NOT A MERE FARM

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 9, 21 December 1933, Page 14

NOT A MERE FARM

THE REAL IRELAND t I TURNING TO INDUSTRY. . u I MINING AND POWER. Ireland, once a land of woe and fam ; he, to-day »cems Well on the road to perpetual prosperity. Though tempor- i araly set back by the world wide de pression, like every other land, it non I in waking in the greying dawn of a i ■ew day, writes Whitley Noble in a I New York paper. Thinking men of bp th the Irish Free State and of North «rn Ireland^have come to the realisa tion at last that Ireland must no longer depend almost entirely on agriculture. 1 know'now that their snug island mnsCproduce semething more than just farm 4 crops, if their people are to be •elfjaastainfing to any appreciable degreat So Ireland has followed the ex 1 amjje set by England and Continental countries. It has turned to industry and to tlejimaciine age to fill the gaps by agriculture. ture that Ireland probably al- 1 ways remain principally an agri , cultural country , but it is also true that ■ tplday? throughout the Width and ■ breadth ; of^ the .island industry is tak I ing firm root.;,The average reader may get' the impression -from travel books j and articles that Ireland is wholly a i land of pastures and bogs; that all of | the homee of- the people are squat ; hovels roofed with thatch; that the only sounds be beard there are the | lowing of herds and the bleat of stray ■ ing|floeks. I But a misconcpeion of true eewiitions, forin Ireland there are i rahny busy Cities. There are innumersfole factories with smoking chimneys. I There are huge shipyards, vast textile 1 plants, many,miles of railways and shipping canals,,and.imammoth electric i power plants. The clatter of the auto- . matie riveter, th? factory whistled j and the . of the steam shovel to day are heara nearly as often а. the moo of the barnyard cow. | FALL IN POPULATION. In 1845 there were 8,300,000 people ' in Ireland, and mote, than tbree.-fourths. i •f them deupnded. <?u . the potato prop tfor their existence. The potato crop ; failed this year, and Ireland expen | •need its worst famine in history. By I 1851 the population had been reduced , by a high death rate and emigration to | б, From then on until recent times the population steadily declined, until it reached a low mark of 4,227,060, the figure set by the last Census i taken on the island. Nearly 3,000,000 i of these inhabitants dwell in the Irish i Free State. Ireland's chief industrial problem up I until a decade ago was the lack of fuel ! for the production of power. Though : fully one-seventh of the Irish Free State is covered with peat bogs, reach- , ing to a depth of 45 feet in places, and i guaranteeing a supply of peat for the future of more than four million tons, | thisltype of fuel is used only for do I snestie'purposes, and no methods have , *been found to convert it into efficient •team coaL Coal resources in Ireland are extremely scanty, and it has been necessary to import the greater part it the coal used in Ireland’s factories. THS SHANNON scheme. ' But clever Irishmen have got round this problem of a lack of industrial fuel by harnessing their historical old river the Shannon. From time to time >n.al| hydro electric projects have | been developed at various points on i the island, but it was not until 1021 that the great Shannon project was | launched. The Irish Free State turn > ed the Shannon project into a State I enterprise in 1925. The 100 feet fall I of the Shannon from Lough Derg to ; the sea has been used for the creation •f electric power by diverting the . water of the river and conducting it I through a headrace canal 7i miles long to Ardnacrusha, the site of the principal power plant. Eventually the Ardnacrusha power plant will produce 180,000 horse power of electrical energy. A super-power network is planned to cover the whole of the Free State. Four big transformer stations have been contracted or projected. The sites for these are Dublin, Maryborough, Cork, and Waterford. The Free State to-day demands 52,000,000 kilowatt hours of electrical power annually, and this demand is expected to increase considerably each year. Dublin alone takes 20,000,000 kilowatt-hours annually, and the Dublin tramways require 15,000,000 kilo-watt-hours, so it can be seen that much of the manufacturing of the free Slate i. centred in the capital. Most of the factories of Dublin are rather small as compared wit- t e great industrial establishments in Eng land or America, but the products of the Dublin plants are widely diversi fied in character. THE INDUSTRIAL NORTH. . More than £23,000,000 is invested in the manufacturing plants of the free State, and in normal times approximately 250,000 people are employed in its industries. The Free S. -» biggest single industry is brewing and malting. Shoes and boots, electrical appliances, hardware, bats, farm tools, and house-

hold accessories are among the other I products of that division of Ireland. 1 Northern Ireland is even more important to-day as a manufacturing centre than is the Free State. At Belfast are some of the greatest shipyards in the world. In those shipyards some of the most magnificent trans-Atlantic liners have been built. Northern Ireland also is famous for its textile plants, more than one third of the world’s flax spinning capacity being located in that region. In norand other cities of Northern Ireland, posits of (opper, zinc, lead, and gypactivity is likely to necessitate more miles of trac'-.> and about C5O miles or