772 BEPORT — 1888. 



4. IrishivomerC s Industries. By Miss Helen Blackburn. 



The industries at present existing amongst women in Ireland are eminently 

 cottage industries. Cottage industries, not requiring large capital, are peculiarly 

 fitted to the condition of the country ; moreover, they suit the tastes of the people 

 and the scattered nature of their dwellings. Ireland, therefore, presents a specially 

 favourable field for such industries ; but to preserve those already existing, and to 

 develop them further, much is needed in the way of skilled direction and organi- 

 sation of trade arrangements. 



The years of the famine of 1846-48 first drew public attention in any marked 

 degree to the capacities of Irishwomen's fingers, and the results the needle pro- 

 duced in those calamitous days were truly astonishing. Of the numerous centre* 

 of work then organised, many have long wholly disappeared, while of those that 

 remain the most firmly established are in the North, where the work is in th® 

 bands of large commercial firms, and thus secure of a permanent market. 



It is true that in Belfast, the chief factory town of Ireland, the majority of 

 women workers are employed in the mills, while box-making and tobacco factories, 

 and a few other lesser industries, employ some ; nevertheless, of the 4,000 women 

 estimated to be employed in shirt and collar making, a quarter are estimated to 

 do the work at home, and ia and round Londonderry, which is the centre of the 

 shirt-making trade, a larger proportion. Hemstitching handkerchiefs is stated 

 to employ 20,000 women, and these, together with numbers employed in sewed 

 muslin and embroidery, bring work into every cottage over the greater part of 

 Ulster. 



But in the rest of Ireland the centres now at w^ork are too dependent on private 

 efibrt. They have mostly been started since the years of distress of 1880-81 ; thus, 

 to name a few, the knitting industries of Valencia Island, Atbea, and the Rosses 

 were started in 1880, 1883, and 1884. The revival going forward in the lace- 

 work of Munster dates from the Cork Exhibition of 188;j, when the Convent Lace 

 Schools awoke to the necessity of improvement in design, and the revival mani- 

 fested itself with marked success in the renaissance of Limerick lace. The revival 

 of pillow lace-making in Mayo ; the Clonmel Industrial Association ; the straw 

 bottle-envelope factory in Galway ; and the Association for Promoting Silk Culti- 

 vation in the South of Ireland, — all have arisen within the last four years. 



To tell of what has been done is to remind ourselves of how much more is. 

 needed to be done to make these openings of lasting duration. The efibrts already 

 made by various ladies have overcome some of the initial difficulties, chief of 

 which is the lack of precision and punctuality. These ladies have set the women 

 on the way to habits of industry and cleanliness ; but the numbers employed must 

 remain comparatively few until the industries thus laboriously started are made 

 independent of the precariousness of private endeavour. For this they need per- 

 manent teaching power, organised channels of distribution, means of knowing how 

 to adapt their work to the demands of the market, as well as how to get it there. 

 Nor do these needs apply only to the cottage centres. The jute and brush 

 factories of Galway, which already employ many women — partly in the factory, 

 partly in work done at home — might employ more. Glove-making, once a well- 

 marked skilled trade for women in Ireland, is susceptible of revival ; jam-making, 

 now on the increase, is a trade in which women are chiefly employed, and which 

 brings with it the correlative industry of fruit-growing. The cottagers of the wilds 

 of Galway are beginning to find out that there is an outside demand for the home- 

 spun, home-dyed flannels characteristic of the district. 



The new City of Dublin Technical Schools admit women, so does the Belfast 

 School of Science and Technology. The Munster Dairy School in Cork and the 

 Glasnevin Dairy School, co. Dublin, are doing good work. But these are not enough ; 

 they may teach teachers, but classes are wanted everywhere. Here the movement 

 towards technical teaching in the convent schools is worthy of note ; nothing can 

 better show that there is a healthy movement at work than the way in which the 

 Convents of the Sisters of Mercy are beginning to start cookery and dairy classes. 

 The importance of this may be realised when we reflect that there is not a town 



