Bittersweet Beet: A History of Irish Sugar

The above advert for Irish sugar made in the 1970s with its tagline ‘a taste of the goodness we’re rich in’ reveals much about the historic place of Irish sugar in relation to the Irish culinary landscape.  With the demise of Irish sugar in 2006, we are no longer rich in the product or the profits of the sugar industry, and most people would now question the wisdom of calling sugar ‘good’ in any nutritional or dietary context. Yet sugar is a foodstuff that still provokes a strong reaction. Food writer Aoife McElwain recently wrote a short piece about sugar for the Irish Times. In it she mentioned the sugar issue of Feast and my research for this article. Following its publication, I received emails from people who wanted to talk to me about sugar beet. The interest in sugar and the resonance it seems to have is a sign of how deeply embedded Siúcra (pronounced shook-rah, the Irish for sugar) was as a food product in the Irish culinary psyche, and how much sugar beet was part of rural life around the country.  For much of the twentieth century sugar was a taken for granted Irish product that people trusted as benevolently familiar. The emotive signification in the advert’s tag line is a sign of those times, showing how foodstuffs can be charged with moral qualities: sugar is good, it is ours, and it is abundant. From the late 1920s until 1991, sugar beet growing and processing into refined sugar was a nationalised industry headed by the Irish Sugar Company. The social and economic impact of the industry on the new Irish state, struggling to find its feet, was immense, helping to forge self-confidence in the ability of Ireland to meet its own needs. 

Yet, the taste for refined sugar is an imported one, brought to Ireland via the colonial sugar trade in which Ireland played a role with its ports, its produce, and of course its emerging middle class and elites who were becoming consumers of sugar. By the beginning of the twentieth century, refined sugar had been so common as a staple and necessary food product that it warranted the state management of Irelands’ own sugar production. The centralised approach to the development of the sugar industry has an interventionist, faintly socialist flavour. It was zealously pursued and rolled out across four areas in the country providing jobs, training and knock-on economic benefits to the towns and farming hinterlands where it was established. A  radio documentary made for the State broadcaster by Dick Warner in 1984 on the 50th anniversary of the Irish Sugar Company  introduces the organisation as “one of the great modern institutions built by the Irish people and one of the most significant instruments for social change in modern Ireland” and that sense of pride remains. When Ireland joined the European Economic Commission the industry was transformed, and later reforms eventually brought it to a close. Looking towards the future, questions can be asked about the feasibility of reinstating an Irish sugar beet industry in the context of food sovereignty, sustainability and public health.

During the peak of the sugar and slave trade, Ireland was under British rule. Irish ports were used as bases for trade routes; Cork was the last stop before crossing the Atlantic. The British treated Ireland in many ways like a larder, exporting the rich dairy, pork and beef produced by Irish tenant farmers to the colonies. Preservation methods were perfected in Ireland to ensure that foods could traverse the Atlantic to the Americas; commonly sent was a salted beef called ‘Irish horse’ or ‘cow beef’, as well as salted Irish butter.5 Confectionary, Cashman argues, was one way for the Irish upper classes to use taste and conspicuous consumption to become of trans-European aristocracy, “Confectioners in Georgian Ireland plied their trade within the boundaries of elite society and those who sought to emulate it.” In feeding merchant sailors and the colonies, Irish ports further facilitated the importation of sugar, tobacco and rum to Britain, becoming directly implicated in the plantation sugar economy and its slave labour system. As farmers and labourers around the country produced food for export, they were expected to exist largely on a diet of potatoes, the cheap and efficient monocrop installed by British rule. The consequences of this dependent relationship were devastating. As Kevin Whelan notes, “Economic development and the evolution of Ireland as the larder of the Industrial Revolution brought with it a permanent, proliferating and potato-dependent underclass.”4 Failure of the crop in 1845 and the following seven or so years led to starvation and emigration on a mass scale.

