Ireland Since 1939 Read online

  This Rousseauesque vision of a land dominated by family farms and industry dispersed to small towns and villages, avoiding the extreme inequalities of fully fledged capitalism and the ‘servile state’ associated with socialism and communism, remained a powerful influence on Irish political life. As critics at the time and since have pointed out, de Valera failed to provide any realistic ideas about how this vision was to be realized at a time when many of the policies of his government actually undermined it.124 But, whatever its lack of economic realism, the speech reflected a keen awareness of the threat to his party's support in the west of Ireland because of small-farmer discontent. This focused on what was seen as the government's failure to deliver on the constitution's commitment to ‘settle as many families as possible on the land’. The threat from Clann na Talmhan was a real one, as the 1943 election demonstrated. It won 11 per cent of the vote and fourteen seats, but in parts of Fianna Fáil's western heartland, where its support had been highest in the 1930s, the vote for the Clann was almost double its national average, while there were big drops in support for de Valera's party.125

  It was to this threat that the core sentiments of the St Patrick's Day speech were directed. So also was de Valera's resistance to pressure from Lemass, on this issue at least in alliance with the Department of Finance, that there be a fundamental re-examination of the commitment to further land redistribution and of the large number of smallholdings that would never be able to provide adequate support for their owners.126 In this sense the sentimental ruralism of the speech had very real effects.

  It also reflected de Valera's problem of integrating the realities of urban life and poverty into his vision of Ireland. During the 1943 election campaign he had declared that ‘there is nobody in this country who is not getting proper food’ and that ‘every section of the community has had the careful regard of the government.’127 The sizeable support for Labour in Dublin was a resounding response to this myopia, as was the increasingly active role played by individual Catholic bishops in dealing with or highlighting urban poverty.

  The Catholic hierarchy and clergy, drawn in large part from the rural bourgeoisie, had traditionally been uncomprehending and unsympathetic to the conditions of the urban working class. However, since the publication in 1931 of Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, with its promotion of corporatist ideas of social organization, there had been a belated development of a Catholic social movement in Ireland. At times combining corporatist ideas with open worship of Franco and Mussolini, it had provided what little intellectual backbone the Blueshirt movement possessed. But corporatist ideas also influenced some in Fianna Fáil and clerics close to the party.

  John Charles McQuaid, who was appointed Archbishop of Dublin in 1940, played a central role in developing the Church's social involvement. A long-standing friend of de Valera, who had pressed his candidacy on the Vatican, McQuaid was a former headmaster of Blackrock College, an elite Catholic school run by the Holy Ghost Fathers. De Valera had taught there and his son was a pupil. McQuaid rapidly developed a high-profile role for the Church's charitable role in Dublin and made it clear that he was aware of the reality of those excluded from de Valera's vision. His first lenten pastoral in 1941, at a time when government ministers were taking a hard line against strikes, declared that ‘The very widespread yearning for social peace is itself proof of the grave need for social reform.’128 In April 1941 he created the Catholic Social Service Conference, which set out to coordinate and expand Catholic welfare work in the diocese and transformed the quality of social work in Dublin, providing up to 250,000 free meals a month.

  It was this substructure of Church-organized and privately financed charity that de Valera was prepared to bank on as the practical alternative to Beveridge. For, although the work done by the Church could on one level be seen as a criticism of the inadequacies of the state, the Church itself was at the forefront of the ideological assault on the principles underlying the Beveridge Report. McQuaid was an opponent of the expansion of state welfare services129 and within the cabinet he could rely on Seán MacEntee to scour British and Irish newspapers and journals for Catholic criticisms of Beveridge, particularly those that echoed the section of the Irish Constitution that guaranteed the family as bearing the primary responsibility for the education and welfare of its members. Beveridge threatened to make the state ‘omnicompetent’, according to one cleric who had recently been made the first Professor of Sociology at Maynooth, the national seminary.130 Thus, even when clerics criticized the inadequacies of existing welfare services, they were careful to ensure that any proposed alternative relied on the development of their existing role and did not involve any expansion of the role of the state. Such criticism could be acutely embarrassing to the government, as when in 1944 Dr John Dignan, Bishop of Clonfert, produced a pamphlet on the existing health service in which he described the medical assistance service, on which a large section of the population depended for medical care, as tainted by ‘destitution, pauperism and degradation’.131 Yet it was the very Catholic social teaching underlying Dignan's critique that was used ideologically to bury Lemass's radical proposals and that greatly assisted in the political offensive against the upsurge of support for the Labour Party in 1943.

