After his recruitment to the SSISI by CH Oldham in 1924, JJ became a member of the Council in 1926 and contributed his first paper, on distributive waste, on March 10 1927.

It is noteworthy that Oldham had been a dominant figure in the SSISI for two decades; he was a Liberal Home Ruler, and was an early influence on JJ, who picked up from him his Free Trade philosophy, and a strong 'bottom-up' approach to the development of local industry, based on cultivated skills, in the context of co-operative associations of primary producers. This approach JJ regarded as more healthy than protected industries behind tariffs; he developed this position subsequently in his 'Nemesis of Economic Nationalism'. Oldham however was demonised by the 1930s Fianna Fail ideologues, as subsequently emerged in the 1930s Seanad debates.

I have found among JJ's papers a letter from Oldham dated Dec 17 1925, in which he turns down a proffered paper on 'Taxation of Land Values', this subject however being '...not to be considered discredited or depreciated by what I am about to say'. Oldham then goes on to urge that it be postponed in favour of a paper '...examining in a patient and careful manner the actual results of Blythe's Protection Taxes...especially the indirect results which are the true economic outcome of those taxes and are what the public never understand how to trace and to estimate..'.

There is here emerging what looks like a radical-liberal consensus of Oldham followers, including JJ, in favour of classical free trade, moderated by a tax on landed property, and the encouragement of co-operative ownership of industry and commerce. It seems JJ wanted to come in with land tax first, but Oldham wanted first to focus on the effect of protectionism, which he went on in the letter to quantify by estimating that 500 jobs, reported in the Dail as having been created making boots, had been subsidised by £500 per job by the consumer.

Apparently neither option was taken up, and JJ in the end for his first paper focused on the question of distributive waste. JJ had earlier attempted to make the link between producers' co-ops and urban consumer co-ops, and possessed a vision of this link being done efficiently, so that producers were well rewarded, and consumers also got good value. The original vision was on the basis of an all-Ireland co-operative movement, Horace Plunkett's legacy, the consumer movement being strongest in Belfast. This vision however was frustrated by Partition. JJ however attempted to pilot the consumer co-op movement with the Dublin University Co-op, which supplied the students living in College. This supplied him with some first-hand experience of the distribution problem.

Later, in or about 1924-5, JJ worked on a Government Commission on Profiteering (sic), in which he had a chance to look closely at retail pricing practice. Continuing on this theme, he approached the Rockefeller Foundation in got support from them to carry out some international comparisons on this matter. He did the work in Dublin and in Paris, and the topic was "the 'spread' between prices received by the farmer and prices paid by the consumer in different European countries, and the arrangements for marketing agricultural produce in certain of these countries". Names of sources in France given in the application were Casiot, Auge-Laribe, Rist, Tardy, Toussaint and Patier. The Fellowship lasted from 22/8/26 to 21/8/27 and carried a stipend of $1800 with $1200 expenses. The SSISI 'Distributive Waste' paper was the fruit of this experience, and perhaps constitutes his Report; I can find no Rockefeller Report as such.

Some Causes and Consequences of Distributive Waste (J SSISI vol XIV p353, 1926-7)

Turning now to the paper, JJ begins by extending the concept of 'effective and ineffective demand' to 'effective and ineffective supply' stating the problem from the angle of the agricultural producer: '...owing to the haphazard and chaotic arrangements for the commercial disposal of agricultural produce, a large proportion of the annual output of agriculture is frequently wasted. The more perishable the crop and the more bountiful the harvest, the greater the proportion of waste or ineffective supply...'. He goes on to make use of the UK Linlithgow Committee report, and a League of Nations committee on agricultural marketing.

JJ identifies as the key problem the fact that due to the 'friction' in the distribution system, prices are depressed far more for the producer than the consumer in times of plenty. This he links with the unemployment problem, because of the inability of the farmers thus impoverished to buy the products of urban industry, producing statistical evidence in support.

He goes on to produce evidence of the friction effect, in terms of a correlation between the rate of change of wholesale prices and the level of unemployment.

JJ then goes on further to examine the distributive system in Ireland, and concludes that the high mark-up is due to a surplus of small and inefficient units, and he advocates a system of large well-managed retail outlets, under co-operative consumer control, dealing directly with marketing organisations under the control of the primary producers. He links this with the expansion of agricultural credit: '...as soon as a suitable number of farmers have bound themselves by a firm contract to market only through their own organisation, they become in their collective capacity suitable recipients of accommodation from the banks in the ordinary way of commerce...every successful large-scale co-operative marketing organisation in America is finance in this way...'.

Attacking the current taxation system which '...appears to be a tax on honesty and proper business organisation, and a premium on all the unbusinesslike qualities which depress the margin of efficiency and indirectly maintain maximum retail prices..' JJ goes on to propose that the State should require the purchase of a retail trade licence, as a barrier to entry, credited as a pre-payment of income tax for those who cross the tax threshold. This licence fee would be levied at a lower rate on co-operative trading organisations. The same could be done with a turnover tax, but he admits that the latter would initially be impracticable, until such time as retailers were in the habit of keeping accounts.

There is alas no record of the discussion following this paper. The earlier hostile attitude of the Dublin traders in 1913 to the formation of the TCD consumers co-op perhaps foreshadowed the reaction of the political environment in the 1920s, and indeed since, dominated as it has been by small-town gombeen commercial interests, and later by the Fianna Fail supporting owners of protected industry. JJ's liberal utopia fuelled by market-oriented co-operative enterprise remained, and indeed remains, a vision.

National Transport Problems (JSSISI XIV, 53, 1929-30)

This paper was delivered on March 20 1930, with JJ being labelled 'Barrington Lecturer in Economics', as well as FTCD. He recognised the threat to the business of the railways presented by the growth of long-distance road haulage, which due to the inadequacy of the vehicle taxation system was in effect subsidised by the State, while the railways carried the full cost of the maintenance of their permanent way. He urged the encouragement, by means of the taxation system, of the use of road transport as feeder for the rail system, so as to maximise the economic use of the latter for the low-cost haulage of heavy loads over long distances. For relating heavy road vehicles to the cost of road maintenance, he urged a vehicle-mile tax, proportional to vehicle capacity.

Comments on Other Authors

Tom Barrington reviewed agricultural prices on May 6 1926 and JJ spoke to the paper. At this time it was not the practice to put the discussions on record. According the the SSISI minutes he contributed to the discussion on health insurance on 24/04/28, and on the Oireachtas as NEC on 2/5/28, and on various other occasions; he seems to have attended a high proportion of the meetings.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999