A comparatively small silk manufacture, developed by the Huguenots at the end of the seventeenth century, had a moderate success at the beginning of the eighteenth. But it was a value-added industry depending on imported raw materials, producing a product for the luxury market, which was not only inelastic but fickle and attracted to foreign goods imported either legitimately from England or illegitimately from France. Silk manufacture was largely confined to Dublin, except for a small silk-weaving industry in Lisburn that operated throughout the century before it finally closed during the 1798 rebellion.

The industry’s presence in the capital ensured that slumps were well publicised for, while the workers’ distress attracted compassion, the potential for unrest among the unemployed was a matter of urgent administrative concern. In times of hardship attempts were often made to stimulate demand by social events at which garments of Irish material and manufacture were expected to be worn.

For instance, Mrs Delany attended Court at Dublin Castle on the Princess of Wales’s (George III’s mother) birthday in 1745, and wrote that many of those present including the vicereine, Lady Chesterfield, were dressed in Irish materials. It was a period of great distress, as ‘all trade has met with a check this year.’ Those attending the King’s Birthday Ball the following January were similarly attired, ‘except 5 or 6 who wore [imported] silk, and they were not distinguished to their honour. The men were not so public-spirited as the ladies - most of them were in their foreign finery.’ In 1780, another period of hardship, a doggerel verse of many stanzas was circulating to the effect that:

Nor richest squire, nor proudest peer,

Need scorn our humbler homespun gear;

No stuff on earth will wear and tear

Like Irish Manufacture

The fluctuating fortunes of the industry make it difficult to assess its extent accurately over any length of time. In 1730 there were said to be between 300 and 700 silk looms in Dublin, but in 1760, under competition from new fashion materials such as Indian muslins, the number was stated to have fallen to 53.

Among the Catholic merchants known to be in Dublin between 1778 and 1782 there were seven silk manufacturers, two silk mercers and 12 silk weavers, making a total of 21: there were 27 wool weavers and a total of 53 people involved in the woollen industry as a whole, and the same number, mainly drapers, in the linen industry. In 1791–3 more than 20 members of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen were involved in the silk manufacture.

In 1764 the Dublin Society determined to revive the industry. To assist in its marketing the Society opened a warehouse in Parliament Street, which, in 1776, offered a 3 per cent premium on Irish silks. This resulted in a temporary revival, but, as imported silks continued to be in demand, the industry declined again. Then, in 1779, an attempt was made to control the cost of labour by giving the Dublin Society, the de facto patron of the industry, the power to fix fair wages.

But this gave the labour component a rigidity that did not fit with market forces, and when parliament inquired into the industry in 1784 it learnt that about half of the looms were idle and 3,000 people were unemployed. Finally in 1786 the silk warehouse was closed, with the intention of applying the money in other ways. Thereafter the industry, always responsive to the slumps and booms of the market, lingered on.

The Irish silk weavers did have some success in developing poplin - an attractive material with a silk warp and worsted weft. Poplin and glove-making – ‘they make mighty good gloves here; but I shall not be able to send you any; they are prohibited’ – were part of a luxury market to which the mercantilist restrictions imposed by the British government gave an inherent inelasticity.

The spinning of wool or flax, depending on the area, was almost universal throughout the country. However, the development of the two industries was very different and raises questions to which there are no conclusive answers. For instance, both were affected by the British mercantilist system and the industrial revolution. England, following the theories of the mercantilists, attempted to balance her own produce with that of her colonies and, through the Navigation Acts, to make England the entrepôt of imperial trade.

Staples such as Virginian tobacco and West Indian sugar were encouraged and protected within the imperial market. From medieval times the woollen industry had enjoyed a pre-eminent place in the English economy: significantly, the Lord Chancellor sat on the woolsack, and Britain reserved for itself the export of wool and manufactured woollen goods.

In 1698, under pressure from the English government, the Irish parliament placed heavy duties on the export of manufactured wool in 10 Will. III, c. 5. A year later, in response to the continuing clamour of the English woollen merchants, who particularly feared the lower costs of Irish production, the English parliament passed an act (10 & 11 Will. III, c. 10 (Eng.)) specifically prohibiting the export of Irish woollen goods.

The 1698 act had constitutional as well as commercial implications and produced an almost instantaneous reaction in William Molyneux’s famous pamphlet The Case of Ireland being bound by Acts of Parliament in England stated (1699), which marks the first salvo in the eighteenth-century battle for Irish colonial nationalism.

Nevertheless, it was the export market, real or potential, that was in contention. The Irish home market for woollen goods was, and remained, unaffected throughout the century, and from time to time efforts were made to encourage it. Sometimes these bordered on the bizarre: for instance, in 1733 an act, 7 Geo. II, c. 13, was passed making it obligatory for corpses to be buried in a woollen shroud.

