Ireland Since 1939 Read online

  If the more diversified and labour-intensive agriculture that had been the aspiration of Fianna Fáil agrarian radicalism was now chimerical, it only served to underline the limitations of the party's industrial strategy. Lemass had, in 1945, hinted at the possibility of breaking with a key tenet of economic nationalism when he informed the cabinet that ‘While it is desirable that all industries should be owned and controlled by Irish nationals, there is less reason for insistence on national ownership of export industries than of industries supplying only the home market.’19 It would be another twelve years before he was able to implement this idea with the amendment of the Control of Manufacturers Acts of the 1930s to make substantial foreign investment possible. He was already being attacked for being too sympathetic to foreign interests, and the immediate post-war period, with the emergence of a radical social-republican challenge to Fianna Fail, was not conducive to policy innovation.20 Yet, without a new source of employment generation based on foreign capital developing the export capacity that indigenous industry lacked, the other arm of potential industrial strategy was doomed by the overwhelming resistance from the party's powerful allies amongst the manufacturing bourgeoisie that had developed behind tariff walls.

  Lemass, the main sponsor of protectionism in the 1930s, was well aware by the end of the war of the inefficiencies and restrictive practices that protectionism had permitted. Speaking to a group of businessmen in 1947, he explained that protective tariffs and other import restrictions were going to be much less important in the future.21 He was attempting to prepare the ground for his controversial Industrial Efficiency Bill, which proposed to establish a new and powerful Prices Commission to inquire into prices, prevent cartels and promote efficiency. Manufacturers would be required to participate in ‘development councils’, including workers and consumers, to promote efficiency, and recalcitrant industrialists were to have their directors' fees stopped. Together with the establishment of a Labour Court in 1946 as an instrument of industrial conciliation, the bill was an attempt to promote the modernization of Irish industry in a semi-corporatist fashion. In the bleak conditions of post-war Ireland, it was visionary. Apart from the fierce resistance of some of Lemass's former business allies, the major practical problem was that successful modernization would often have meant more rather than less unemployment. Until the nettle of foreign capital was grasped, Lemass's modernizing project provided no way out of the impasse created by a shrinking agriculture and a stagnant industrial sector.

  The bill fell victim to Fianna Fáil's ejection from office after sixteen years in power. A large role in the defeat was played by the surge in support for a new party, Clann na Poblachta, whose main themes were an embarrassing reprise of the more radical republican sentiments expressed by de Valera and Lemass two decades previously.

  The First Inter-party Government

  Alvin Jackson has provocatively described the decade after 1948 as ‘the heyday of Irish Butskellism… an era characterised by unrelenting party warfare but also by minimal ideological and policy distinctions’.22 But the post-war consensus in Britain was constructed around the welfare state and a commitment to full employment achieved through Keynesian techniques of economic management. In stark contrast, what consensus emerged in Ireland was in this period centred on resistance to British welfarism on the basis of the social teachings of the Catholic Church and the prioritizing of the balance of payments over economic growth and employment creation.

  In the immediate post-war period it became apparent that Fianna Fail could not count for long on the gratitude of voters for being saved from the hazards of war. This was clear in 1945 from the results of the first election for the office of President, a post created under the 1937 Constitution and originally held with all-party agreement by the Protestant Gaelic revivalist Douglas Hyde. The Independent candidate Patrick McCartan polled an impressive 20 per cent of the vote. McCartan, who had a solid republican pedigree, was supported by disaffected IRA men, Labour and Clann na Talmhan. This quickly improvised coalition was to encourage the emergence of a more serious challenge to Fianna Fail with the creation of Clann na Poblachta (‘Party of the Republic’) in July 1946.

