Maurice Fitzgerald, sixth duke of Leinster, would not turn twenty-one until March 1908. In September 1903 he was still a minor, and the roughly 45,000 acres his family had held around Maynooth, Athy, Kilkea, and Castledermot in County Kildare — the largest estate of Ireland's premier peerage — were controlled entirely by two trustees, Lord Frederick Fitzgerald and Lord Kinnaird, acting on his behalf without needing to ask him anything. The estate's finances had been collapsing for decades; the previous duke had already sold 19,200 acres in 1885 just to service £290,000 in debt, and by 1902 the trustees were auctioning off the family's Gainsborough and Van der Hagen paintings at Christie's to cover the shortfall. When the Wyndham Land Act passed that August, offering landlords a twelve percent cash bonus for selling their estates outright, the trustees moved before the ink was dry — and moved without their ward, who had no legal standing to object to the sale of everything he was due to inherit.
On September 15, 1903, the trustees informed the estate's tenants they would sell at twenty-six years' purchase — roughly twenty-six times the annual rent, the standard measure of land value at the time — and a meeting was called in Athy for that same day to respond. A contemporary newspaper called it well attended, though the chairman, a former Irish Parliamentary Party MP named Matthew Minch, admitted openly that circulars had only reached tenants whose addresses the committee could find on short notice. The men who ended up negotiating were not a representative cross-section of the estate's roughly five hundred tenant families. The Maynooth deputation held an average of well over a hundred acres each; the Athy and Kilkea deputation was much the same, most of them Justices of the Peace, several sitting county councillors, one — Minch himself — a wealthy malt and corn merchant. Eighteen men, holding 3,580 acres between them, sat down with Lord Frederick Fitzgerald in Dublin on September 24 and settled the whole estate's terms in a meeting the Irish Times reported lasted under an hour.
The Castledermot tenants, on the poorer, colder land at the estate's southern edge, did not get a seat at that meeting at all. They convened for the first time three days later, on September 27, simply to decide whether to accept terms that had already been struck without them. One tenant, John Keogh, put the class divide on record in language that needed no elaboration: "It's all very well for the big bugs about Athy to give twenty-five years' purchase, but it's different with us." Edward Heydon, who had at least tried and failed to win an arrears concession for the smaller tillage farms, recalled the old duke with a kind of complicated affection that cut against the tenants' own interest in the deal — "he always gave the tenants better terms than other landlords," a voice in the crowd agreed he'd been a good man, and another voice added the quiet warning underneath all of it: better than the government will be. The Castledermot tenants voted to accept anyway, with only three dissenting. They had, in practical terms, no other option on the table.
The final numbers, once the sale closed, ran to £766,647 — the purchase price, the interest, and a twelve percent bonus of £80,108 paid directly to the trustees on the duke's behalf. Five hundred and six tenants became owners of their own holdings. Seventy-seven of them, the largest farmers on the estate, accounted for £381,825 of the total money advanced — roughly half the entire sum, split among fewer than one in six purchasers. The Irish Times worried in print, even as the sale was closing, that a deal this generous to already-comfortable tenants would set a price other estates couldn't match: "the act will be a complete failure unless it affects the small farmers and poorer agriculturalists." A Maynooth resident, writing to the Freeman's Journal under the initials W.H., was blunter about what the sale actually was — "a more grievous wrong could hardly be inflicted... on the small tillage tenants than by their inclusion in Mr. Minch's cast-iron mould of uniformity."
The warning proved accurate almost immediately. Within weeks, landlords on neighboring estates — the Samuel Mills estate straddling Kildare and Queen's County, and R. H. McDonnell's land near Athy — were refusing lower offers, telling their own tenants the "Leinster terms" were now the going rate. Land prices across the region rose to match a deal negotiated in under an hour by eighteen of the wealthiest tenants on one particular estate, none of whom had any obligation to consider what the price would mean for a smallholder three townlands over.
By 1908, with the Wyndham Act's funding running dry years ahead of schedule and the poorest tenants in Connacht, Clare, Kerry, and Donegal still waiting for the assistance the act had been built to give them, the Liberal government's own law officer, Attorney General R. R. Cherry, told the House of Commons plainly what the Leinster sale had actually done: advances of up to seven thousand pounds to a single purchaser had been "largely taken advantage of by the rich and well-to-do," and the duke of Leinster's large tenants "were certainly not the class of people intended to be benefited by the land purchase acts." His successor as chief secretary, Augustine Birrell, put the number on it directly in a later debate: nobody, he said, had intended for a well-managed estate like the duke of Leinster's to see its owner walk away with eighty thousand pounds "into his breeches pocket" for selling land that had never given the government a moment's trouble. The reform meant to break up Ireland's landlord class had instead handed its largest tenants a windfall, at the direct expense of the small farmers in the west the law had been named for.