The control of the levy of Customs and Excise Revenue by the Irish Legislature, would imperil the fiscal solidarity of the United Kingdom, and be destructive of the further extension of Home Rule on federal lines. The Imperial Parliament should continue to control these all-important Departments, but power may be usefully reserved to the Irish Legislature to vary, under certain defined conditions, the duties on particular articles or commodities, without, however, any reservation of power to vary the articles themselves. For such a reservation, there is a precedent in the Isle of Man (Customs) Act of 1887, as I explained in an address delivered before the Irish Bankers’ Institute last November. The suggestion was further developed in an Article on Irish Finance, which I contributed to the _Nineteenth Century and After_ for January, 1912. In this connexion, it should be remembered that Mr. Gladstone’s Bills of 1866 and 1893, excluded the Customs and Excise Revenue from Irish Control: and that the present Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, following, in this respect, Mr. Parnell’s example, has recognized the propriety of the exclusion.
The suggestion I make preserves the principle, thus confirmed by high authority, while it allows to Ireland, working in concert with Great Britain, the opportunity of adjusting her taxation to her own special necessities.
The Administration of Posts and Telegraphs in Ireland is intimately associated with the Department’s Administration in Great Britain; and though Ireland has an indefeasible claim, which can be readily conceded, to the great bulk of the patronage within her shores, (patronage mostly of a petty and purely local character) I fail to see in that claim sufficient justification for localizing the Irish part of the business and thereby incurring the risk of dislocating the working of a great Imperial Department. And my objection to transferring the Postal Department to the new Government is emphasised by the fact that in Ireland this Department is worked at a loss of about a quarter of a million sterling annually. There would, therefore, be a tendency on the part of the new Irish Government to curtail expenditure on the Post Office, to the detriment of the public convenience of the United Kingdom, in order that the expenditure on the Department should balance the income.