  The new party was yet another attempt to meld republicanism with left-of-centre politics, a project that could be traced back to the writings of James Connolly and that had its previous most significant manifestation in the Republican Congress in the 1930s. However, the leftism of the Clann owed much more to papal encyclicals than to the sort of Marxism that had influenced the republican radicals of the 1930s. Its leader, Seán MacBride, had briefly been Chief of Staff of the IRA in the 1930s. MacBride had been born into the republican aristocracy. His mother, Maud Gonne, was a lifelong activist in the nationalist cause, and his father, Major John MacBride, had been executed for his part in the Easter Rising. He had left the IRA arguing that de Valera's new constitution showed that full sovereignty and an end to partition could be achieved constitutionally. DeValera's robust response to the IRA during the war had been the prime cause of his disillusion with Fianna Fáil. A barrister, MacBride had spent the war years defending IRA men and came to public notice when he represented the family at the inquest of the former Chief of Staff of the IRA Seán McCaughey, who died on hunger strike in 1946.23 Twenty-two of the twenty-seven members of the provisional executive of the Clann had been active members of the IRA at some stage in their lives, and for them the priority was to press on for the full republican objectives that de Valera was seen to have betrayed.

  Yet MacBride's own experience of republican politics in the two decades after the Civil War had taught him that Fianna Fáil's rise to a hegemonic position in Irish politics depended on an ability to provide a left-of-centre social and economic programme as well as a radical nationalist agenda. It was therefore the Clann that did much to ensure that emigration was a major issue in electoral politics, using it to highlight the winners and losers in de Valera's Ireland: ‘The nation is being weakened by the forced emigration of its youth. A small section has been enabled to accumulate enormous wealth while unemployment and low wages, coupled with an increasing cost of living, are the lot of the workers.’24

  The party also proposed that the state assume responsibility for full employment based on a minimum wage related to the cost of living. Underlying such demands was MacBride's commitment to the economic ideas set out in the iconoclastic Minority Report to the Commission of Inquiry into Banking, Currency and Credit written by P.J. O'Loghlen. This had attacked the direction of economic policy followed by all governments since 1923. It doubted the ability of the private sector to generate sufficient employment and supported comprehensive government intervention in areas including industrial development, afforestation, land reclamation and a public housing drive. All this would be financed by severing the link with sterling and repatriating the sterling assets held by Irish nationals. O'Loghlen had cited papal encyclicals to support his arguments, and MacBride was careful to establish the Catholic credentials of his party's economic and social programme. He vigorously espoused the social welfare plan devised by Bishop Dignan of Clonfert, which had been rejected out of hand by MacEntee in 1944, and the Clann asserted, in a manner that would return to haunt it, that the family was the basic unit of society and that the state could not encroach on the fundamental responsibilities of the heads of families in the social and moral spheres.25

  The radical tone of the Clann's economic and social programme made it attractive to a younger generation who had grown up after the Civil War and were less influenced by the party loyalties the conflict had generated in their parents. It was partly to appeal to this group that MacBride chose Noel Browne, a young doctor with a passionate commitment to the eradication of tuberculosis, as his Minister for Health. Noel Hartnett, the man responsible for recruiting Browne to the party, was typical of another important source of recruits and voters: disillusioned Fianna Fáil activists. The feeling that de Valera's government had turned its back on the central agrarian a
nd cultural goals of the revolutionary generation had begun to be articulated in the party itself. Michael Joe Kennedy, a prominent Fianna Fáil TD, wrote to Frank Gallagher, director of the government information services, in December 1946 complaining that the agrarian and language policies of the party had been jettisoned:

  The Land Commission has ceased to function… and two ministers [Land and Agriculture] are proclaiming… that there are too many people on the land. Our language policy is as dead as a dodo… We'll have English holiday camps in Gormanstown and beautiful international airports as your name is Frank Gallagher but the Irish Ireland programme will be watered down before Fianna Fáil leaves office.26

