Ireland Since 1939 Page 11

  Although supplies of some foodstuffs, such as potatoes, eggs and meat, were adequate, other staples, such as tea, butter and margarine, were scarce.90 A combination of moral persuasion and compulsory tillage orders more than doubled wheat output between 1939 and 1944, leading to a darkening of the colour of bread and prompting one historian to comment sardonically, ‘The furore over wheat revealed the Irish concept of hardship – how white would the bread be.’91 Rationing of some commodities had existed from early in the war, but a general rationing scheme was not introduced until June 1942, and profiteering and black marketeering were rife. Coal imports, for which the country was totally dependent on Britain, fell to one third of the 1938–9 level by 1944–5. Rationing of coal was introduced in January 1941, but by September there was only one week's supply of domestic coal left in Dublin.92 The government had launched a campaign to increase the tonnage of turf drawn from peat bogs as a substitute. This was organized by the state's Turf Development Board, though the turf produced was sold through private fuel merchants, some of whom had close relations with Fianna Fáil, leading to charges of both nepotism and profiteering.93

  That the Emergency years were far from cosy for the poorest sections of Irish society was clear from the statistics of tuberculosis mortality. Between 1939 and 1941 mortality rates rose in both Irish states, but whereas in Northern Ireland tuberculosis mortality in 1945 had fallen below its 1939 level, it was still higher in the southern state in 1947 than it had been in 1939. While other indices of health sensitive to poverty fell rapidly from the middle of the war in Northern Ireland, in the South infant mortality, a sure guide to trends in living standards, rose during the Emergency. Greta Jones has argued that in the 1940s tuberculosis became symbolic of the failure of the Irish government to tackle social deprivation and injustice. Dublin, with its concentration of the poorest working-class families often living in overcrowded housing conditions, was at the core of the state's tuberculosis problem. In 1936–41 Dublin's population accounted for one fifth of the total population of the state but for one third of all deaths from tuberculosis.94

  It was not simply the brutal realities of deteriorating conditions that produced increasing dissent but the perception that the government had forgotten its only very recent protestations of social radicalism and concern for the worst-off sectors of Irish society. In 1941 the dole in rural areas, the most important indicator of Fianna Fáil' social concern in the 1930s, was stopped. This reflected the rise in the demand for rural labour brought about by the compulsory tillage orders and the drive to expand turf production. The government also prohibited the emigration of men who were normally resident outside towns with a population over 5,000. In response one of those very rare creatures in rural Ireland, a female communist, addressing a large audience of unemployed labourers in Foynes, County Limerick, voiced an increasingly common anti-Fianna Fáil sentiment: ‘They started off by passing acts helpful to the workers… but they had given way to the farmers and industrialists, the people who had the money.’95

  The government had made some attempts to retrieve its 1930s image of social concern through a number of welfare reforms: free food and fuel for the poorest were introduced in 1941 and 1942, and unemployment benefits were increased in 1942. However, these did little to decrease dissatisfaction amongst the majority of workers, who faced a substantial increase in the cost of living at a time when the state not only froze wages but appeared to want to intervene decisively in a radical restructuring of the trade union movement.

  Splitting the Labour Movement

  Irish trade unionism had been divided for some time over the desire of the leadership of the largest union, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, for a ‘rationalization’ of the movement into far fewer industrial organizations, which would eliminate smaller unions and also diminish the influence of the British-based amalgamated unions that continued to organize in the South after independence. Lemass, as Minister for Industry and Commerce, had been strongly in favour of the ITGWU's ideas, in part because of his desire to give a streamlined union movement a role in a more corporatist form of economic policy-making, and also because he was opposed on nationalist grounds to so many Irish workers still being members of British-based unions.96

  The General Secretary of the ITGWU, William O'Brien, was Lemass's main ally in the trade union movement. He instigated the decision of the Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC) to set up a Commission of Inquiry into union structures in 1936. At that time the ITUC, which had unions affiliated from both sides of the border, represented 134,000 workers in forty-nine unions. While two of these had over 10,000 members each, seventeen had memberships of less than 500. Inter-union conflicts between craft and general unions, and Irish and British unions, certainly weakened the movement and meant there was a serious argument for radical reform.97 O'Brien's pursuit of a rationalization into ten industrial unions may well have had the objective of strengthening weakly organized workers in rural areas and smaller towns to resist government and employer demands that they accept low wages as the price of a job.98 However, many of his critics saw his proposals as being aimed at eliminating the British unions and absorbing the small unions into a much enlarged ITGWU. The Commission of Inquiry failed to agree, split as it was between Irish and British unions, and in 1939 a Council of Irish Unions was set up to promote O'Brienite ideas. It provided the union base of support for Seán MacEntee's Trade Union Bill, which was published in April 1941 and contributed powerfully to the subsequent disastrous split in the political and industrial wings of the labour movement.

