Ireland Since 1939 Read online

  The government's economic and social philosophy was conservative, reflecting in large part the straitened circumstances of the early years of state building, but also its ties with the Catholic professional and business class and in the countryside with the larger farmers who had a strong vested interest in the maintenance of the existing relationship with the British market. Its dominant personality was not its leader, William T. Cosgrave, but Kevin O'Higgins, the Minister for Home Affairs. O'Higgins was elitist, authoritarian, an enthusiast for the Commonwealth and an ardent believer in the moral virtues of balanced budgets; there was little surprise, therefore, when one of the early decisions of the government was to cut old-age pensions by a shilling a week. He was a strong supporter of the Department for Finance's imposition of best British Treasury practice. The government's hard-nosed image was encapsulated in the icy declaration by the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Patrick McGilligan, in 1924 that ‘People may have to die in this country and die of starvation.’41

  The Treatyites had been excoriated for their acceptance of British insistence that all members of the Dáil had to take an oath of allegiance to the British monarch, and the new government was condemned for other manifestations of its ‘pro-imperialist’ mentality. These included its use of the upper house, the Seanad, to make overtures to the Free State's rapidly dwindling Protestant population: Cosgrave had used his powers of nomination to the body to appoint sixteen former unionists. This, along with the existence of proportional representation, allowed the minority some voice in national politics but needs to be set against the radical shrinkage in the Protestant population, which occurred during the national revolution, and the increasingly Catholic ethos of public policy.

  The census of 1926 showed that almost a third of Protestants in the twenty-six counties had gone since 1911. The Catholic population of the new state was 2,751,269, while there were just 220,723 non-Catholics.42 Although the withdrawal of the British garrison after 1921 was in part responsible for the decline, the distinct sectarian edge of the national revolution was another. Thus in Cork, the most violent of all Irish counties during the War of Independence, Protestants made up 7 per cent of the population but 36 per cent of the 200 civilians shot by the IRA, and eighty-five of the 113 houses burnt belonged to Protestants. In just one night in April 1922 ten Cork Protestants were killed by the IRA allegedly as ‘spies’ or ‘informers’ but in reality as a sectarian reprisal for attacks on Catholics in Belfast. They included businessmen, farmers, a lawyer, a curate, a post-office clerk and a farm labourer. Hundreds of Protestants went into hiding or fled their homes, abandoning farms and shops. Many did not stop until they arrived in England or Belfast.43

  Cosgrave's desire to reach out to the minority was commendable, but its positive effects were undermined by his and his colleagues' eagerness to reflect Catholic morality in legislation. In 1925 divorce was outlawed, leading W. B. Yeats to warn the government, ‘You will create an impassable barrier between South and North.’44 Protestants, North and South, subsequently saw the creation of the Censorship Board in 1930 as further evidence of the Catholicization of the public sphere in the Free State. This and the state's commitment to the creation of a ‘Gaelic Civilization’, through making the Irish language compulsory for the Intermediate and Leaving Certificate and for jobs in the civil service, would do little to help the realization of the first objective of its party programme: ‘To secure the unity of Ireland and to unify the diverse elements of the Nation in a common bond of citizenship.’45

  For all its contradictions, the desire of Cosgrave's government to work out a more harmonious relationship with the North was sincere. This was reflected in its acceptance of the demise of the Boundary Commission in 1925. Under Article 12 of the Treaty, the Commission had been given the task, if Northern Ireland exercised its right to secede from the Free State, of determining the boundaries between the two states as specified by the ambiguous formula ‘in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as it may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions’.46 Held out by Lloyd George as a major tactical inducement to the Sinn Féin negotiators, it had encouraged them to hope for such substantial transfers of territory to the Free State that the North would be made unviable. However, when the Commission was eventually constituted in 1924, Lloyd George had departed the scene and Collins's death removed the Irish leader who would have been most able to press a tough position. With Craig firmly ensconced in power, refusing to nominate the North's representative but sure of the sympathy of the British government's substitute (the former editor of liberal unionist Northern Whig), the eventual report, which left the northern state virtually intact and even proposed some minor transfers from the Free State, was unsurprising, although still acutely embarrassing for Cosgrave.

