[caught in the fever of the industrial revolution…]

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caught in the fever of the industrial revolution.

The leaders of the Grattan parliament (see Part I of this series) which the Act of Union brought to an end had, however, spread boundless hopes of the economic possibilities of an independent Ireland.

In 1791 Wolfe Tone said:

.. if Ireland were free and well governed ... she would in arts, commerce and manufactures, spring up like an air balloon and leave England behind her at an immense distance. There is no computing the rapidity with which she would rise' Tone's words were fanciful. But in an exaggerated form they still carried some truth.

Despite the economic damage and plunder already inflicted by Britain on Ireland, despite what the great political economist Adam Smith called 'the invidious restraints which at present oppress the trade of Ireland' , an independent Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century could still perhaps, like other nations of Western Europe, have formed the basis for an independent capitalist industrialisation.

But the collapse of the movement for Irish independence at this time put paid once and for all to this possibility for Ireland.

Degradation

The next hundred years of British imperialism were to bring a level of economic degradation upon Ireland which was as bad, if not worse, than occurrea any where in the world.

The coming catastrophe was hidden at first by the impact of the Napoleonic wars. High demand led to something of a boom in Irish exports of food and clothing especially for the British army.

Production, exports and wages all rose and Irish agriculture became able to support growing population.

After 1815 came the post war slump. Irish wages fell by nearly one third over the next 25 years.

But the population continued to grow-from about 4½ million in 1790 to well over 8 million by 1841 (about half the population of Great Britain). culture. That was grain and cattle for the English market. Throughout the nineteenth century the pattern of this production shifted from grain to cattle.

Cattle as well as sheep and pigs were exported live and fattened for the market in England.

Bankrupcy

At the end of the years of 'prosperity' , tenant farmers were increasingly forced into bankruptcy and evicted by the landlords who increasingly turned land over to pasture and cattle-feed crops.

This form of production was profitable to the landlords. The tenants, however, benefited little even in good years due to the prevalent rent system (except in parts of Ulster) where a high proportion of any increase in production was simply creamed off by the landlords.

It was a system which discouraged any kind of technical progress such as was taking place elsewhere in Western Europe.

Irish agriculture remained unproductive, the landlords continued to do well; the tenants produced enough on which to live (potatoes) and a surplus to pay the rent (cattle or feedcrops).

As the population grew, and industrial growth remained negligible the pressure on the land increased especially in the West and the peasantry's livelihood became increasingly precarious.

In places emigration to the United States had begun. And everywhere the slightest failure of the potato crop signalled famine.

Six famines

At least six famines occured between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the early 1840s. These terrible events have been forgotten.

That is because they have been overshadowed by the Great Hunger of the 1840s. From 1845 to 1848 there were major failures of the potato crop.

There was no shortage of other kinds of food in the country. Livestock-and grain were there in great quantities.

But at least 1 million people died in these years of starvation because it was not profitable to feed them. Exports of meat and grain to England continued undiminished during the years of the famine.

The British government practised a kind of economic genocide. In the eighteenth century it had been, as Adam Smith complained, restrictions on free trade through which the British government stifled the development of an independent Irish capitalist class.

Now it was via the obsessional insistence on free trade that the British government murdered one million Irish peasants and workers.

All measures of relief were rejected on the grounds that they would interfere with the law of demand and supply. The shortage would produce new food supplies as capitalists saw the chance to make a profit.

But social need, however, acute, does not the capitalist system represent profitable demand. No food came.

Emigration

The famine prompted an extraordinary increase in the rate of emigration, especially to the United States. Death and emigration brought the Irish population down from over 8¼ million in 1845 to under 6 million only ten years later.

The Irish population continued to decline for a further century so that even taking the population of Irelland (North and South) it is still less than it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Wolfe Tone This experience is historically unique. In the nineteenth century Ireland became the barracks for a vast reserve army of labour for Britain and the USA.

It was an even more dramatic example of the role which has been played more recently by some Caribbean countries, by Portugal and Turkey in relation to the capitalist countries of Western Europe.

The 1840s were a new turning point for the Irish economy not only because of the famine but also because of the abolition in 1846 of the Corn Laws.

This meant the end of protection of grain (especially wheat) in the British market.

It was a measure long campaigned for by British industrial capitalists. Cheaper imported grain, they believed, would lower food prices and enable them to pay lower wages.

It was directed particularly at the Irish landowners whose feudal systems of tenure were now the most primitive in the British Isies and who helped to keep up grain prices as long as they had the protection ot the Corn Laws.

Both the famine and the abolition of the Corn Laws gave a sharp boost to the trends in agriculture which were directly going on.

Deaths, evictions and emigration allowed landlords to consolidate holdings, something which was necessary for the conversion of grainproducing land to cattle pasture.

For the abolition of the Corn Laws was the final death blow to grain production in Ireland.