  It was of course true that only the massive expansion in the functions and size of the state in wartime Britain made the post-war welfarism and Keynesian economic management possible. A radical such as Lemass faced an Irish situation in which, despite the large increase in state regulation of private economic activity, there was an actual shrinkage in the proportion of national income taken by the state during the Emergency.132 The implementation of his policies would have brought the government into conflict not only with the traditionally conservative mercantile, financial and large-farmer interests, some of whom had begun to soften their anti de Valera positions in the late 1930s, but also with the new bourgeoisie that had grown up under protectionism. They would have solidified and expanded Fianna Fáil's support in what remained a large but minority constituency, the urban and rural working class. They might have won back support lost to Clann na Talmhan, but they would have unleashed the sort of distributional class warfare that de Valera had set up Fianna Fáil precisely to avoid. Neutrality and its ideological buttressing by anti-communism and Catholic social thought made a conservative response politically sustainable but left the state seriously unprepared for the challenges of the post-war world.

  4. Stagnation: Ireland 1945–1959

  Ireland's post-war history contrasts with that of most Western European states, where the war proved to be a watershed in social, economic and political terms. Neutrality and the isolation of the war years had served to consolidate a conservative nationalism based on protectionism, a strong Catholic moral community and irredentism in relation to Northern Ireland. The major political challenge to de Valera's government would come from those who charged it with forsaking the radical social republicanism of the 1930s and were thus demanding a reinvigoration of the autarkic and irredentist themes of classic de Valeraism rather than a change of course. It would take the shock of economic crisis and accelerated population loss in the mid 1950s to force a radical rethinking of isolationist economics and the adoption of a more realistic tone in the state's approach to the North.

  Protectionism under Pressure

  The main motivation for those in government prepared to consider the need for new policy directions was the fear of a destabilizing influx of workers who had gone to the UK during the war. This was a major concern for Lemass when he produced a substantial document on full employment for the cabinet's Economic Policy Committee in January 1945. In fact, the main challenge to the southern state in the next decade would not be the high levels of unemployment exacerbated by returned emigrants but an intensification of the wartime exodus to Britain. Data on net emigration indicate that over 30,000 people left Ireland annually in the immediate post-war period, and this figure rose to over 50,000 in the 1950s
.1 Irish nationalists had, since the Great Famine in the 1840s, defined emigration as the gravest symptom of British misrule. Political independence, land reform and state-sponsored economic development were supposed to lead to an end of the problem. In the year before Fianna Fail first won power de Valera had claimed that the implementation of his party's development proposals could provide the means of existence for a population of 20 million.2 Land redistribution, a shift from pasture to tillage and the development of indigenous industry, together with the closure or severe restriction of emigration opportunities in the 1930s, did see a lessening of the rate of population decline. But, as Kevin O'Shiel, a member of the Land Commission that was charged with land redistribution, put it in a memorandum on agrarian strategy for the cabinet in 1942, the ‘dry rot’ might be ceasing but there was little sign of a rural resurgence: ‘In 1847 there were 6,700,000 of us in Eire's Twenty-Six Counties with 4,000,000 sheep and cattle and 3,129,000 acres of tillage. Today we are about 2,968,000 with 7,000,000 cattle and sheep and 1,845,000 acres of tillage.’3 O'Shiel, like de Valera, was a firm believer in what he termed the ‘national school’, which viewed the land question as more than a simple matter of economics, in contrast to the ‘big business’ view, which prioritized efficiency and productivity, inevitably leading to larger holdings and a diminishing demand for labour. Land and the rural communities it supported formed the basis for the preservation of the nation's essential character as expressed in history, legends, folklore, customs and language. The objective of agrarian policy was not to maximize productivity but ‘to make the land maintain as large a number of tradition-preserving cells as possible… as many families as possible on holdings large enough to assure them a fair measure of frugal comfort’. While these ideas were reflected in government policy and in de Valera's St Patrick's Day address in 1943, they were under increasing pressure from elements in the political and administrative elite.

