Economic history of Ireland
Swords, axes, daggers, hatchets, halberds, awls, drinking utensils and horn-shaped trumpets were produced in the period 2500BC – 700BC (the Bronze Age).
During these times, the economy was predominantly one based on subsistence farming, mainly oats and potatoes (after the 16th century) and other forms of tillage.
Completely deforested for timber exports and a temporary iron industry in the course of the 17th century, Irish estates turned to the export of salt beef and pork and butter and hard cheese through the slaughterhouse and port city of Cork, which supplied England, the Royal Navy and the sugar colonies of the West Indies.
The bishop of Cloyne wondered "how a foreigner could possibly conceive that half the inhabitants are dying of hunger in a country so abundant in foodstuffs?"2.
This had wide-reaching consequences, especially when the expectation of Roman Catholic Emancipation took longer to emerge than had been foreseen, leaving Ireland chiefly represented by the Anglo-Irish and the Ulster Scots in the combined parliament sitting at Westminster.
During the international Post-Napoleonic depression (1815–1821) following the conclusion of the Coalition Wars (1792–1815), wheat and other grain prices fell by half in Ireland, and alongside continued population growth, landlords converted cropland into rangeland by securing the passage of tenant farmer eviction legislation in 1816, which led, because of the Irish workforce's historic concentration in agriculture, to a greater subdivision of remaining land plots and increasingly less efficient and less profitable subsistence farms.
Furthermore, many estates, from whom the small farmers rented, were poorly run by absentee landlords and in many cases heavily mortgaged.
When potato blight hit the island in 1845, much of the rural population was unable to access the remaining food – wheat, livestock etc.
At this time British politicians such as the Prime Minister Robert Peel were wedded to a strict laissez-faire economic policy, which argued against state intervention of any sort.
While some money was raised by private individuals and charities (Native Americans sent supplies, while Queen Victoria personally donated £1,000) British government inaction (or at least inadequate action) led to a problem becoming a catastrophe; the class of cottiers or farm labourers was virtually wiped out.
While Ireland did not experience absolute deindustrialisation either before the Famine or afterwards, its industrial growth was disappointing when considered in a comparative perspective.
As a result, both parts also shared in any inflation or deflation in the value of sterling, with interests rates being determined in London.
The continuing link to sterling from 1922 to 1979 underlines how much the economy of the south depended upon exports to (and remittances from) Britain, even though it was politically independent.
A major policy change followed the issue of TK Whitaker's economic model in 1958, and the Republic slowly embraced the industrial world.
In 2005 the northern economy was supported by a net annual "subvention" from London of £5 billion, an amount that has risen over time.
[9] Conversely, after a bleak period in the 1970s and 1980s, the Celtic Tiger era in the Republic was spurred on by the high technology industries that took root in the country in the mid-1990s.