Thus Ireland became the *Emerald Isle'-an unconscious euphemism for the transformation of its agriculture by imperialism.

Exaggerated

To some extent these changes represented the growth of capitalist agriculture. But that shouldn't be exaggerated. Irish farming continued to be based on relatively small-scale peasant holdings.

Even as late as the 1960s over 70% of holdings were less than twenty hectares; and only 15% of those working in agriculture were wage labourers.

Even Tsarist Russia experienced a more radical degree of land reform than most of Ireland in the nineteenth century.

It was long after the "emancipation' of the Russian serfs that British governments decided to make some kind of reform' to Irish land tenure.

Gladstone's Land Act : 1881 was prompted by t new wave of agricultur depression following t] economic crisis of 1873 ar new famines in the la 1870s.

For the first time (exce in Ulster where such a syste was already common): tl Land Act fixed money ren for statutory tenancies fixed periods and allowed t sale of remaining portions unexpired leases.

But falling prices ma these fixed rents even mc burdensome and a compani Act to waive some re arrears was defeated by i House of Lords.

The failure of Gladsto and the Irish Party to e Home Rule through t Commons in 1886 brought power a Tory governme backed by Chamberlain a ine Liberal Unionists a headed by the arch-imper list Lord Salisbury.

The Annual Register 1886 (the official record parliamentary debat reports a speech by Salisbu in which he 'maintained th Ireland was not a nation b two nations; held that the were races, like the Hotente and even the Hindoos, w were incapable of self gover

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Cartoon of Britannia choosing between Tory • ment; and refused to place confidence in a people who had acquired the habit of using knives and slugs ...

'My alternative policy is that parliament should enable the government of England to govern Ireland. Apply that recipe honestly, consistently and resolutely for twenty years, and at the end of that time you will find that Ireland will be fit to accept any gifts in the way of local government or repeal of coercion laws you may wish to give her Devolved power What Salisbury meant was that it was necessary to build some kind of capitalist class before any form of devolved power could be risked. It became Tory policy to create such a class.

The 25 years after 1886 saw a real acceleration in both industrial and agricultural growth. Tory Land Acts encouraged the purchase of land holdings by the richer peasants which itselt expanded the tiny home industrial market.

Farming cooperatives were officially encouraged. At the same time prices and demand began to rise again for exports both of livestock and of de labour in en Ulster flax IN C ELEK* ERICAN PANE TARES nU:

NEWYOR industrial goods.

Many light industries developed during these years but most of them were on a very small scale.

The major heavy industry development was shipbuilding, concentrated in Belfast. The annual tonnage produced rose from 40,000 in 1880 to over 250,000 in 1914. Between these years the population of Belfast doubled.

In these crucial 25 years, therefore, developed the classes and social groups which participated in the dramatic events of the class and national struggles between 1910 and 1924.

The industrial working class grew ding to a census in 1907, there were 290,000 industrial workers, more than half of them in Ulster.

Peasantry

This certainly represented some growth but there were almost certainly more Irish workers in New York or in Boston than in the whole of Ireland and the peasantry remained numerically a much, larger class.

This. was the period of the construction of workers' organisations (see part 3 of this series). But these figures make plain how a revolutionary proletarian policy at that time required the development of a policy for the liberation of the peasantry from landlordism, poverty and oppression.

But this alliance was what Connolly and other labour leaders signally failed to build, preferring to tail end the would-be oppressors' class of the bourgeois nationalist movement (see parts 6 and 7 of this series).

Weak Both the industrial' and agricultural bourgeoisie also grew though it remained a weak and dependent class. One section (basically the Unionist bourgeoisie in Belfast) were completely tied to the world market and opposed the protectionist outlook which went hand in hand with nationalism.

The leaders of the nationalist movement represented the small aspiring bourgeoisie which saw its future as being based on a home market.

While Wolfe Tone had one hundred years before seen the economic future of Ireland as a second United States, the aims of the petty bourgeois 5xa:

An emigrant on a Dublin quayside nationalist leaders were now more modest.

But they still saw Ireland becoming an industrialised, capitalist, imperialist nationeven though the model was now not the USA but Hungary OI perhaps Germany.

Sinn Fein leader Arthur Griffith argued for a policy of industrialisation behind tariff barriers. It was to be the economic dimension of a political settlement in which Ireland's relation to England would be like that of Hungary to Austria-a dual monarchy.

In 1905 Griffiths wrote: "A nation cannot promote and further its civilisation, its prosperity and its social progress equally as well by exchanging agricultural products for manufactured goods as by estabishing a manufac. turing power of its own.

"A merely agricultural nation cannot ever develop to any extent a home or foreign commerce... it will never acquire important political power or be placed in a position to intence the cultivation and progress of less advanced nations and to form colonies of its own. A mere agricultural state is infinitely less powerful than an agricul. tural-manufacturing state..

