Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

THE GREAT WAR AND NATIONAL IDENTITY 101
another direction, with some other industry being made to supply
the deficiency It took no extensive process of elimination to
conclude that Irish agriculture would have to bear the increased
burdens. 84
The Independent argued that, war or no war, the financial
provisions of the Act were disappointing; it pointed out that Lloyd
George’s proposals could have been introduced by another British
Chancellor of the Exchequer and passed by the British House of
Commons even with home rule in operation. The only power of an
Irish parliament would be to vary taxes by the addition of more
taxes; in other words ‘if the British Parliament does not go far
enough in the direction of destroying…Irish industries by…
taxation the Irish Parliament may complete the operation; but it
can do nothing whatever to mitigate the evil’. 85 Without fiscal
autonomy for the Irish Parliament, the Home Rule Act ‘was not a
“charter of liberty”’ as Redmond claimed it was. 86
These reservations were again raised by the war budget of
September 1915 which envisaged the ‘dead weight’ of British
national debt at £2,200,000,000 by the close of the financial year,
the existing revenue being £272,000,000. With increased taxation
bringing an extra £115,000,000, the anticipated revenue was
£387,000,000 for the full year, with increased taxes and duties on
incomes and items such as tea and spirits once again. This budget
meant, said the Irish Independent, that war taxes would add enor
mously to Ireland’s financial burden and relatively affect her more
severely than Britain. It was known that Ireland had contributed 5.
61 per cent of the total UK revenue in the last peace year, and that
by the next year there would be a revenue increase of £189,000,
000. Five per cent of that would amount to £9,450,000 which
meant that the total revenue raised had been only £156,537,689;
it was therefore calculated that Ireland had contributed £9,621,
000. The UK’s income tax had been roughly trebled. In the case of
Ireland, the Independent found that the extra yield on the basis of
the proportion of 1913–14, namely 3.13 per cent of the total,
meant it obtained practically the same figure. Assuming there was
no reduction in consumption, the two war imposts on tea would
come to £840,000; similarly in the case of sugar, the increase
would be £1,000,000, these three items accounting for nearly £5,
000,000. Beer, tobacco and other taxes would add substantially to
that figure, all of which went to the British Treasury, and was not
to be laid aside for the Irish Parliament. 87 The financial cost of the
war was increasingly bringing the question of the financial
provisions of the 1914 Home Rule Act under intense Nationalist
scrutiny, and a campaign aimed at devolving greater financial