks remained unfilled, and which therefore was a document quite incomprehensible, and capable of a hundred different interpretations. It is with very great reluctance that I have brought myself to intrude upon your Lordships' notice what is after all, a private and insignificant matter; but, as your Lordships are aware, public opinion in Ireland is in a very excited state in reference to these subjects. Every statement is received without inquiry, and propagated by the newspapers from one end of the country to the other, and already, I am told—I will not say in consequence of Sir John Gray's statement, but in consequence of similar misstatements, equally incorrect, and, I am afraid, advanced with less good faith—I have had the honour of being christened in the newspapers, and at public meetings, "the Scully of Ulster."