At the same time as this developing underclass, the importation of sugar in Georgian Ireland brought wealth to Ireland and with it the trades of sugar baker and confectioner. Dorothy Cashman has written on the emergence of these culinary skills and their demand. She uncovers hidden histories that reveal a more agentive class of Irish protagonists within the sugar trade. Sugar refining had been practised in Dublin and Ireland since the eighteenth century. By 1766 there were at least 59 refineries in Dublin alone.5 Confectionary, Cashman argues, was one way for the Irish upper classes to use taste and conspicuous consumption to become of trans-European aristocracy, “Confectioners in Georgian Ireland plied their trade within the boundaries of elite society and those who sought to emulate it.”6 Cashman references Nini Rodgers’ assertion that the sugar trade and industry was key to the economic development of Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and fuelled the rise of the middle class.7 Rodgers maintains that this economic activity also fuelled urban growth, particularly the cities of Cork and Dublin. The Irish appetite for sugar increased at a rapid rate;8 from 1733 until the outbreak of the American war in 1775 the amount of sugar imported into Ireland increased fivefold.9

As the trade grew, the stakes increased. Ireland was subject to the tariffs and taxes of Britain, who often protected its own interests and was at the mercy of the global sugar trade. By the nineteenth century, the European demand for sugar was so high that it became imperative to find sources for sweetness that did not depend on the Atlantic trade. Together with questions of the morality of the slave trade an unwelcome volatility arrived in the provision of sugar to Europe.10

These four names are known to multiple generations of Irish schoolchildren, learned by rote to recall the towns where sugar was produced. The rhythmic chant is an invocation of place and industry, ingrained in many experiences of early education. Cumann na nGaedhal were still in power when the first sugar factory was opened in 1926. At first the government were in a support role, offering subsidies to its private Belgian backers. Competition between towns to attract this new industry was fraught but Carlow was chosen. In Dick Warner’s radio documentary, a local man Paddy Bergin describes the town’s reaction to finding out that the factory would locate there. 13]

The completion of the first factory was achieved very quickly. Former Director of Irish agriculture and food state agency Teagasc Liam Downey notes that, “sugar was produced by the company in just over ten months from the turning of the sod, an achievement facilitated by the involvement of skilled European chemists, engineers, and technologists.” 14 When Fianna Fáil took power in 1932, they brought an ideological commitment to economic and cultural protectionism and began a bitter trade war with Britain. 15 Sugar was seized on by the nascent state as a staple product of primary significance that it could now produce itself as a cornerstone of its industrial strategy. In an era of mass unemployment and subsistence farming, they hoped that an indigenous Irish industry would blossom under conditions of import substitution. 16 The state bought out the private owners of the Carlow factory and in 1933, the first state owned company Cómlucht Siúicre Eireann or the Irish Sugar Company was formed. By this time the Carlow factory was not producing enough sugar to meet the country’s needs. Séan Lemass, then Minister for Industry and Commerce, convinced the government to build three more sugar factories: at Mallow, Thurles and Tuam. Lemass was an iconoclastic character with a visionary yet pragmatic approach to industrial policy, and he is crucial to the story of Irish sugar. His statement in the Dáil in 1933 expresses the mood of post-War social responsibility,17

The new factories opened and each started processing sugar in 1934. As with other national projects at the time, such as the iconic Ardnacrusha dam on the Shannon river to create electricity, and the corresponding establishment of the Electricity Supply Board, political will acted decisively and collectively to improve the lives of citizens and to establish the key stones of a new country. Fianna Fáil’s Charles Haughey, who was later to lead the country explained,18

In 1973 Ireland made the momentous decision to connect with Europe and joined the European Economic Community. By joining the EEC, Ireland now had to comply with the European Common Agricultural Policy. The policy had been set up in 1962 to regulate internal European food and ensure stability in food production. After its initial success, Europe began to produce too much of certain foods, one of which was sugar. As a result, CAP’s Sugar Regime established the EEC Sugar Quota system. Each country was allocated a sugar beet “quota” in line with its consumption needs and sugar output was restricted. The factories were modernised and made more efficient at the same time the amount of sugar they could produce under CAP was reduced. There was a deep recession in Ireland in the 1980s, making the industrial context difficult and compounding the challenge of the sugar quota system.  A decision was made by management to concentrate production and close the two smaller factories, Tuam in 1986 and Thurles in 1989. The rationalisation was devastating for these communities; the factories had been the traditional industrial base of these towns for decades. The decisions were bitterly opposed by trade unions who argued that the factories were performing efficiently and the decision could have been avoided. At the same time, mechanisation was also leading to increasingly higher farming yields. Prof Burke explained, “by the mid 1980’s some growers were able to produce beet with only 4% of the labour required just thirty years earlier.” This ‘streamlining’ and the sugar quota system fundamentally restructured the Irish sugar beet industry. Further undoing of the original mission of the Irish Sugar Company was to come. In April 1991 the Irish Sugar Company was floated on the stock market under the name Greencore,  reflect the ideology of privatisation that became prevalent in the 1980s. Greencore as the continuation of Irish Sugar was now the holder of Ireland’s sugar quota and therefore the only sugar  producer.

