FROM THE ARCHIVES:Some supporters of protectionism in the 1920s saw an additional benefit in the damage it did to industries in the North, an approach that was criticised in this editorial. –
JOE JOYCE
OUR BELFAST correspondent informs us that the well-known firm of Marsh and Company, which has been manufacturing biscuits in the North of Ireland for nearly a hundred years, is about to close its doors, and that some three hundred persons will be thrown out of work. One of the directors of the firm announces that the immediate cause of the firm’s decision to cease business is the Customs barrier between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. In the years before the imposition of tariffs by the Free State a flourishing trade was done with the twenty-six counties. Under the new régime, however, an import duty of threepence per pound has been levied on all biscuits containing sugar. This duty is assessed on the gross weight of the imported article, so that, if in a consignment of a hundred-weight of biscuits a pound of sugar is contained, duty must be paid, not on the pound, but on the hundredweight.
Those short-sighted persons who declared, when the Free State Government adopted a protectionist policy, that one of its results would be the economic coercion of Northern Ireland, may be pleased by Messrs. Marsh’s decision to close their factory. Sensible folk, however will take another view. The Customs barrier undoubtedly has caused serious losses to the Northern State. The import duty on wearing apparel, for instance, has almost ruined the trade of several big distributing houses in the six counties, and some of the other imposts have caused great inconvenience to Northern industry and commerce. These penalties, however, have served merely to strengthen the North’s determination to maintain its separate entity. From the outset the Customs frontier between Northern Ireland and the Free State created an unnecessary element of mistrust between the two States. It was a God-send to the enemies of Irish unity.
What have tariffs done for the Saorstát? When Mr. Ernest Blythe first announced his policy of “selective protection” in Dáil Éireann we were told that tariffs would solve, or, at any rate, would mitigate, the unemployment problem, that they would check the outward flow of emigration, and that ultimately they would cheapen the cost of living to the consumer.
Has any of these benefits been obtained? Unemployment continues to be widespread. . Emigration has not stopped; it has not even been reduced, for the simple reason that protective tariffs hit the farming classes most severely, and farmers’ sons, instead of finding employment in the new factories, are making haste to leave the country.
The cost of living, in most essentials, has not fallen appreciably If tariffs really helped the people of the Free State, their disastrous effect on the relations between North and South might be excused; but they do nothing of the kind.