A word should perhaps be given to the position of the industrial portion
of Ulster, which has flourished so remarkably since the Union. This of
itself affords sufficient proof that that Act, whatever its defects,
cannot be held accountable for any lack of prosperity that may still
exist in other parts of Ireland. It is sometimes stated that Ulster was
favoured at the time when the commercial jealousy of certain English
cities succeeded in securing a prohibition of the Irish woollen
industry. The southern wool, it is alleged, was checked, and the Belfast
linen was favoured--hence the prosperity of the northern capital. This
is a really curious perversion of quite modern history. The linen
industry was at the time in question in no sense confined to the North
and was by no means prominent in Belfast. It was distributed over many
districts of Ireland, for whilst Louis Crommelin was sent to Lisburn to
look after the French colony settled there, and to improve and promote
the industry, his brother William was sent on a similar errand to
Kilkenny, and stations were also started at Rathkeale, Cork and
Waterford. When, later on, the Irish Parliament distributed bounties
through the Linen Board, the seat of that Board was in Dublin, and its
operations included every county in Ireland.
At the time of the Union, indeed, the linen manufacture was almost
unknown in Belfast, the "manufacturers" or handloom weavers in the
North, as elsewhere, living mostly in the smaller country towns and
bringing their webs in for sale on certain market days. From Benn's
"History of the Town of Belfast," published early in the century, we
learn that at that time the principal manufacture of the town was
"cotton in its various branches." This industry had been introduced in
1777, we are told, to give employment in the poorhouse, but it caught on
and spread amazingly. "In many of the streets and populous roads in the
suburbs of the town, particularly at Ballymacarrett, the sound of the
loom issues almost from every house, and all, with very few exceptions,
are employed in the different branches of the cotton trade. In the year
1800 this business engaged in Belfast and its neighbourhood 27,000
persons." In 1814 there were eight cotton mills at work with steam power
driving 99,000 spindles. On the other hand, "there is very little linen
cloth woven in this town or parish. In 1807 Belfast contained 723 looms,
only four of which were for weaving linen."
The story of the sudden change from cotton to linen is an instructive
one. Cotton appears to have forced itself to the front because cotton
spinning could be carried on by machinery whilst the linen weavers were
still dependent on the spinning wheel for their yarn. It was Andrew
Mulholland, the owner of the York Street cotton mill, who first took
note of the fact that while the supply of hand-made linen yarn was quite
insufficient to justify the manufacture of linen on a large scale in
Belfast, quantities of flax were shipped from Belfast to Manchester to
be spun there and reimported as yarn. Mulholland determined to try if he
could not spin yarn as well as the Manchester people, and accordingly in
1830, "the first bundle of linen yarn produced by machinery in Belfast
was thrown off from the York Street mill." That, and not legislation nor
any system of State bounties or State favour, was the beginning of the
Belfast linen industry in which the York Street mill still maintains its
deserved pre-eminence. When the critical moment arrived, as it does in
the case of all industries, when manufacturers must adapt themselves to
new methods or succumb, the Belfast leaders of industry rose to the
occasion and secured for themselves the chief share in the linen trade.
In the rest of Ireland, it is true, the manufacture dwindled and
disappeared, but whatever may have been the cause of that disappearance,
it was certainly not the Act of Union.