Which Irish Minister said: "Men and women of Ireland. . . Your duty is clear - DEMAND IRISH MADE CIGARETTES"? How would you answer if you were asked this question in a table quiz as you took your final puff in the pub tomorrow night?
Would you have guessed the exhortation was from a poster signed by Constance Markievicz, then Minister of Labour in the First Dáil? She would surely be astonished if she knew a government led by another former Minister for Labour was about to curb smoking as a recreational activity.
It seems inconceivable in these politically correct times that the health implications of smoking were ignored by Markievicz but one must remember that cigarette smoking was one of the few pleasures accessible to the impoverished workers in the emergent State. And her appeal to the men and women of Ireland was understandable, of course, because no chorus of racking cigarette coughs could drown out the clamour for native industry, with its attendant jobs.
There was one man, however, who had an even more ambitious vision for the tobacco industry in Ireland. He was one James J. Kelly, alderman, high sheriff and justice of the peace, proprietor of a tobacco broking, bonding and growing business, established in 1893, standing on the corner of Camden Street and Harcourt Road, (and recently refurbished). This was the premises that gave its name to "Kelly's Corner".
Kelly came from a long line of Wexford tobacco growers. In the style of some plain-talking witnesses before the planning tribunal today, he lambasted the British for "getting their Hessian and German cavalry to trample the tobacco crop of his great-grandfather" in 1830. This allegation was made during Kelly's address to The Irish Tobacco Commission in the early 1920s to prove to them that tobacco could be grown and cured in Co Dublin, without subsidy.
Kelly obviously took his mission very seriously indeed, because at the bottom of the covering page of his 1932 pamphlet on Commercial Tobacco Growing in Ireland he proudly lists his "Plantation Phone" as 707 Terenure - the number of his home at St Gatien's, Rathfarnham. It was there that he grew tobacco for the first time in 1911, under the tutelage of his father, who was growing the crop in Wexford in those days. In his pamphlet, Kelly promises to purchase for cash all the leaf grown as per the instructions therein, provided it was free from pole sweat and rust and, more importantly, that growers used the seed he was selling which included such exotic brands as Irish Havana, Irish Virginia and Irish Kentucky. He also boasts that the produce for this seed would be "world-famed".
Like many eccentrics who are passionate about their cause, Kelly felt the powers-that-be were ranged against him. He alleged to the Irish Tobacco Commission that "one of the Heads of the Department of Agriculture" had told him they did not want Irish tobacco to be a success. This was understandable in the cash-strapped new State because, as any 1960s cannabis-growing hippy will tell you, it would have been well-nigh impossible for the government to collect tax on the tobacco crop, had it become a cottage industry.
He also claimed that two excise officers had burned bales of his tobacco which, they said, did not conform to Department of Agriculture standards - standards which, naturally, Kelly considered to be ill-informed.
So where did it go wrong for this visionary? One has only to read his instructions for growing tobacco to realise that farmers, used to digging a few drills from which could be harvested a substantial crop of potatoes, baulked at the work involved in growing, curing and fermenting tobacco.
Kelly recommended a virgin, flat field, facing south in a valley, not in the centre of a wood nor too near the sea. Neither should tobacco be sown in dark, boggy heavy land or with heavy manure (which, apparently would result in hot, burning tobacco). The seed had to be sown at right angles to the prevailing wind in a zig-zag configuration with a row of Jerusalem artichokes every 12 yards!
Next came the laborious instructions for harvesting, followed by advice on the curing which should be done in sheds, made of wood and divided into bents about 18 feet. high, etc., etc. As Dylan Thomas once said in a letter to his father, some of the etcs were worse than what had preceded them. To round it off, the tobacco then had to be aged in bond for two years.
Kelly admitted, when questioned by the Commission that, apart from his own roll tobacco (which according to himself, a visiting French expert had pronounced the best he'd ever tasted), other cigarettes he had smoked from home-grown tobacco seemed "like a cabbage on fire when lighted". This was, however, he explained, because the tobacco had been rushed to the market and not allowed to mature.
Kelly's experiments cost him £3,000, but because he had pitted himself against the Department of Agriculture, there was no future for his dreams. he tried his hand at making snuff on the old range in the kitchen of his Rathfarnham home - and of course, declared it the best he had ever made.
While Kelly's tobacco shop still stands at the busy city crossroads named after it, not a stone upon stone remains of St Gatien's, his home in Rathfarnham. A petrol station occupies the site today.
When I enquired nearby in St Gatien's Court the Bollard family, who moved there in 1975, fondly recalled the beautiful old house and its sale by auction. The house then had a preservation order but, sadly, was badly damaged by fire some years later and had to be demolished.
Their daughter nostalgically remembered the magnificent wild gardens, where badgers and other wild life roamed freely, and particularly mentioned the gigantic wild rhubarb. She didn't know tobacco had been grown there and I'd like to think the "rhubarb" was really some of Kelly's Irish Virginia or Irish Kentucky gone to seed.