DAVE MANS8LL economy was that agricultura! prosperity for the strong ranching farmers, unimpeded by tariffs would somehow stimulate wider economic development, so that, in the event, Griffith's party, after his death intervened only minimally in the economv, except for the setting up of a semi-autonomous state body, the Electricity Supply Board to develop hydro-electric power on the river Shannon, and the passing of a Currency Act in 1927 which retained parity of the Irish pound with sterling and thus keot the Free State within the financia! ambit of Britain. The hydro-electrical scheme was bitterly ooposed by the rural bourgeoisie who were dedicated to minimal taxation on themselves and had no interest in investing their capital in Ireland. The main effect of this policy of keeping budgetary costs to the absolute mínimum was an almos total neglect of welfare expenditure. The bad economic conditions of 1925-6 forced the usual Irish solution of the unemployment problem: massive emigration, with a huge flow to the United States which was still enioying a post-war boom. Economic development in the North under a now indigenous one-party system of vernment, which had showed itself to be strong enough to repel attacks from beyond the border, and which had inherited a comoetent civil service from the British administration, did not live up to the expectations of the "ultra-loyalist" capitalists and workers. Ulster had chosen "loyalty" to Britain because it was effectively a part of the British economic system. It was in the interests of all the social classes, including the industrial workers, to remain British. Cutting themselves off from the British market would have meant suicide for all classes. But the economy had taken a sharp downward turn after the war due to a continua! decline in the Belfast shipbuilding industry consequent on the fall in world trade. Linen enjoyed a temporary boom because of an upsurge in the American market for it, but this demand gradually dried up so that by 1930 there were 20,000 unemployed linen workers in Belfast, and the number of employees in the shipyards reduced from 20,000 in 1924 to 2,000 in 1933. According to any theory of progressive immiseration of the workforce these experiences of workers in Dublin and Belfast should have resulted in a united all-Ireland revolutionary working class. That his class did not emerge is due to the welfare policies of the Ulster Unionist government and the conservative stranglehold that the Roman Catholic church had over the working-classe in the South by its operation of public charity. 58
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