90 THE IRISH AGRARIAN PROBLEM. 



15,090 of these labourers' dwellings had 

 been erected, chiefly in Munster and 

 Leinster. In many cases the labourer also 

 rents land as ' con-acre,' i.e., he receives 

 permission to take one harvest from a 

 certain piece of land, for which he pays a 

 very high rent ; his methods of cultivation 

 are generally very primitive and the land 

 is deteriorated by them. When the same 

 individual has the same piece of con-acre 

 land year after year, his economic position 

 is not very different from that of the 

 labourer who rents a cottage and garden. 

 It is difficult to ascertain the exact amount 

 of land which is rented in this manner ; we 

 may, however, assume that a great part 

 of the 74,607 holdings under one acre are 

 labourers' land, to which the Land Acts do 

 not apply. 



4. The last class of tenants who do not 

 enjoy the benefits of the agrarian reform — 

 and who indeed seldom need them — are the 

 eleven months tenants. Section 58 of the 

 Land Act of 1881 laid it down explicitly 

 that a temporary letting for purposes of 

 grazing does not come under the Land Act. 

 Therefore, if the grazing-letting is for less 

 than one year, e.g., eleven months, a situa- 

 tion is created to which the Land Act is not 

 applicable. The consequence is that the 

 landowner has an interest in adopting this 

 particular manner of letting any lands over 



