Latouche, Sinclair, Houghton, Leader, Grattan, Smith O'Brien, George
Moore, and Daniel O'Connell. In the year mentioned the Society appointed
a number of committees to report on the state of Irish agriculture,
commerce, and industry. One of these reports is full of information
touching the drain of capital from the country, and its consequent
decay, as registered by contemporaries; we shall learn from another how
things stood with regard to coal. At the time of the Union the Irish
Parliament granted a bounty of 2s. per ton on Irish coal carried
coastwise to Dublin, and levied a duty of 10-1/2d. per ton on coal
imported from Great Britain. The effect of the Union was to abolish the
bounty and double the levy on imports. Writing twenty-eight years later
the Committee summarise in a brief passage the disastrous effects of a
policy, so foolish and so unjust. The last sentence opens up sombre
vistas to any student of economic history:

"Severe, however, as the operation of the coal duty in arresting
the progress of manufacture may have been in other parts of
Ireland, in Dublin, under the circumstances to which your Committee
are about to call the attention of the Society, it has produced all
the effects of actual prohibition, all the mischiefs of the most
rigorous exclusion. It is a singular circumstance that, in the
metropolis of the country, possessing local advantages in respect
to manufactures and facilities for trade with the interior,
superior, probably, to any other city or town in this portion of
the empire, with a population excessive as to the means of
employment, in a degree which probably has not a parallel in
Europe, _there is not a factory for the production of either silk,
linen, cotton, or woollen manufactures which is worked or propelled
by a steam engine_."