However, the question remains that given the rapid development of the English woollen industry and the unforeseen impact of the industrial revolution in the second half of the century, could the Irish woollen industry have offered the English manufacturers effective competition outside the Irish home market anyway? The traditional argument that the woollen industry suffered because the governments in London and Dublin supported the linen industry is difficult to sustain.

Raw Irish wool was useful for mixing with French wool, and early in the century it was reputedly smuggled abroad - in quantities for which there are, of course, no reliable statistics – but, so far as can be deduced from the evidence available, the trade was probably modest in the late 1730s and very small before and after that time.

By 1739 the early inventions of the industrial revolution, such as Kay’s flying shuttle, were gaining recognition and the manufacturers of Yorkshire, Lancashire and East Anglia found that the production of the weavers was potentially in excess of the yarn available to them. Thus from about 1740 there was an elastic market in England for Irish woollen yarn, and in response to pressure from English manufacturers the British government removed the duties on Irish woollen and worsted yarn, leading to the absorption of any left over from home consumption.

Imports of Irish wool and yarn had previously been restricted to Exeter and the south-west ports beyond Land’s End, but further pressure in 1752 and 1753 opened ports that had previously been closed. Thus by the middle of the century Irish woollen exports had become complementary to the English woollen manufacturing industry. It is difficult to believe that this could have been prevented. Ultimately mechanisation was to have severe social effects on the traditional textile industry, but in its early eighteenth-century stages technological improvements actually increased demand for Irish yarn, thereby absorbing any surplus left over from home consumption.

In Ireland, the woollen industry was largely centred in the south, where it was dominated by the Quakers. ‘The poor Catholics in the south of Ireland spin wool very generally,’ wrote Arthur Young in the 1770s, ‘but the purchase of their labour, and the whole worsted trade is in the hands of the Quakers of Clonmel, Carrick, Bandon, &c.’ At this time more than £200,000 worth of wool was purchased every July at the great fair at Ballinasloe, Co. Galway.

Raw wool was sent to Cork not only from Ballinasloe but also from other parts of the country; Young reported that as many as 500 cars (the small two-wheeled Irish carts) had been seen in a line. The manufacturers would collect it from Cork for putting-out to the local peasants, who spun it into yarn for the English market. Describing the organisation of yarn spinning as it had developed in the late 1770s in Co. Cork, Young wrote that:

Spinning is the general business of the women: they spin infinitely more wool than flax … In the little towns of Doneraile, Mitchelstown, Mallow, Kilworth, Kanturk and Newmarket are clothiers who buy up the wool, employ combers in their houses, who make considerable wages and when combed they have a day fixed for the poor to come and take it in order to spin it into worsted and pay them by the ball by which they earn one penny three-farthings to two pence a day.

Subsequently, most of the yarn was exported through Cork or Dublin to Manchester and Norwich. Young valued the export of woollen yarn from Cork at £300,000 p.a. Quantitatively, annual exports of worsted yarn rose from 12,849 stone in 1698 to 150,000 stone in the early 1760s (1 stone = 6.35 kg); although woollen goods had fallen from about 30 per cent to 7 per cent of exports as a whole, these figures give some indication of the expansion of trade during the period. By this time smuggling of raw wool had long been minimal; instead French agents bought up some of this yarn ‘at a vast price … but even this does not amount to £40,000 a year’.294

Wool for the home market was manufactured into friezes or serges. This was a cottage industry, and the weavers lived in cabins throughout the country. In some areas the women supplemented the family income by knitting stockings. From this they could earn from 12–18d a week. Woollen cloth was woven in narrow widths to suit the looms, usually 16–36 inches depending on the type of material.

A more sophisticated manufacture of broadcloths and ratteens for the home market developed at Carrick-on-Suir. In the late 1770s, it was estimated that it employed 300–400 people. The Dublin Society was anxious to encourage the development of the industry, and in 1773 opened a woollen warehouse in Dublin to assist in marketing woollen cloth.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a cotton industry flourished for a short period. Cotton started to be produced in Ireland around 1750. It developed out of a demand for mixed textiles, and initially it drew on the weaving and finishing skills of the silk and wool industries centred in Dublin and Cork. Although cotton ultimately led to the factory-based textile industry, originally it was spun on spinning-wheels designed for wool.

By 1770 it had become the dominant industry among the women of Killarney, Co. Kerry, who spun for the Cork and Dublin manufacturers. From the late 1770s the Irish parliament gave increasing financial support to the development of Irish industry, and, encouraged by the Linen Board, cotton was established in Counties Dublin, Kildare, Meath, Carlow, Waterford and Cork before 1782.

In the early and mid-1780s parliament voted considerable sums for industrial development: these amounted to £96,000 in 1785. Cotton shared in this largesse, and the continuing support of the Linen Board and the Royal Dublin Society produced funds to purchase spinning jennies and copy the use of the water-powered machinery developed in England in the preceding decades.

