Editing Absentee landlord (section)

== Ireland ==

Absentee landlords were a highly significant issue in the [[history of Ireland]]. In the 16th and 17th centuries, much of Ireland's land was confiscated from [[Catholic Church in Ireland|Catholic]] landowners by [[the Crown]] during the [[plantations of Ireland]] and given to Protestant settlers from [[Great Britain]]. Many of these settlers and their descendants eventually moved back to Britain while continuing to own their Irish estates, renting them out to local tenants. In 1782, Anglo-Irish politician [[Henry Grattan]] claimed that absentee landlords earned approximately £800,000 ''per annum'' from their Irish estates, and attempted to place an extra tax on [[remittance]]s paid out to them. However, absentee landlords also reinvested their rents into constructing roads and bridges in Ireland in order to improve local economies, many of which still exist today; one such landlord was [[Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston|Lord Palmerston]], who went into debt to develop his estates in [[Sligo]], an investment that eventually paid off.{{citation needed|date=April 2024}}

By the 1800s, resentment towards these landlords grew as not only were absentee landlords all [[Protestantism|Protestant]] (while their mostly Catholic tenants were forbidden to inherit land), but the goods produced on their estates were mostly exported to Britain and other markets. This system became particularly detrimental to the Irish public during the [[Great Famine (Ireland)|Great Famine]], when despite Ireland being a [[Great Irish Famine#Food exports|net exporter of food]] millions either died of starvation or disease or emigrated elsewhere.<ref>Ross, David (2002), Ireland: History of a Nation, New Lanark: Geddes & Grosset, {{ISBN|1-84205-164-4}} page 226</ref> In the years following the famine, the [[Irish National Land League]] engaged in the [[Land War]] to address the issue of absentee landlords in Ireland. The issue was one of the factors which resulted in the [[Irish revolutionary period]], though it had largely been addressed by the British government in 1903 via the [[Land Acts (Ireland)|Land Acts]].{{citation needed|date=April 2024}}