But what was a
more serious and permanent factor was the circumstance that Ireland's
economic development could only be on lines which competed with England,
and not like Colonial development on lines complementary to English
trade. One after another Irish industries were penalised and crippled by
being forbidden all part in the export trade. A flourishing woollen
industry, a prosperous shipping, promising cotton, silk, glass, glove
making and sugar refining industries were all ruthlessly repressed,[87]
not from any innate perversity on the part of English statesmen, or from
any deliberate desire to ruin Ireland, but as a natural and inevitable
consequence of exclusion from the Union under the economic policy of the
age. Whatever outlet Irish economic activity took there was always some
English trade whose interests were prejudicially affected, and which
promptly exercised a perfectly legitimate pressure upon the Government
to put a stop to the competition. The very poverty of Ireland, as
expressed in the lowness of Irish wages, was an ever convenient and
perfectly justifiable argument for exclusion.
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