"The Irish Land Question and Sectarian Violence"
An Excerpt from "The Irish Land Question and Sectarian Violence" by the late Raymond Crotty The Colonial Origins of Sectarian Violence It is impossible to begin to understand the causes of the massive decline in the number of people getting a livelihood in Ireland that has proceeded now for 140 years without understanding aspects of the conquest by Britain of Ireland and the implications of that conquest for the social role of Irish land. Land, according to the indigenous, tribal, gaelic concept was a social asset, available for use by all members of society. It was, in practice, an economically inefficient and unproductive form of land use, but a socially integrative one. The concept of the role of land held by the Tudor, Stuart and Cromwellian capitalist conquerors of Ireland was of land as a source of profit for the individuals who succeeded in appropriating it. That concept has since been implemented in Ireland to a degree without parallel anywhere else in the world. Social interests have been subordinated to private profit from land more thoroughly, more consistently, more disastrously and for a longer time in Ireland than anywhere else. The implications in Ireland of using land for profit were most clearly perceived and expressed by Sir William Petty, the greatest economic philosopher prior to Adam Smith and himself a successful appropriator of extensive tracts of Irish land. Petty proposed that, in order to maximise profit from Irish land, the people should be cleared from it and replaced by cattle, to be reared and duly sold to England.<3> Petty's proposals had in fact been implemented under the early Stuarts, but the resulting flood of cattle into England cut straight across the political and economic interests of England's ascendant landed oligarchy, so that one of the first Acts of the Restoration Parliament was to ban the entry to England of all Irish pastoral products.<4> With direct access to the English market barred, for Irish land to yield a profit its produce, in the form of beef, butter and bacon, had to be diverted via the triangular trade to the West Indies, where it was used to maintain the slaves on the plantations and was exchanged for the, tropical produce of the slaves' labour, which was acceptable in England.<5> The triangular trade required much more labour than raising and shipping cattle to Britain, so it was necessary to suffer the survival of the defeated but rebellious Irish, rather than their extinction as proposed by Petty. If the Irish were to be retained to work land profitably for its English appropriators. it was necessary to disarm them and to garrison the island with .an armed Protestant ascendancy, most of whom were settled in Ulster. The century following the Restoration of Charles II was a period of steady growth in Ireland. It was a period of growth and development such as has occurred also in most other colonies - in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in Asia and in Africa -- following their initial capitalist colonisation and prior to the onset in them of the more recent phenomenon of economic under- development. Matters changed in Ireland with the onset of the industrial revolution, which transformed Britain from a grain exporter to a grain importer and caused it to repeal the Cattle Acts and to welcome the Irish pastoral products that had been excluded by them. The effect was to create in Ireland conditions in which profit from land was maximised by its cultivation by capital-less, coolie, Irish labourers, who subsisted on some of the potatoes they grew on land worked with their spades and fattened pigs for export with the surplus. They grew cereals, also using spades, on the land improved by the potato crop, and sold the grain for export and the straw for the winter keep of cows that produced butter for export.<6> A unique combination of farm production conditions, land tenure conditions, and market conditions in which beef prices were low and grain and butter prices were high, obtained in Ireland through the reign of George III, from 1760 to 1820. That combination brought into existence and expanded into the largest class in the land an agricultural proletariat such as has not existed elsewhere above 30 degrees latitude. The market conditions that made profitable and brought into existence this agricultural proletariat lasted only for the duration of George Ill's reign. Beef prices since then have risen threefold relative to the price of butter and fivefold relative to the price of grain.<7> The price change made it profitable to replace people growing grain and potatoes with cattle and sheep, and cattle exports, which had not changed from 1660 to 1820, increased tenfold within fifty years.<8> The agricultural proletariat, brought into existence during the course of George Ill's reign, was obliterated by starvation, enforced celibacy and emigration during the succeeding reign of Queen Victoria. The Protestants of Ulster were insulated by their "ascendancy" or "garrison" status from the operation of the market forces that created and destroyed a Catholic agricultural proletariat. To hold Ireland for England, it was necessary to arm the Protestant settlers while disarming the hostile, Catholic Irish. Armed Protestants acquired rights to land different from those of the disarmed Catholics. The latter had no rights other than those they could win on a freely working market; the former were accorded prescriptive rights of security of tenure, fair rents, etc. that were enshrined in the "Ulster Custom".<9> The Protestant farmers of Ulster, insulated by the Ulster Custom from the free working of the market, were spared from competition for land by capital-less young people. These young people were instead held, like peers in the rest of Europe, dependent on their capital-owning parents.<10> Ulster farmers, as a result, had both the land and the family labour to respond to the demand for cloth, that was growing in England no less rapidly than the demand for food, by expanding the relatively capital-intensive production of linen. They were helped in expanding the production of linen cloth in no small way by the procurement of yarn from "the linen counties" of the south which, under ±he new dispensation, were no longer able to work up the yarn into cloth.<11> Farmers outside Ulster, during George III's reign, were under the dual pressure of competition for land from capital-less young people (the emerging Irish coolie class) and the inability to compel their own children to operate the family holding when these could achieve a modicum of social independence by acquiring their own potato patch. Farmers outside Ulster were forced by these pressures to abandon linen production, or to carry the enterprise no farther than the production and sale of linen yarn. The coolie labourers on their potato patches were forced by extreme poverty to use their resources to produce pigs, grain and straw products that came to market vital months earlier than linen yarn.<12> The initial divergence between Ulster and the rest of Ireland, based firmly on the different terms of access to land secured by armed and disarmed peasants, widened with time. As the agricultural proletariat of the south was being wiped out by the changed market conditions of Victoria's reign, the cottage linen industry of the north became concentrated into the linen factories of Belfast, which were duly served by Belfast' s new, specialised linen engineering industry. Belfast's newly acquired factory discipline and engineering skills provided the technical base for a shipbuilding industry that was highly innovative at a time of radical change from the craft building of small timber ships to the factory scale building of large iron and steel ships. Three factors in particular contributed to the innovativeness that was the key to the success of the Belfast shipyards: first, there was no traditional, craft shipbuilding industry in the city, which itself came into existence with the late eighteenth century growth of the linen industry; second, the residual Catholic population of Northern Ireland was available as a helot class of unskilled, casual labour to undertake the least pleasant, least secure, worst paid chores and to bear the main brunt of innovative adjustment; and third, Protestant management and Protestant workers in Belfast's shipyards were united, in a way that occurred nowhere else in the British Isles (sic), by the common threat of being overwhelmed by the Catholic Irish masses, whose hostility intensified with their debasement and with their displacement to make way for more profitable cattle and sheep during the nineteenth century From: http://nootherlaw.blogspot.com/