It has been usual in works on nineteenth century Irish history to treat the Irish Church Act, 1869, as having been solely or predominantly an act of political justice and a setting right of an unfair relationship between churches and communities. The important place which the act holds in British economic policy as the first enactment for state-aided tenant purchase of land in Ireland has been generally ignored. What attention the subject of tenant purchase at that early period has received both from contemporaries and from subsequent writers has been mainly centred on the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1870, which was, in its tenant purchase provisions, a much less successful and less extensively applied measure. There are several reasons for this ignoring of the place of the Irish Church Act in the history of tenant purchase. Neither the act nor any part of it was classified as falling within the mass of legislation to which the collective citation of the Land Purchase (Ireland) Acts was given, nor was it specifically directed to be read as part of any of these later acts.