  Hartnett had been a member of Fianna Fáil national executive but had resigned in 1937 in protest at the decision to accept a £1,000 donation from a businessman.27 Like that of the teachers, small businessmen and lawyers who dominated the executive of the Clann,28 Hartnett's social philosophy was for a nostalgic return to what Richard Dunphy has described as the ‘essentially petty-bourgeois ideology’ of 1920s republicanism.29 Fianna Fáil was accused of selling out to big business, bankers and graziers, and of betraying its working-class and small-farmer supporters. The Ireland that de Valera still admitted to dreaming about was the one that the Clann claimed could yet be created if the will was there: an Ireland of small farms and small and medium-sized factories run by patriotic Irish capitalists with contented and healthy workers. Although the state was assigned a large role in the Clann's economic and social vision, charges of communism were deflated by the party's proclamation that it would put a priority on rehabilitating the moral fibre of the nation from the attacks of ‘modern materialism’ and other ‘alien, artificial and unchristian concepts of life’.30

  Conditions could hardly have been better for a challenge to Fianna Fáil. An excessively wet summer in 1946 followed by one of the coldest winters on record hit agriculture and domestic consumers badly. Things were made even worse by a serious energy crisis brought about by a major cutback in coal supplies from Britain. In consequence, transportation became chaotic, and the already marked shortage of raw materials was exacerbated, forcing many industries to close. The country ran a serious balance of payments deficit of over £25 million in 1947. Bread rationing was reintroduced in January 1947 as was soap rationing, and, critically, beer and porter supplies were drastically reduced. There was a widespread popular anger sparked by high prices (these had more than doubled during the war), a scarcity of goods and black-marketeering. A Lower Prices Council set up by Dublin Trades Council was able to bring out crowds of up to 100,000 and, in an unprecedented movement for such a patriarchal society the Irish Housewives' Association set up a Women's Parliament where 300 delegates representing over 300,000 women made a range of demands, from that for the provision of hot dinners for all school children to the dottily xenophobic one for restrictions on the ‘influx of tourists’.31

  Lemass and the government appeared to turn their backs on earlier pro-trade union stances in the face of widespread pressure from workers wanting to reverse the decline in their living standards associated with the wartime wage standstill. A wave of strikes or threatened strikes hit the docks, buses, banks, insurance offices and the crucial flour-miling industry. But it was the government's victory over striking teachers that harmed it most politically and provided the Clann with a powerful new source of support. A pre-war wage demand, revived after the end of the wage freeze, was brusquely dismissed by Tom Derrig, the Minister for Education, and the government showed no inclination to use Lemass's recently established Labour Court as a possible means of arbitration. The strike by the teachers' union focused on Dublin, with teachers in the rest of the country being levied to support their striking colleagues. It lasted from March to October, when the teachers, defeated, returned to work. The government took a hard and uncompromising line. It spurned an offer by the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, to mediate, and striking teachers who invaded the pitch during the All-Ireland football final were brutally dispersed by the police. The policy backfired and left a legacy of bitterness. Teachers were traditionally regarded as the backbone of Fianna Fáil, the organic intellectuals of the national revolution, essential for the realization of de Valera's commitment to the Irish language and culture. Many teachers left Fianna Fail, and teachers became the organizational bedrock of the new party.

  Three scandals involving allegation of corrupt practices by ministers, two of them implicating Lemass, contributed to the pervasive sense of malaise. Although only one junior minister was forced to resign and Lemass was cleared of all the charges, the Clann made effective use of the issue of ‘political decadence’ and won by-elections in Counties Dublin and Tipperary in the autumn of 1947. Worryingly for Fianna Fail, not only had MacBride defeated Tommy Mullins, the high-profile National Secretary of the party in Dublin, but both the Clann victories had been helped by substantial vote transfers from Labour and Fine Gael candidates. De Valera attempted to pre-empt the new party's development by calling an early general election, in the knowledge that his Minister for Local Government, Seán MacEntee, had just carried out a quite radical revision of constituency boundaries designed to favour the larger parties. His strategy nearly succeeded. Dizzy with its by-election successes and with the totally unrealistic hope of challenging Fianna Fáil's dominance, the Clann put up candidates in every constituency, ninety-three in all, which was more than Fine Gael. With only rudimentary organization in most constituencies and many candidates new to electoral politics, if not to underground activity, the result was a major disappointment.

