Pollock, Hugh McDowell (1852–1937), businessman and politician, was born 16 November 1852 in Bangor, Co. Down, third and youngest son of James Pollock, master mariner, and Eliza Pollock (née McDowell). He was educated locally and on leaving school served an apprenticeship with Messrs Andrews & Co, Belfast shipbrokers, before moving to McIlroy flour importers, which under the name Shaw, Pollock & Co. became the largest such business in Ireland. Pollock was a leading Ulster businessman who held directorships in numerous companies. In 1917 he was appointed director of wheat supplies under the food controller for the north of Ireland, and also chairman of the Belfast chamber of commerce. In this capacity he was nominated ex officio to the Irish Convention. His grasp of finance led to his appointment to the convention's inner committee of nine. He advised that fiscal unity with Great Britain was essential, and that the nationalists were making fiscal demands that had not occurred to O'Connell (qv), Butt (qv), Biggar (qv) or Parnell (qv); his remark that he stood where Parnell stood raised one of the few laughs in the convention.
On the establishment of the Northern Ireland parliament he was elected at the age of 69 as unionist MP for Belfast South (1921–9) and then for Windsor (1929–37), a new seat comprising part of his former constituency. From the start of his parliamentary career until his death in office he was finance minister and deputy prime minister.
In finance, Pollock was an orthodox, pre-Keynesian liberal who regarded a balanced budget as gospel. Expounding the virtues of self-reliance, he wanted Northern Ireland to stand on its own financial feet, and disliked the cavalier attitude of James Craig (qv), in which the imperial treasury was a milch cow. In 1930 he proposed additional taxation as ‘preferable to appearing as mendicants on Britain's bounty’ (quoted in Buckland, Factory of grievances, 97). In the 1930s he attempted to block the efforts of the labour minister, John Andrews (qv), to bring Northern Ireland's expenditure on social services into line with Britain's much higher spending. He relaxed his stern orthodoxy only for the shipbuilders: in 1927, when Britain denied trade facilities to shipbuilders, Pollock decided via the loans guarantee act (1922) to continue them in Northern Ireland, thereby enabling Belfast shipbuilders to undercut their British competitors. A member of the Belfast harbour commission from 1899 until his death, he served as president of the commission, 1918–21. In 1933 he was rewarded by the harbour commission's naming the new Pollock Dock and basin after him.
An octogenarian by the 1930s, Pollock was tenacious in his principles, which he tended to propound in very general terms; he had small grasp of the long-term financial difficulties of the state arising from the terms of the government of Ireland act, and held firmly that any problems were temporary. He liked in particular to blame Eamon de Valera's (qv) economic war, terming it unfair and vindictive; he proposed ending it by a customs union with the Free State.
He was well travelled and less insular than many of his colleagues. He and J. Milne Barbour (qv), minister of commerce (1925–41) were the only members of cabinet not to join the Orange order. In 1936 he was made Companion of Honour. He died 15 April 1937 at home in 26 Windsor Avenue, Belfast, and was buried in the city cemetery. He married (1885) an American widow, Mrs Annie Robinson, daughter of Andrew Marshall of Brooklyn, USA; they had four sons and two daughters.