BitShit

Did you know that Tobacco has been grown in Ireland on and off for centuries! In 1660 an Act of Parliament banned planting tobacco in Ireland alike to protect the American colonies monopoly and the shipping that served them, so a farmer in Meath or Wexford was a rival the Crown didn't need. The penalty was forty shillings for every rod of ground planted, which works out at £320 an acre. Some writers quote £1,600, but the statute says otherwise. Either way, it was ruinous to be caught. The ban lasted until 1779, by which point those naughty treasonous colonies had revolted. Irish growers took to the baccky at once, and the strain Nicotiana tabacum thrived. Meath had large tracts by the early 1800s, and Wexford became the heartland, with over a thousand acres planted and hundreds of people working the fields around Enniscorthy. That success was the problem. Tobacco duty fed the Treasury, and Irish leaf threatened it. A House of Commons committee under Sir John Parnell recommended suppression in 1830, and Westminster outlawed the Irish crop in 1832. Daniel O'Connell and Thomas Spring Rice spoke against it and lost. A thriving industry was stamped out by a parliament where Irish voices were a minority. Then in 1898 Sir Nugent Everard won a special licence and began growing tobacco at Randlestown, near Navan. For decades he argued that the obstacle was never the climate, only politics. He died in 1929, but local growers formed a co-operative that carried on until 1939, the last year tobacco was grown in Meath. Randlestown House now lies beneath the Tara Mines tailings dam. De Valera's drive for self-sufficiency gave tobacco one last flowering. Cigarettes were to contain native leaf, and by 1934 about 750 acres were planted across Wexford, Carlow, Laois, Kildare, Kilkenny, Meath, Wicklow and Offaly. The Tobacco Act 1934 put every grower under licence. Today growing the plant for ornamental reasons isn't banned, but you still need a licence from Revenue. Oh and remember kids smoking causes cancer and get that vape and nicotine shite out of your mouths too, you're paying to poison yourselves ye zdopes!