  The bill proposed that all unions had to obtain a licence to allow them to negotiate and lodge a financial deposit with the High Court. There was to be a tribunal with the power to grant one or more unions the sole right to negotiate for a category of workers where these represented a majority of the workers. Although officials from the Department of Industry and Commerce had consulted the ITUC executive and the Congress of Irish Unions (CIU) and received tacit support, the public-c of the bill sparked off a substantial movement of opposition spearheaded by the Dublin Trades Council and the Irish Labour Party, which saw in the bill a powerful issue with which to amplify existing working-class dissatisfaction with the government's performance. On 22 June 1941, the day that Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, the Trades Council organized the largest demonstration of working-class anti-government resolve since the formation of the state. The crowd cheered the ageing union firebrand, Jim Larkin, when he set alight a copy of the bill.99

  Speakers at the meeting had bemoaned the fact that a city with such a substantial working class should not return one Labour Party representative to the Irish parliament. The combination of falling living standards and resentment over the wages freeze and the Trade Union Bill appeared to be set to change this. There was a large increase in Labour Party membership, with the number of branches rising from 174 in 1941 to 750 in 1943.100 In the municipal elections in August 1942, the party became the largest group on the Dublin Corporation; and in the general election in 1943 the Labour vote was 15.7 per cent, a 10 per cent improvement on the previous election, and it gained eight new seats, for a total of seventeen.101 Its vote in Dublin exceeded its national average for the first time, seeming to indicate that it could become more than a party of rural and small-town protest and actually challenge Fianna Fáil for the support of the capital's working class.102

  Fianna Fail, which had been at the receiving end of anti-communist allegations from the incumbent government in 1931 and 1932, was by 1943 not averse to using similar tactics against a growing Labour Party threat. It was helped by the bitter legacy of an intra-ITGWU dispute between William O'Brien and Jim Larkin.103

  Larkin, who had won a North Dublin seat as an Independent Labour candidate in the 1937 election, had subsequently joined the Labour Party and attempted to get an official Labour nomination, but this was resisted by O'Brien and by the ITGWU, which had provided financial support for a nu
mber of TDs who were union members. Larkin's political radicalism had diminished substantially by the end of the 1930s, and he had severed any connection with communism.104 The division in the union movement over the question of rationalization and the suspicion of many that O'Brien had given tacit support and encouragement to the MacEntee Trade Union Bill resulted in Larkin assuming a central role in opposition to the bill and subsequently in an increasingly bitter response from O'Brien and the ITGWU. In 1943 the Dublin Labour Party nominated Larkin as a Dáil candidate, and he was returned in the election of that year.

  During the election campaign, which Fianna Fáil had fought under the conservative slogan ‘Don't change horses when crossing the stream’,105 MacEntee had waged a lurid anti-communist campaign against Labour, alleging that the party had been infiltrated by a middle-class intelligentsia and, if that was not damning enough, adding that it was taking its orders from Moscow.106 The decision of the Communist Party of Ireland to dissolve its small organization in the South in 1941 was accompanied by a direction to its former members to enter the Dublin Labour Party and work for an end to Irish neutrality. Former communists and other radicals, along with Larkin and his son, formed a new Central Branch of the Labour Party, which was soon closely monitored by the Special Branch, whose reports were the basis for MacEntee's campaign.107 Lemass, who still hankered after an image as the leader of the left wing of Fianna Fail, was less than happy with MacEntee's claims that the Labour Party was ‘honeycombed with agents of the Comintern’.108 He asked MacEntee to keep out of Labour strongholds during the campaign, fearing that a backlash against these lurid claims would make Labour voters reluctant to give second-preference votes to Fianna Fail.

  The 1943 election result was a severe setback for Fianna Fáil: the party's share of the vote dropped from 51.9 per cent in 1938 to 41.9 per cent, and it lost ten seats.109 The blow was softened by the fact that Fine Gael also experienced a severe rebuff, with a drop of support from 33.3 per cent to 23.1 and a loss of thirteen seats. Its losses were in large part attributable to the party's support for neutrality, which eroded its difference with Fianna Fáil. Nevertheless, the discomfiture of Fianna Fáil's main rival could not hide the rise in support for Labour, particularly in Dublin, where it doubled its first-preference vote.

  The sort of denunciations of communist infiltration that MacEntee had specialized in during the election campaign would appear in a new form when O'Brien's ITGWU disaffiliated from the Labour Party in January 1944 and five of its eight TDs split from the party to form a new National Labour Party (NLP). The ITGWU attacked the ‘Larkinite and Communist Party elements’ who, it was claimed, had taken over the Labour Party.110 The split and the anti-communist assault put the leadership of the Labour Party on the defensive. It launched its own inquiry into communist involvement, which, although it resulted in the expulsion of a mere six members,111 had allowed the terms of debate in the labour movement to be defined by the Catholic nationalist right. The report of the inquiry proclaimed that the party's programme ‘is based on a set of principles in keeping with Christian doctrine and wholly at variance with the principles of atheistic communism’.112 Labour's leader, William Norton, faced with a snap general election in May 1944, declared that the Labour Party ‘proudly acknowledges the authority of the Catholic Church in all matters relating to public policy and public welfare.’113 But, weakened and demoralized by the split, the Labour Party saw its vote sink to 9 per cent and eight seats, with the National Labour Party winning 3 per cent and four seats.114