The final death knell to the industry came with the major reforms of the CAP EU Sugar Regime in 2005-2006. These aimed to make European sugar production more efficient and fairer to less economically developed countries. The World Trade Organisation had declared that by disadvantaging poorer countries in the global sugar trade, the “EU's sugar regime, financed by European consumers and taxpayers, hampers global efforts to reduce poverty.” 23  Under the 2005-2006 reforms the EU was to reduce its sugar production by 25%. This loss was to be replaced by sugar imported to Europe from the least developed countries tariff free. To achieve this, protections such as guaranteed prices for sugar and export subsidies were all reduced, impacting on beet and sugar prices. Greencore’s initial response to the changes was to close the Carlow factory and move all production to Mallow. Eventually however, the beet growers collectively made the choice to take compensation rather than work on at a lower value and in 2006 Greencore made the decision to stop sugar production entirely and close Mallow as well. SITPU union representative Mick Browne, who worked on the closure negotiations, explained 

I asked him how Carlow has fared since the closure whether the town has recovered?

The final Campaigns and the closure of the Mallow and Carlow factories was an emotive end to a key part of Irish industrial history, an industry that in the context of the economic boom of the time and its fascination with the knowledge economy seemed to be an anachronism.  The issue of whether the sugar beet industry could have continued is still contentious. A subsequent report by the European Court of Auditors concluded that the decision to close the industry entirely was not necessary and this was a bitter afternote to the fractious negotiations that saw the end of Irish Sugar.  Former beet grower Allan Navratil, who was involved in campaigning against the decision, feels that the decision to close the industry was ill-judged “It is an easy calculation that if the sugar business had been retained, in the period since closure, Greencore would have made many hundreds of millions of Euros, far more than the compensation money received from Europe.” 24 Professor Burke says of production, “It would be wrong to say that sugar beet ceased in Ireland because our farmers were not able to attain top yields.”  German sugar refiners Nordzucker took over Greencore, but at that point it was too late. Ben McGarry, who works for Nordzucker but has years of experience in the Irish sugar industry, thinks in retrospect Nordzucker could have kept one factory open but they had been decommissioned before the company was  fully on board.  The difficulty was to ensure a sustainable price for growers. Professor Emeritus of European Agricultural Policy at Trinity College Dublin Alan Matthews believes,25

It is an issue on which experts differ, and one that is difficult to answer on a speculative basis.

“We know one thing for sure. Beet is back. Bringing a Brighter, Sweeter Future”

Since the demise of sugar production in Ireland there have been many rumours of its return. These ambitions hinge on the feasibility of sugar beet as an economic endeavour for growers, and the optimisation of the processing facilities. The most recent attempt was BEET Ireland, who have spent the past eight years researching and canvassing support for the reinstatement of a modernised sugar beet based industry. The BEET Ireland plan required an investment of €400 million for a biorefinery facility which would produce sugar, bio-ethanol and a number of other products from sugar beet, cereals and molasses.  BEET Ireland acquired a site in Kildare where the new facility was to be based. Farmers wishing to become part of a new cooperative were asked to pay €1000 as an “initial subscription which will be used by the Sugar Beet Cooperative to fund an equity stake in a new company in conjunction with BEET Ireland.” Persuading growers that beet is again a viable crop was harder than expected. In June 2019 BEET Ireland announced the postponement of its plans to restart the industry, Prof Jimmy Burke who advised on these plans, said “While many benefits would accrue from such a project; large-scale import substitution, a major boost for employment and the rural economy of the tillage area, a contribution to the achievement of mandatory EU biofuel use targets, and an increased national security of supply for two important commodities, the capital cost involved and market conditions prevailing today make this a formidable challenge.”  So, for the near future at least, sugar beet will not be grown or processed in Ireland.