THE HUMBLE loaf of bread was a central aspect of Irish life in the 1950s and the previous decades. It was such a stable of the diet that its price was a political touchstone and the imports of wheat required to make it were an important fact in the State's finances. Thus, the fact that the Institute for Industrial Research and Standards hoped to make a 100 per cent Irish loaf merited a front page report and this editorial under the headline "The All-Irish Loaf". – JOE JOYCE
THE INSTITUTE for Industrial Research and Standards, as its report indicates this morning, is making progress towards the discovery of a wheat which will permit making an all-Irish loaf. This is a truly worthy subject of study.
Wheat is one of our most expensive imports – only fuel oil, wool and tea exceed it in value – and it is the most costly of all in the sense that the great bulk of it must be paid for either in United States or in Canadian dollars. If we could render ourselves independent of wheat imports, our balance of trade would be the better by the dollar equivalent of several million pounds a year.
As matters stand, we have gone a very fair distance towards the goal of self-sufficiency – our importation of wheat was much greater before the war – but not far enough. The alleged reason is that Irish grown wheat is too “soft” – too deficient in its glutinous quality – to make the kind of bread that the Irish people prefer, and that a proportion of the loaf must be made from imported “hard” wheat.
Under a dictatorship, or even under some democracies, that excuse would not carry weight, but in Ireland the will of the people matters. Whether it is really a case of the will of the people, or of the preference of the millers, is a question that never has been properly decided.
If, and when, the Institute achieves the object of its quest, the battle will be only beginning. Many farmers, including those who now make a good thing out of wheat-growing at its subsidised prices, will resent the inevitable restriction to a certain type of wheat.
The millers indubitably will kick, because they do not like any innovation that involves a change in their mechanical processes: and they will do their best to ensure that any resultant increase of cost will be passed on to the public in the form of a dearer loaf. Both pressures must be resisted.
There is no reason why the farmers, given the assurance of a guaranteed price, should not produce, to the best of their ability, the exact type of wheat that is required of them; and it is wholly impossible to believe that the millers, successful as they have been hitherto in concealing the details of their businesses, are headed for bankruptcy.
If we can produce wheat as satisfactory and, within reasonable limits as cheap as the product of Canada and the United States, it is our bounden duty to put an end to this substantial drain upon our allocation of dollars.
http://url.ie/89fn