Tensions between locals and ‘migrant’ farmers.

The 1933 and 1946 land acts pitted the rights of the western migrants against local inhabitants in eastern counties such as Meath, leading to a great deal of local tension. At one stage in the late 1930s these tensions culminated in ugly street riots in Athboy, County Meath, as locals vented their anger towards 'land-grabbing' migrants.

 

S. J. Waddell wrote a play Bridge Head (written under the pseudonym Rutherford Mayne):

In the play, one of his characters, a local man, informs the Land Commission inspector who has recently arrived in the area to divide an estate: 'You'd be wise to be putting no migrant up into that country. Begor the Rising that was in [nineteen] sixteen will be nothing to what's coming on yous if you plant strangers up in that bedlam.' Even more frightening was the factual case of the Land Commission inspector who received a death threat from a dissatisfied applicant who had been overlooked in favour of a migrant. And he was probably not the only one.

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