Higher price

•Griffith added for good measure that it was "the duty of the individual to pay where necessary a higher price for Irish-made goods"that is, to accept a cut in the standard of living in order to foster the growth of the imperialist ambitions of the budding Irish capitalist class.

The fact that these positions were well-known shows up again the criminal failure of the leaders of the labour movement to build a political movement independent of the would-be imperialists of Sinn Fein (see part 8 of this series).

In the crucial years of 1916 to 1924 it was these policies of the labour leaders which contributed in great measure to the form which Irish "independence" took-a divided country, with the squabbling petty bourgeois nationalists in political control.

The economic auspices of "independence in 1922 could hardly have been worse for the grandiose projects of the new petty bourgeois leaders.

The wartime and post-war boom in Britain had changed in 1921 to a deep slump with a catastrophic effect on Irish exports.

The most industrialised area (the 6 counties) were split off from the new state. And important installations (especially dairies) had been wantonly destroyed by the Black and Tans.

For ten years the pro-treaty government of William Cosgrave pursued an economic policy which claimed to be moderately protectionist but was in reality based on the old formula, so reviled in nationalist rhetoric, of stimulating meat and dairy exports to Britain.

The main architect of this strategy was the Agriculture Minister Patrick Hogan who coined the slogan: "One more cow, one more sow, one more acre under the plough."

In 1932 the Fianna Fail under de Valera won the elections on a pledge to introduce all-out protectionism in order to develop industry and shift agriculture from its export orientation.

The new Industry Minister Sean Lemass had said in 1928: "We believe that Ireland can be made a self-contained unit, providing all the necessities of living in adequate quantities for the people residing in the island at the moment and probably for a much larger number.

From 1932 to 1938 he gave protection to any industry which requested it. But a tiny home market based on a stagnant, primitive agriculture and a declining population was no base for industrialisation.

The failure of the pathetic scheme is shown by the fact that the national income per head calculated at 61% of the British figure in 1931 had fallen to 49% by 1939.

Incapacity

Fianna Fail In 1 Fail, in erect recog the nised the incapacity of the puny Irish capitalist class to resolve any of the country's economic problems.

The government signed a new British-Irish Trade Agreement which once more ratified the neo-colonial situation of the Irish economy.

This agreement was renewed in 1948 and then developed into a Free Trade Treaty in 1965.

But in other respects the protectionism of the Fianna Fail continued until well after the Second . World War. Foreign investment was discouraged and Irish capitalists subsidised.

It was in 1949 that the Irish bourgeoisie began to put aside dreams of becoming an 18th century USA or a 19th century Hungary Germany and to replace them with something closer to a 20th century Hong Kong or Singapore, Taiwan or South Korea.

| HONE RULE and Gladstone's Home Rule Bill The Industrial Development Agency started hawking for foreign capitalist investment, tirst trom Britain and then later in the 196Us trom the Common Market, Japan and the USA.

The Irish bourgeoisie became economic pimps prostituting cheap Irish labour to imperialism and pocketing a share of the profits.

And the profits are very high. The United States Department of Commerce estimates that Ireland is the most profitable country in the worid for American overseas investment.

Its average rate of profit is 29.5% compared with an international average of 11.7%. For Britain the figure is In this they have, of course, been competing with the North, where British governments have also tried to attract foreign capital.

Today there are 680 foreign operations in Ireland. 206 of these, with a capital value of £271 million, are American. The second largest investors are Japanese whose projects are worth £8Omillion. The third largest are British.

The kind of manufacturing which is done is predominantly, as it was in the protected industries of the 1920s and 1930s, assembly operations based on imported raw materials. cerrain even it it provides a Coral ment, it does little to solve Ireland's permanent trade deficit. From 1924 until today Ireland has been a chronic debtor country Conditions today's Northern Ireland This kind of "industrialisation" has been very concentrated in and around the main ports. Nearly 50% of all industrial employment is in Dublin.

Growth based on foreign investment, especially since the late 1950s, is sometimes described as Ireland's "econo mic miracle" • Miraculous it may seem only in relation to the country's past economic failures.

„But Ireland's growth rate has been the second lowest in Western Europe in the post-war period. Though it has the slowest growing labour force in Europe, the unemployment rate (probably about 16%) is the highest in Europe. And it has since the 1960s had one of Europe's highest rates of inflation.

The closest parallel with this economic experience is that of the 6 counties of Ulster.

The border has not stopped both sections of the Irish bourgeoisie from continuing to show their dependent nature in relation to imperialism, and to demonstrate that in the epoch of imperialism they have no progressive role to play.

Through preserving its "divisions" and the border then both sections of this pitiful class have to some extent managed to conceal the utter bankruptcy which has been its characteristic for nearly two centuries.

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LESS,

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