Water-powered spinning factories began to appear in a number of towns and from 1790 to 1830 the cotton industry flourished, particularly in and around Belfast, where its expansion almost annihilated the linen manufacture – to which the rest of Ulster remained attached. In Belfast cotton spinning on jennies was initially supported by the Belfast Charitable Society, which, in 1777, decided to provide a trade for the children under its care.

Thereafter Belfast made up for its slow start. Between 1760 and 1810 the number of linen looms in the town decreased from 400 to four, while the number of cotton looms rose from zero to 860. In 1800, 27,000 people in Belfast or its vicinity were estimated to be employed in manufacturing cotton. Moreover, it employed the new industrial technology effectively, as in the first decade of the nineteenth century there were 15 steam-engines driving 99,000 spindles, and in 1814 there were eight cotton mills.

The machinery required for a competitive cotton industry encouraged factory-based industrialisation. George Hamilton (0922) of Balbriggan, one of the Barons of the Exchequer, and Col. Talbot of Malahide introduced state-of-the-art machinery and induced migrants trained in the Lancashire mills to settle on their estates. At the same time Talbot encouraged weavers from Dublin to join his colony. The growth of combinations, and the ineffectiveness of the 1780 Anti-Combination Act, 19 & 20 Geo. III, c. 19, were causing concern to the authorities, who were justifiably worried at the potential excesses of the social unrest created by unemployment in the capital.

The most elaborate and capitalised cotton development was Robert Brooke’s mill in Co. Kildare, ill-named Prosperous in expectation of a success that did not materialise. He received a large parliamentary grant which carried the obligation to employ in and transplant to this rural development 2,000 city work­ers over a period of ten years.

Brooke, an officer in the East India Company, stated that in setting up the enterprise he had mortgaged his own and his family’s fortune to the extent of £40,000 and he received parliamentary grants amounting to £4,000, along with other support. He invested in a wide spread of related activities, including a textile machinery plant and housing scheme. These absorbed his capital without creating an adequate cash flow, although between 1781 and 1784 he sold 361 spinning jennies, with 25,750 spindles, that were widely used throughout the country. But, after the death of his brother and partner, he appears to have personally lacked, and been unable to acquire, managerial expertise in a highly competitive industry.

For instance, Prosperous was hardly an ideal choice of site – it lacked a natural fall of water for the water-powered machinery. Finally, in 1786, the enterprise collapsed and Brooke went bankrupt. Early industrial history is full of similar stories, and Brooke’s had a happier end than most, for he was speedily discharged out of bankruptcy, rejoined the East India Company and subsequently became Governor of St Helena.

Flour milling was a major industrial development, and between 1770 and 1814 large mills began to appear throughout the country. The most famous of the early ones was the water-powered flour mill at Slane, built between 1763 and 1770 and at a cost of £20,000 it represented a large capital investment. When Young visited Slane in 1776 it was owned by Col. Burton Conyngham (0303), MP for Ennis, in partnership with a Mr Jebb, who was also the mill manager, and another local landlord, Blayney Townley-Balfour (2094) of Townley Hall, MP for Carlingford.

The land, on the Drogheda side of the bridge at Slane, had been leased from Lord Conyngham. Each partner had subscribed £1,500, and this £4,500 had been supplemented by £3,750 won on a lottery ticket. Further finance was raised locally, probably from landlords. Young also recorded visiting another mill of similar capacity, Captain Mercer’s mill at Leighlin Bridge, Co. Carlow.

Apart from their indication of an important stage in industrial development, mills like this also indicated an important stage in the commercialisation of flour milling and the marketing of both grain and flour. The early, smaller water mills had ground on commission, but the large mills now purchased directly from the farmers and traded to the local bakers, the Dublin market or wherever there was a demand.

Thus corn was no longer ground in the lord’s mill or at the baker’s behest from his meal chest kept at the mill. Although grain and flour were not significant exports until the closing decades of the century, the Dublin market expanded with the city and these mills attracted investment from local merchants and landlords.

Most towns had small-scale industries for local needs, such as breweries and distilleries. Malt was needed for both brewing and distilling. In 1785 there were 2,216 malt houses; by 1835 the number had reduced to 338 but production had doubled – economies of scale had increased productivity. In Dublin and Cork there were major enterprises such as Arthur Guinness’s brewery in Dublin, founded in 1759, and Beamish & Crawford in Cork, and malt duty was an item of revenue (26 Geo. III, c. 3; 28 Geo. III, c. 21; 29 Geo. III, c. 25). The by-products of the brewery made valuable animal feed, particularly as keeping animals in urban conditions was a feature of eighteenth-century towns.

Irish beer was subject to competition from English beer easily accessible by sea, and in the early 1790s the brewers campaigned to have the beer tax repealed for beer brewed in Ireland. The Irish parliament was supportive, and in 1795, 35 Geo. III, c. 19, the beer tax was repealed, although the malt tax remained. There was also a considerable sugar refining industry, particularly in Dublin. Edward Byrne, the richest Catholic merchant in the city, was a sugar refiner.