THE LAND PURCHASE BILL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIII, Issue 21, 18 September 1885, Page 11

THE LAND PURCHASE BILL.

(Dublin Freeman, July 18.) It appears the terms of the Land Purchase Bill, of which intimation has been given in both Houses of Parliament, are before the Government. We are informed that the Lord Chancel lor of Ireland submitted at Saturday's Cabinet Council a draft of the Bill. It provides for the repayment of the capital and interest in forty-seven years, and each annual payment is to be fifteen per cent, under the existing judicial rents. It will be remembered that in May of last year the late Government introduced a Bill with the same object, vis. — to facilitate purchase. It proposed to advance the whole of the purchase money to the tenant who was unable to find the cash himself, and to charge for it at the rate of £3 5s per cent. The term of repay man t was to be 33 years, and the annual payment both for interest and sinking fund would have amounted to five per cent. The terms of the new Bill will be awaited with great interest. An Irish solicitor writing to the Timet on the subject warns her Majesty's Government that no measure of financial relief, however liberal, will be of any avail unless the departmental and legal obstacles to the working of the purchase clauses of the Act of 1881 are removed :— " Th« Bill of 1084 offered no relief in that regard. We cannot have two courts for the ■ale and transfer of land in Ireland — one court to which incumbrancers must apply for relief by sale, or in which an owner must sell such portions of his estates or such interests as would not come under the provisions of a Purchase Bill, and another court to which he must apply if he desires to carry out sales to tenants. It id estimated that three-fourths of Irish estates are encumbered or so circumstanced, and comprise such different in 1 crests, that they could not be dealt with under the Act of 1881 or the Bill of 1884 ; and we are told that at the present time there are over 1,000 petitions for sale pending before the Landed Estates Court. Again, unless the 25th section of the Land Act of 1881, which empowers the Land Commission to purchase estates for the purposes of re-sale, is repealed, the salutary provisions of the second part of the Tramways Act of 1883 are rendered nugatory. The State will inevitably be brought into direct relations with the tenants as landlords, and the price of land will be indirectly regulated by the Government standard instead of the ordinary laws of supply and demand."