404 THE IRISH MILLING INDUSTRY. 



produce in opening up a foreign trade. With their great advantages in 

 being situated in the heart of one of the greatest wheat-growing districts 

 an the world, having ample supplies of the best qualities of grain at low 

 prices, and with a market at home for the bulk of their produce in which 

 they were getting very remunerative prices, it is little wonder that they 

 ■were able with their surplus produce to cut out from those niarkets in 

 England and Scotland, to which we have already referred, the Irish miller, 

 who had to import practically all the wheat he required. Moreover, these 

 •districts gradually erected mills to supply their own requirements, so that 

 Ireland soon lost all her export trade m flour. The cutting off of this 

 ■outlet left our millers only the home market for their product, and this 

 market was being every day contracted owing to the decline in the popula- 

 tion of the country. The official returns show that in 1871 the total popula- 

 tion of Ireland was 5,412,377; in 1881 it had fallen to 5,174,836; in 1891 

 to 4,704,750, and 1901 to 4,456,546. The dechne in the population, there- 

 fore, since 1871 has been 955,831, which is equivalent to over 17.6 per cent. 

 In addition to the loss of the export trade, and the contraction in the 

 numbers of the consumers at home, the Irish millers had to contend against 

 the competition of imported flour in their own narrow market. The 

 Americans were not content with sending their surplus produce to England, 

 but they sent it to this country also, and this competition has continued 

 down to the present day. The competition referred to has been greatly 

 developed by the extremely low freights at which flour has been brought 

 from America by the Trans-Atlantic passenger steamers within recent years. 

 The flour has often been brought at a merely nominal freight, practically as 

 ballast, and this has, of course, been an enormous advantage to the American 

 miller in enabling him to compete on more advantageous terms with the 

 home manufacturer. He gains another advantage also in the low through 

 freight given by some of the Cross-Channel Steamship and Irish Railway 

 Companies, so that he is often able to send his flour from the docks at some 

 English port into a country town in Ireland at a lower freight than the 

 miller in that town has to pay on his foreign wheat from the Irish port of 

 discharge. 



The decline in wheat growing in Ireland has been an undoubted injury 

 to the smaller of our millers in country districts. The opening up of foreign 

 •wheat markets in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Argentine 

 Republic, and in other parts of the world, has caused a considerable fall in 

 the price of that article within the past twenty or thirty years, and this fall 

 Tendered the extensive growing of wheat at home unprofitable. Irish wheat 

 is of a soft nature, and before it could be used for milling it had to be dried, 

 and the cost of this drying and the loss of weight in the process handi- 

 capped it considerably in competition with foreign wheat, which is for the 

 most part put on the market fit for milling without having to go through 

 any process of kiln-drying. The farmers practically gave up the growing 

 ■of wheat, and the country miller lost a source of supply in his own district 

 where he was saved the heavy cost of carriage, which he had to pay on 

 imported wheat. It is difficult to get the complete figures showing the 

 number of mills at work thirty years ago, and those working at the present 

 time, but there is no doubt that the number shut down during that period 

 was very considerable. Taking one particular district in the south, there 

 were twenty-seven flour mills in that district in the year 1874, while to-day 

 'there are only three. Probably the output of the three mills at work to-day 