  The trade union movement subsequently succumbed to the long-standing tension between Irish and British unions. This was now further inflamed by the nationalist assault on the pro-Allied position adopted not just by Irish communists but by those unions with British headquarters and a strong base in Northern Ireland. Symptomatic of the assault was the publication by the National Labour Party of a pamphlet by Alfred O'Rahilly, President of University College Cork and a frequent contributor to the right-wing Catholic weekly the Standard, which had run a series of exposés of alleged communist infiltration of the Labour Party. O'Rahilly's The Communist Front and the Attack on Irish Labour widened the assault to include the influence of British-based unions and communists in the ITUC. In January 1944 the ITUC executive had declined an invitation to attend a world trade union conference on the war economy and reconstruction, which was to be hosted in London by the British TUC. When this decision was reversed, after a campaign by British-based unions, fifteen unions disaffiliated and created a Congress of Irish Unions, with the ITGWU at its core, in April 1945. This split (although the exact membership figures for each organization are disputed115) was a disastrous blow to the Irish left's hope that the South would experience the increasing shift to the left that was occurring in public opinion in Britain and even in Northern Ireland.

  The Cold War started in Ireland before the defeat of fascism. The outpourings of the Standard, recycled in the pronouncements of the NLP and CIU, encouraged a strong public sentiment that there was only one global enemy of Irish faith and fatherland: the USSR. The theme of a communist conspiracy to destroy Irish neutrality through the manipulation of the labour movement had split that movement and removed a significant threat to Fianna Fáil. In the longer term it ensured that when the continuing social and economic dissatisfaction with the government manifested itself, it would not be in secular-class terms but through a new left-republican formation, which would deepen the political and ideological division on the island that neutrality had done so much to consolidate.

  Éire and Beveridge

  The Second World War was, for many of those on the Allied side, a struggle not simply for military victory but for a better society. In Britain it meant a commitment to a comprehensive welfare state and full employment. The initial reaction of deValera's cabinet to the Churchill government's acceptance of the Beveridge Report in 1942 was one of vulgar political fear. It was felt that the Irish labour movement had been given a tremendous propaganda weapon by the British decision. Hugo Flinn, a parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Finance, set out the prospect in a letter to de Valera:

  The publication of this report, its adoption by public opinion in England and the promise of the Six County Government to implement it if adopted at Westminster is a ‘god send’ for the Labour party and, properly worked, worth quite a few seats.

  Every wildest claim made by them may be made to seem possible of accomplishment: ‘if this can be done by England after a horribly costly war, what could not be done by a country that has remained at peace?’116 Flinn, a Cork man who had spent much of his life running the family fish business in England and who had no involvement in the independence struggle,117 personified what Fianna Fáil's critics saw as its growing conservatism.118

  Lemass was the only member of the government who favoured a radical response to the challenge of Beveridge. Authorized by the cabinet to prepare an analysis of the report, he was prepared to endorse publicly Beveridge's objective of overcoming the ‘giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness’.119 He had by now reclaimed his former Department of Industry and Commerce, which he combined with Supply; this provided him with the institutional and policy-making clout to push government planning for the post-war period in a more social-democratic direction. He bombarded his colleagues with quotations from ‘modern economic research’, which usually meant Beveridge, Keynes or Nicholas Kaldor. His argument was that post-war Ireland should maintain many of the controls, particularly on labour, that had been introduced during the Emergency. These should be developed into a new set of relations between the state, employers and unions that aimed to achieve trade-offs between full employment, improvements in productivity and wage restraint.120 Aware of the limited capacity of Irish capitalism to generate new jobs, he also proposed an ambitious set of post-war state-spending schemes in areas such as afforestation, drainage, fisheries, hospitals and housing.121 The objective was full employment, and he argued that such arrangements w
ould require the state to adopt a ‘new kind of budget policy’ that transcended the narrow accounting priorities of balancing the books.

  Unsurprisingly, such notions were anathema to the Department of Finance, which saw them as ‘bureaucratic control of the most oppressive and objectionable kind’. Lemass's economic theorists were dismissed as the ‘Escapist school of economics’. The Finance view was that the Beveridge proposals were unaffordable for a country like Ireland, and the government needed to avoid any further commitments to social welfare improvements. The only sure way to deal with unemployment was through measures to improve the efficiency and productivity of Irish agriculture and to cut taxes.

  De Valera, while not totally sharing this perspective, was uncomfortable with Lemass's radicalism. His inclination was to try to persuade the Irish people of the attractiveness of his own folksy vision of an Ireland that put spiritual values above vulgar material concerns and that should put up with economic problems as the price of being saved from the horrors of war. In a Dáil debate on unemployment in August 1940, he declared that a small country like Ireland should be content with ‘frugal comfort’ and that unemployment was a problem that defied solution.122 His famous St Patrick's Day radio address in 1943 has, as Charles Townshend has noted, been frequently quoted ‘more often in mockery than in admiration’:123

  The Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the joy of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be the forums for serene old age.