There can't be so many people around who have smoked cigarettes made from tobacco grown in Ireland. A long-time colleague remembers going to interview a former tobacco dealer in Rathmines, Dublin, and being shown tobacco leaves grown in the man's garden - and smoking a couple of cigarettes rolled by his host. But that was after the industry had been abandoned - long after - and the host was possibly breaking the law, for at all times tobacco could only be grown under licence. There was a distinctive Irish cigarette brand. Our friend can't remember - was it Ballydown? Ballysomething, he thinks. And probably pipe tobacco, also home-grown. Anyway, a volume mentioned here some time ago, Studies in Local History, Meath, tells us a lot about the industry, with emphasis on a considerable enterprise based on Randalstown, Navan, from 1898 to 1938, on the estate of Sir Nugent Everard, where not only was there a tobacco plantation but also a plant for handling the produce of other growers and processing it for sale to factories. At one time, the industry there provided almost 100 jobs and was a vital part of the local economy, according to Ciaran Mangan, the author of this study. Everard was a Senator in the early days of the Irish Free State and died in 1929. Then a co-operative tobacco growers' society was formed, but closed in 1939.
More prominent in tobacco growing was Wexford, which at one time had 1,000 acres under tobacco, 10 tobacco factories and 1,500 employed. But that was far back - in 1830. And, of course, the whole thing started when Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the plant to Europe in 1584, planting the first seeds on his estate in Youghal, Co Cork. The weed flourished under Queen Elizabeth, we are told, "with the practice of smoking becoming of such vogue that some of the great ladies would not scruple to blow a pipe socially". King James 1, of course, denounced and suppressed the weed and its "pernicious stink", but it survived and is still going. It is not grown any more in Ireland.
How and why the industry, after flourishing, died, is told well in this volume. It came about through "the failure of the native leaf to win over smokers who preferred the Virginian brands rather than the heavy Irish leaf, and manufacturers curbed the native industry by buying its crops but not using them." There is much more in this book, edited by Liam McNiffe. An offshoot of a Maynooth NUI Diploma Course in Local Histor. Paperback: £8.99, Bought in Tighe's of Kells.