Between 1810 and 1814, for example, a commission reported four times on the condition of the Irish bogs.

They expressed their entire conviction of the practicability of cultivating with profit an immense extent of land lying waste.

In 1819, in 1823, in 1826, and in 1830, select committees inquired into and reported on drainage, reclamation of bogs and marshes, on roads, fisheries, emigration, and other schemes for giving employment to the redundant population that had been encouraged to increase and multiply in the most reckless manner, while 'war prices' were obtained for agricultural produce, and the votes of the forty-shilling freeholders were wanted by the landlords.

When, by the Emancipation Act in 1829, the forty-shilling franchise was abolished, the peasant lost his political value.

After the war, when the price of corn fell very low, and, consequently, tillage gave place to grazing, labourers became to the middleman an encumbrance and a nuisance that must be cleared off the land, just as weeds are plucked up and flung out to wither on the highway.