The Lands Act 1965 was passed to restrict new foreign investment in agriculture, some of which was speculatively based upon the Ireland's planned entry into the European Economic Community, which occurred in 1973. The EEC's Four Freedoms allowed for investment within the EEC by any citizen of an EEC member state. This naturally undermined the ethos of the Land Commission, which had processed a further since 1923. By the early 1970s, half of open market land purchases were by non-farmers, and half of those were to buy small sites, typically for building bungalows.