Galway In Days Gone By

1920

Lighten the burden

We have frequently stated that if Labour seriously tackled the question of reducing the cost of living, it could lighten the burden of the poor and the middle class considerably within a very few months.

Moreover, it would have entered upon a thoroughly sane and intelligible policy, by which it would earn the gratitude and support of every class in the community with the sole exception of the profiteers.

Recently an enormous accession of women voters have been added to the register. When this class proceeds to “pull its weight,” it will be seen that it will be all in favour of those who can reduce the costs and anxieties of running the home, and leave a reasonable margin out of the wage or salary earner’s purse to provide the ordinary amenities of life.

At present, the costs of living do not merely keep pace with ever-increasing wages: they constantly outpace wages. In the result thousands of housewives have gone through a period of anxiety which, to those who know little of home worries and a slender purse, are scarcely credible.

Labour has recently shown what it can do in this matter; and however we may criticise the somewhat crude methods employed in certain instances, we cannot fail to appreciate the potentialities of the movement to reduce the cost of living to a reasonable level in Ireland.

It is true that the National Executive of the Irish Farmers’ Union has denied “the right of any section of the community to assume the function of government,” but it is equally true that whilst bacon and butter were being shipped to England, they could not be purchased in the country where they are produced, except at famine prices that placed them out of the reach of any but the most wealthy.

As a result of the conferences forced by the attitude of Labour in placing an embargo on imports, thirty per cent of the bacon already on hands is to be ear-marked for Irish consumption, and for the future the shippers of live pigs are warned that if the proportion of the 17 ½  per cent. permitted to be exported is exceeded, they run the risk that the embargo on live pigs will be re-imposed.                                                                             

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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