(10 of 10)
While the government has succeeded in easing Ireland's historically harsh system of farm leasing, nearly 1,000,000 of the country's 11 million acres of agricultural land are still covered by eleven-month leases, which discourage tenants and owners alike from improving the land (after twelve months on a farm, an Irish tenant has a legal claim to buy it). Though 45 acres of good land are the accepted minimum for a viable farm, there are still 208,000 farms (of 360,000) with less than 30 acres each. In the poor western counties, one in three farms is still less than 15 acres, and sons grow old waiting for fathers to die.
Though Sean Lemass is often chided in Parliament for foot-dragging on housing and farm reform, most of the nation's problems are a longtime legacy of national poverty and political timidity. What is radiantly different about Ireland today is the serious expectation that its ills and lags will in fact be corrected. Lemass will soon release details of a new six-year economic program that aims to boost the G.N.P.
50% by 1970. If it succeeds—and his goals in the past have been set far short of actual performance—the nation will have traveled a long way from "the unfortunate country" of Ireland's ancient lament. The varied and lively virtues of the Irish, which in the past have often shaded into weaknesses when they were not vigorously applied to a cause, are the nation's best assurance that it can find the future it seeks for itself. However bright the goal, Ireland will still be many light-years away from the Blest Isle. But—who knows?—they may have their Troubles there too.
* A tribe in north Katanga that ambushed an Irish contingent in 1960, killing ten of its soldiers.