ABSTRACT
With many members who had commercial or industrial experience and interests, the northern parliament understood Ulster's mainstay industries, linen and shipbuilding. For lesser aspects of Ulster's commercial activities, trade fairs and exhibitions provided useful propaganda. The establishment of the Agricultural Credit Corporation (ACC), which provided loans for marketing produce, also facilitated propaganda for farm improvements. Like agriculture, the fishing industry could be transformed by increasing consumption. Industrial prosperity needed energy sources, and with bountiful water and peat the state had vast resources. Highly romanticised, turf-cutting propaganda matched Fianna Fail's industrial propaganda which aggrandised a spiritial connection between the means of wealth creation and the citizen who exploited it – despite small-scale exploitation's hopeless inefficiencies. It was propaganda to conceal economic hardship beneath a veneer of national pride. Finance approved the proposal as 'quite good propaganda and more to the point than a good deal of publicity matter that has come before us'.
