The Act of 1903 also enabled owners to sell their demesnes and untenanted lands to the Commissioners, and to repurchase them, or so much of them as the Commissioners approved, with the aid of advances made to them in the same manner and under the same conditions as to tenant purchasers.
The Act also gave considerable powers to the Commissioners of dealing with poor and uneconomic holdings. It enabled (Section 2) parcels of untenanted lands on the sale of an estate to be sold to the following persons:
(_a_) A person being the tenant of a holding on the estate;
(_b_) A person being the son of a tenant of a holding on the estate;
(_c_) A person being the tenant or proprietor of a holding not exceeding five pounds in rateable value, situate in the neighbourhood of the estate; and,
(_d_) A person who within twenty-five years before the passing of this Act was the tenant of a holding to which the Land Law Acts apply, and who is not at the date of the purchase the tenant or proprietor of that holding: Provided that in the case of the death of a person to whom an advance under this paragraph might otherwise have been made, the advance may be made to a person nominated by the Land Commission as the personal representative of the deceased person.
This last class (_d_) was intended to provide for the reinstatement of tenants evicted from their holdings within the prescribed time.
It also gives power to the Commissioners to purchase untenanted lands for the purpose of enlarging holdings and of creating new holdings, and to enable this work to be carried out satisfactorily, the Land Commission is given all the powers conferred on the Congested Districts Board by their Act of 1901 for facilitating re-sales of land.
A large number of evicted tenants had been reinstated in their holdings under the Act of 1903 or had been provided with new holdings where their former holdings were not available. Large sums of money (drawn from the Reserve Fund established under the Act of 1891, which was made available by Section 43 of the Act of 1903) were expended in equipping these holdings and in financing reinstated tenants where in the opinion of the Estates Commissioners this was necessary. The provisions of the Act of 1903 were, however, found to be insufficient to carry out the intentions of the legislature, and in 1907 Mr. Birrell passed an Evicted Tenants Act which enabled the Estates Commissioners to acquire untenanted land compulsorily for the purpose of providing holdings for tenants who, or whose predecessors, had been evicted from their holdings since the year 1878, and who had applied to the Commissioners before May 1st, 1907. Up to March 31st, 1911, as many as 12,398 persons had applied for holdings as Evicted Tenants. Of these 6,276 were rejected by the Commissioners after enquiry; 2,631 did not apply within the prescribed time; 2,830 were actually reinstated in holdings; and 661 were still under consideration by the Commissioners.