  The problem was clear, even to O'Shiel, who pointed out that of the 344,500 holdings in the state, at least 200,000 could be regarded as ‘uneconomic’, because the farmer could not support himself and his family at even a level of ‘frugal livelihood’. A high percentage of these uneconomic holdings were in the ‘congested districts’ along the western seaboard from Donegal to Kerry. The west of Ireland, with its high concentration of native Irish speakers, had been at the core of the cultural definition of Irishness for de Valera and his party, and their agrarian policy had had real effects in maintaining the small-farm economy in the west. Part of O'Shiel's critique of existing policy was that the activities of the Land Commission had been largely concentrated in these areas, where vast tracts of land were bog, moor and mountainside and much of the remainder was land of very poor quality. Almost half of the land redistributed since the process began under the British had been in the western province of Connacht. However, if the government had acceded to his desire to extend land redistribution to the richer areas, it would have risked disrupting the all-important cattle trade with Britain, which depended on the large cattle farms long denounced by Fianna Fáil radicals as ‘ranches’, with their owners dubbed parasitic ‘graziers’.

  The attempt to alter the balance between tillage and pasture had been silently given up by the middle of the 1930s, when the centrality of the cattle trade in earning the surplus necessary for the importation of machinery and raw materials for the industrialization drive had been recognized in the Coal–Cattle Pact negotiated with Britain in 1935. De Valera admitted before the war that ‘the flight from the land was a fact’,4 but this was the extent of his concessions to economic realism. The land redistribution programme was slowed down, and there would be no indulgence of O'Shiel's demand for something just short of ‘a wholesale obliteration of the big graziers’. But de Valera still wanted agrarian policy to pursue two essentially incompatible objectives: the maximization of food production and the retention of as many families on the land as possible.5

  Lemass, who had asked his leader in vain for an indication of which objective he prioritized, went on to produce his own dramatic proposals for post-war agriculture in a long memorandum on full employment in 1945. He recommended the ‘displacement’ of the worst farmers, if necessary through state powers of compulsory purchase:

  It is necessary to ensure that the Nation's resources of agricultural land are fully utilised. The rights of owners should not include the right to allow land to go derelict or to be utilised below its reasonable productive capacity. Only a limited number of families can be settled on the land, on economic holdings, and policy must be directed to ensuring that ownership will be confined to persons willing and capable of working them adequately.6

  The radicalism of his approach to agriculture was anathema to most of his colleagues, combined as it was with a far-reaching set of proposals for Keynesian budgetary policy, a substantial expansion of the state's role in industrial development, a new system of economic planning involving the trade unions and a critical review of the workings of protectionism. It was predicated on the assumption of an economic and political crisis detonated by the return of the tens of thousands of men and women who had migrated to Britain during the war. Pressure for this sort of change was greatly reduced as it became apparent that wartime migrants were not returning. It was also the case that, despite wartime emigration, the 1946 census showed a population decline of only 0.4 per cent and that the bulk of this was accounted for by a sharp drop in the Protestant population.7 A new census in 1951 was the first since 1841 to register an increase in population.8 These apparently favourable demographic trends were accompanied by a post-war consumption boom as people tried to make up for the dearth of goods during the Emergency. Personal expenditure rose by almost a quarter between 1945 and 1950 and indus-trial output rose by two thirds.9

  But beneath these short-term improvements the problems that had motivated Lemass's radicalism remained. The increased output of Irish industry was destined mainly for the domestic market, and even by the end of the 1950s exports of manufactured goods represented only a small percentage of total exports. Over 80 per cent of industrial firms in the Republic employed fewer than 50 persons and lacked the resources for research, improved production methods, and the development of export markets.10 At the same time the Republic's dependence on imports for machinery and raw materials contributed, along with the demands of Irish consumers for a range of imported consumer goods, to recurrent balance-of-payments crises. A protected domestic market did provide the basis for some continued expansion, but the small size of the market put an inherent limitation on the capacity of Irish industry to absorb what became the largest rural exodus since the worst periods of population loss under British rule.

