unevenly across the country, with some large estates surviving if the owners could show that their land was being actively farmed. Provision was made for compulsory purchase of land owned by a non-Irish person until repealed in 1966. From 1923, the amounts outstanding under earlier acts were paid to the British government as "land annuities", accruing in a Land Purchase Fund. This was fixed at £250,000 annually in 1925. In December 1925 W. T. Cosgrave lamented that there were already: "250,000 occupiers of uneconomic holdings, the holdings of such a valuation as did not permit of a decent livelihood for the owners". Despite this, his government continued to subdivide larger landholdings, primarily to gain electoral support. The Land Act 1933, passed on a vote of 70–39, allowed the Minister for Finance to divert the annuities for local government projects. This was a factor that caused the "Economic war" between 1932 and 1938, and was mutually resolved by a one-off payment of £10m to Britain in 1938. From 1932 the government argued strongly that Irish farmers should no longer be obliged for historic reasons to pay Britain for Irish land, but when Britain had passed out of the payment system it illogically still required farmers to continue to pay their annuities to the Irish government as before. The Land Act 1965 was designed to stop speculative purchases of land by non-Irish persons. The Succession Act of 1965 treated real estate owned by a deceased person as personalty for the first time. The Commission ceased acquiring land in 1983; this signified the start of the end of the Commission's reform of Irish land ownership, though freehold transfers of farmland still had to be signed off by the Commission into the 1990s. The Commission was dissolved on 31 March 1999, by the Irish Land Commission (Dissolution) Act, 1992, and most of the remaining liabilities and assets were transferred to the Minister for Agriculture and Food. Many relevant historical records are held by the National Archives of Ireland. Ground rents A "ground rent" is a nominal annual rent paid where a property is held under a long lease. Legislation has reformed ground rents alongside the agricultural land laws (see above). While most tenancy reform legislation was enacted for agricultural land, urban and suburban occupiers / tenants have been allowed to "buy out" their ground rents from landlords, and so effectively can change a long