H-Albion has just published a review of Fergus Campbell,  
_Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland,  
1891-1921_, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.  
  
I believe it somewhat bears upon the ongoing discussion.  
  
>From the review:  
  
Campbell's stage is the west of Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century  
where the plight of the smallest farmers had not been adequately dealt with  
by ameliorative land legislation.  The 1881 Land Law Act might have  
reduced rents, and subsequent acts introduced more attractive  
occupier-purchase terms, but this did not alter the standard of living for a  
large number of small tenants still living on uneconomic holdings.  In the  
Westport poor law union, for instance, there were four thousand families  
living on farms valued at less than �8, while sixty-six graziers occupied  
nearly one hundred thousand acres between them (p. 9).  Access to economic  
holdings rather than the amount of rent was the key issue, and the United  
Irish League (UIL), founded by William O'Brien in 1898, sought to  
redistribute the large grass farms of the graziers to the smallest tenant  
farmers in the west of Ireland.  
  
See  
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Albion&month=0606&we  
ek=b&msg=7EyP%2bTYbJpzsE5r8quPZTA&user=&pw=  
  
Yuri Tulupenko