All Covid-19 measures are permanent, don't be a boiling frog!

I see in the Irish Independent that Dr Holohan is asking people to 'flatten the curve' and there and elsewhere they are saying it is just 30 days of sacrifice etc.

At this stage, for me anyway, the question has to seriously be asked of all Irish people, squarely and directly.

How gullible are you?

Yes governments, and big pharmaceutical companies lie to and manipulate people all the time, and no, that is only common sense, not a 'conspiracy theory'.

But anyway on a hopefully interesting twist I thought I would point out another example of where a temporary emergency measure was to prove anything but.

Quit Rent

Quit rent is a recognised phrase in ancient English land law (liberi redditus), and the phrase means that you would pay this rent to the crown on freehold land, in a sense 'quitted' of previous encumbrances. As you get into the early modern period it is a phrase usually applied to a tax on land given out as a grant by the King, typically in this country land confiscated from Irish Catholics and given to English Protestants, such as for example the confiscated monasteries in Ireland.(1) Then it applied to the state tax levied on Irish land confiscated under the Cromwellian plantation of the 1650s, the excuse been the much hyped, by the media, supposed, massacre of the Irish rebellion of 1641.

Specifically Cromwell paid off the 'Adventurers', people who had lent money to the state on the security of Irish land, actually before the 1641 rebellion, the '1649 officers', in other words back pay owed to the Cromwellian army in Ireland, and other Cromwellian and later Royal favourites, with these lands and with these Quit Rents attached. The initial Quit Rent rate was 18 pence in a 240 pence pound of the estimated annual revenue of the lands, so approximately 7.5%, yielding at first 3,072 pounds to the state (2) and rising to about 50,840 pounds in the 18th century.(3)

Of course there was nothing very permanent about Cromwell's, and his son's, reign and so when the Stuarts came back the assumption was that these lands would be restored to the Irish and that the tax would lapse simultaneously. However the Irish were to discover that what the state pinches it never gives back and so Charles II retained and codified these quit rents in a proclamation he issued in 1661: Proclamation requiring the payment of rents, quit rents and other moneys due to the Crown, August 15th 1661.(4) There the following rents on these escheated lands was set at, per English statute acre per year in pence: Leinster 3, Munster 2¼, Ulster 2, Connaught 1½.

So would anybody like to guess when it ended? When does the state give back its right to levy that tax, which it only levied in the emergency atmosphere at the end of the Cromwellian wars?

I don't know exactly but I think with the abolition of the Land Commission in 1999. Certainly it was still collected and in force by 1971 in both jurisdictions, the North and the Republic.

In the North in that year Rafton Pounder asked if Quit Rents were to be abolished in Northern Ireland, the answer was from Patrick Jenkin:

In the South, where the Quit Rent Office existed at 3 Lower Ormond Quay "down to about the 1950s",(6) they later collected it as an office of the Land Commission and paid it to the Irish state:(7)

Footnotes

1. See for example Calendar of the State Papers relating to Ireland, 1608-1610 (London, 1874), p.448.

2. Kevin McKenny, A 17th century "real estate company": the 1649 officers and the Irish land settlements (Maynooth, 1989), p.234.

3. Gorges Edmond Howard, A treatise of the Exchequer and revenue of Ireland (Dublin 1776) vol i, p.43.

4. James Kelly and Marion Lyons, Proclamations of Ireland (Dublin, 2014) vol i, p.41. This reference was not consulted but indirectly researched.

5. Irish Press 27/1/1971, p.7.

6. Evening Herald 13/11/1974, p.9.

7. Since 1926, see Irish Independent 23/6/1926, p.5.

8.  https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1971-04-20/45/ , mentioned in the Cork Examiner 21/4/1971, p.10.