  Despite nine extra Dáil seats being available, Fianna Fail lost eight, giving it a total of sixty-eight, and its share of the poll dropped 7 per cent to 41.8 per cent, the same as in the bad year of 1943. Fine Gael's share of the vote dropped slightly to 19.8 per cent although it gained one seat, giving it a total of thirty-one. The two Labour parties' overall share of the vote was more or less unchanged with 8.7 per cent for Labour and 2.6 per cent for National Labour. However, the number of Labour seats rose by six, while National Labour gained one. Labour had benefited from the Clann's overambitious decision to put up candidates in every constituency. While many of these candidates were defeated, their vote transfers went disproportionately to Labour candidates. This helps to explain why the Clann got 2 per cent more of the national vote than the two Labour parties – 13.2 per cent – while winning nine fewer seats, for a total of ten. Clann na Talmhan, which lost support to MacBride's party, saw its vote halved to 5.6 per cent and won seven seats.32

  Peter Mair has argued that Labour and the Clann faced a crucial choice: they could either allow Fianna Fáil to remain in office as a minority administration and allow themselves time to mobilize a radical alternative to the two main Civil War parties; or they could subordinate their differences in the interests of forming a broad anti-Fianna Fáil alliance, which would inevitably be dominated by Fine Gael.33 Although some in the Labour Party and the Clann had favoured a‘Republican–Labour–Farmer’ alliance against Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the failure of the Clann to make a major breakthrough ruled this out. Ironically, it was MacBride's own mistaken belief that the international situation was favourable to radical action on partition that made him eager to contemplate coalition with a party led by General Richard Mulcahy, a man whose role as commanding officer of the provisional government's military forces in the Civil War caused the strongly republican element in the Clann to regard him as a ‘bloody murderer’.34 Mulcahy had suggested a possible Fine Gael–Labour–Clann na Talmhan coalition during the 1944 election.35 At the time Lemass had denounced this on the basis that Labour would end up as the tail-end of a Fine Gael coalition implementing ‘anti-national policies’. While the first inter-party government would put an end to a decade of electoral decline for Fine Gael, it would do so partly on the basis of that party repudiating the less anglophobic and pro-Commonwealth themes of its discourse that Mulcahy had articulated in 1944.36

&nb
sp; Many people expected the inter-party government to break up almost immediately. It was, after all, based on an uneasy and purely expedient alliance between the conservative Fine Gael, the sectional Clann na Talmhan, two antagonistic Labour groups and the untried Clann na Poblachta. How would, for example, the desire of William Norton, the Labour Tánaiste, for a generous social security scheme be reconciled with the determination of Patrick McGilligan, Fine Gael's Finance Minister, to keep a close eye on government expenditure? Nevertheless, the government lasted from February 1948 to May 1951 and had some considerable achievements, particularly in the area of social policy.

  Mulcahy's easy acceptance of a Clann veto on his becoming Taoiseach and the filling of that position by John A. Costello, a barrister and former Attorney-General in his late fifties, eased the process of government formation. Costello had few of the resources for strong leadership. His personal style was more suited to the court room than to the political platform. He was not party leader, had no choice in who became a minister and had none of the patronage normally enjoyed by a Taoiseach. He therefore had in part to rely on his acknowledged skills as chairman of government meetings to deal with the numerous areas of potential inter-party conflict. He was helped by his good relations with MacBride, whom he had helped to persuade to take up constitutional politics through their common membership of the Law Library,37 and was also on friendly terms with leaders of the Labour Party through family connections and common involvement on hospital boards. But most significant in limiting the scope for conflict was his government's willingness to borrow to finance capital expenditure and a shared set of Catholic and nationalist values.