Episode 22 - Panel 6a - Southern Protestant Manufacturing Interests: the Union, Partition and Protection - Prof. Frank Barry

Most of the large manufacturing firms in the Irish Free State in 1922 had been established by Protestant unionist families and remained under Protestant ownership and management. These included Guinness, Jacobs, Goodbody’s (jute), the Cleeve Brothers’ Condensed Milk Company of Ireland, Goulding’s (fertiliser), Smyth & Co. (hosiery), Denny’s (bacon), the Limerick Clothing Co., and a number of linen manufacturers. These firms were export-oriented and fully integrated into the British and colonial markets. The large Catholic/nationalist-owned firms of the time, by contrast – in sectors such as clothing, bread, printing and agricultural implements – were largely oriented towards the domestic market. The political orientation and economic interests of Protestant manufacturers (quite apart from loss of privilege and fear of potential religious discrimination under the new dispensation) were thus aligned, since independence and partition would be particularly detrimental to export-oriented firms. The moderate protectionism of the 1920s and the much more extensive protectionism of the 1930s would also have been damaging to export-oriented firms. The paper documents the sale of a number of Protestant-owned businesses to British “tariff-jumping” firms that established in the Free State to avoid the newly erected protectionist barriers. It has been suggested that protectionism also resulted in "positive discrimination in favour of Catholic firms", as import substitution favoured newly established Catholic manufacturing businesses. The paper analyses the differential experiences of the large Protestant and Catholic-owned firms over the first two decades of independence. The paper therefore aims: to identify the different degrees of internationalisation of the leading Protestant/unionist and Catholic/nationalist manufacturers of the immediate pre-independence era, to assess the extent to which these divergent economic interests were explicitly recognised in political discourse, to chart the exit of Protestant-owned manufacturing businesses over the 1920s and 1930s, and to chart the relative growth of the leading Protestant and Catholic-owned manufacturing businesses over these decades. Frank Barry is Professor of International Business and Economic Development at Trinity College Dublin. His main work in recent years has been on the transition from protectionism to outward orientation in the 1950s and beyond. He is currently working on a book on Manufacturing Firms and Manufacturing Interests in the Irish Free State Area, 1922-1948.