Liam's Irish Traditional Music - Irelands culture and tradition

Textile production was organized on an informal, domestic basis in the eighteenth century. A family would be involved in the whole process of producing fabric, from carding and spinning to weaving and dyeing. The money they earned it from this was added to their income from farming. Both England and Ireland produced woollen cloth, but Ireland's industry was prohibited in 1699 because it competed with England's textile production.

Irish weavers developed linen as an alternative to wool. The flax they used for making the linen was either imported or grown on small plots of land, and the process of linen production provided a part-time job for farmers. Irish weavers were not allowed to export coloured linens to Britain, but the industry grew successful because they could export to the British colonies of North America and the West Indies.

The linen industry was most heavily concentrated in Ulster, and Belfast to replace Dublin as the Commercial centre of Ireland. Ulster had had a distinctly separate character, and the people benefited from a greater security of tenure than those living elsewhere during the years of famine the people of Ulster felt the pressures of hardship less than those who were living in the south and west of Ireland.

Dublin was the second largest city in the United Kingdom in the early eighteenth century, but within a hundred years it had been over taken by Belfast. Belfast's prosperity was built on a new system of work, and on cotton and steel production. Over the nineteenth century the population of Dublin increased to 300,000, while in Belfast the population increased from 100, 000 to 400, 000.