  The 1940s saw a decisive shift in the attitude of many rural dwellers to life in the countryside. A commission appointed in 1948 to examine emigration and other population problems noted the unanimity of view expressed to them by those with direct experience of rural life: ‘the relative loneliness, dullness and generally unattractive nature of life in many parts of rural Ireland, compared with the pattern of life in urban centres and with that in easily accessible places outside the country’.11 The limited amount of industrial development since the 1930s, together with the much greater employment opportunities in Britain, broke whatever limited attraction subsistence living on the family farm had for tens of thousands of young men and women. The post-Famine dominance of the ‘stem family’ system of inheritance, where the land was passed intact to the eldest son, had produced a society with an extremely low marriage rate and a high age at marriage.12 The social and sexual casualties of this system, particularly the younger sons and daughters without dowries to make them an attractive match and thus condemned to celibacy, now voted with their feet for the building sites, hospitals and hotels of post-war Britain. Agriculture had a total workforce of 580,000 in 1946; by 1951 this had dropped to 504,000, and by 1961 to 376,000.13

  Fianna Fáil's post-war agrarian and industrial policies did little to
address this exodus. The government's main priority in agricultural policy was to restore the relatively favourable terms for exports to Britain provided in the 1938 Trade Agreement. There had been a decrease of 35 per cent in agricultural exports to the UK from 1939 to 1946, which the Irish blamed on inadequate UK prices. After the war the scope for increased agricultural exports at satisfactory prices was further adversely affected by food rationing in Britain and increasing competition from cheap Commonwealth food.14 Irish industry was also continuing to suffer from British reluctance to allow scarce supplies of coal and industrial raw materials to cross the Irish Sea. When de Valera opened negotiations with the British in September 1947, his priorities were the revival of the cattle trade to its pre-war level and countering resistance from the British to further industrialization in the South. The latter stemmed from Britain's economic weakness, which had led to the suspension of sterling convertibility against the dollar in August 1947. Ireland's external assets, which were held in sterlng, had increased from £163 million in 1939 to £450 million in 1945, and the British Treasury was concerned lest too rapid a process of Irish industrialization ran these down as they were used to buy dollars to import machinery and raw materials. In response de Valera was insistent that ‘it was the fixed policy of the Eire government to develop their own industries insofar as they were capable of doing so. Eire did not wish to remain a predominantly agricultural country [but one] whose economy would be based on the export of manufactured goods.’15

  The Irish were successful in persuading the British to respect their right to pursue independent economic policies, but the price of a substantial coal allocation was the acceptance that, in the words of Patrick Smith, the Irish Minister for Agriculture, Eire's agricultural production had ‘to fit in with the British programme’.16 De Valera, who had boasted in the 1930s that Irish agriculture could do without the English market, was quoted in a British Treasury document as calling for the ‘dovetailing of the two economies’.17 The limit of his agrarian radicalism was a demand, conceded by the British, for the removal of the price differential between Irish fat cattle and animals fattened in Britain. Although the negotiations were interrupted by the 1948 general election, the Trade Agreement signed by the inter-party government in June 1948 was based on the elements largely agreed on by de Valera. While this meant that fewer cattle were exported to be fattened in England, thus increasing the value of cattle exports, it added little to the employment-generating capacity of Irish agriculture at the same time as the agreement intensified dependence on the British market, which in the mid 1950s was taking 86 per cent of Irish agricultural exports.18