Fun Fact #159 The Irish Hero
Fun Fact # 159
The Irish Hero
The Irish cattle industry was decimated as planned by England but there was hope. England had left a loophole in The Cattle Acts in which preserved foods could still be imported in order to still allow preserved and dried produce like Tea leaves to still be imported. Preserved meat never sold well and so it was seen that if Ireland’s cattle industry survived it would never again threaten England. They could not have been more wrong.
You see, Ireland had not been idle and invented a new dish preserved with large grains of Salt called corns. This “Corned beef” proved to be a hit, and it soon spread all across England. Turns out an earlier tax (The England Salt tax) made salt progressively more expensive as quality increased. Ireland did not have such a tax however and since the salt would dissolve into the meat, Corned Beef wasn’t taxed in the same way.
England attempted to pass more laws to prevent this but after a threat of war from France and the other European countries and civil unrest threatening to tip the country into civil war, England gave up. Their domestic Cattle industry and Roast beef vanished almost overnight while Ireland became the world’s premiere cattle supplier.