  Rather than implement the report, the three governments signed a tripartite boundary agreement on 3 December 1925. It confirmed the existing boundary and released the Free State from the financial liabilities it had incurred under the Treaty. Cosgrave's attempt to obtain concessions from Craig in the agreement on the treatment of Catholics in the North failed, although Craig did speak of a ‘fair deal’ for the minority.47 The Council of Ireland, that provision for North-South co-operation under the Government of Ireland Act, had its powers transferred to the government of Northern Ireland, but the agreement provided for representatives of the two governments to meet to consider matters of mutual concern. The benign possibilities that might have flowed from Dublin's recognition of the northern state were not to be realized. In part this reflected the northern regime's too-easy indulgence of sectarianism. South of the border it was a product of the growing political strength of those who had been defeated in the Civil War.

  Fianna Fáil and the Republicanization of the South

  There is no doubt that Fianna Fail has been the dominant political force in modern Ireland. In the fifty-year period (1922–72) following the establishment of the Free State, the party held governmental office for no fewer than thirty-four years. For most of this period the party's success was intimately linked with its enigmatic and machiavellian leader, Eamon de Valera. Born in New York in 1882, de Valera had been sent back to Ireland at the age of two by his Irish mother when his Spanish father died. Brought up by relatives on a small farm in County Limerick, he was educated by the Christian Brothers and the Holy Ghost Fathers at Blackrock College, which produced many of the new state's religious and political elite. His early formation encouraged some of his key characteristics: industry, asceticism and self-discipline, accompanied by emotional distance and cold calculation. His rural petit bourgeois background, education and white-collar position made him typical of that generation of earnest young men and women whose nationalism had been deeply influenced by the movement to revive the Irish language. He joined the Gaelic League in 1908 and the Irish Volunteers in 1913. He was the oldest leader of the 1916 insurrection to survive, his death sentence being commuted because of his American birth.

  After the Rising he became the President of the ascendant Sinn Féin Party and titular head of the Irish Volunteers, later the Irish Republican Army. He was the main political opponent of the Treaty and, after the Civil War, of the anti-Treatyite Sinn Féin, which in the first election to the Dáil after the conflict in 1923 won 27.4 per cent of the vote and forty-four seats to Cumann na nGaedheal's 39 per cent and sixty-three seats.48 De Valera and his allies in the leadership of the anti-Treatyites were soon convinced that the new dispensation had enough popular legitimacy to make any attempt at its physical overthrow unthinkable, and this forced them into a parting of the ways with their more fundamentalist colleagues in Sinn Féin and the IRA, who wanted to maintain the twin policies of abstention from the Dáil and the underground preparation of the IRA for the overthrow of the states North and South.

  The name Fianna Fáil – meaning ‘Warriors of Destiny’ – and its subtitle ‘The Republican Party’ demonstrated de Valera's determination to monopolize the legacy of 1916 a
nd the national revolution. The first two aims set out in the party's constitution were the ending of partition and the restoration of the Irish language as the spoken language of the people.49 The nationalist and Gaelic dimensions of the party's project were crucial in de Valera's determination to bring as many of the anti-Treatyites as possible with the new formation. Although the two aims might have appeared contradictory, given northern Protestants' generally disdainful attitude to the Irish language, they were essential in defining Fianna Fáil not just as a mere political party but rather, as de Valera portrayed it, as a movement for national redemption.

  All this lofty nationalist idealism notwithstanding, the leaders of the new party demonstrated a ruthless pragmatism, a sure grasp of the material dimension of party appeal and a Leninist approach to organization and propaganda. The party was still committed not to take its seats in the Dáil until the oath of allegiance was removed. However, the assassination of Kevin O'Higgins, the government's strong man, by IRA dissidents in July 1927 forced de Valera's hand. Emergency legislation enforced the oath as a sine qua non of participation in constitutional politics and Fianna Fáil complied, telling their supporters that ‘hardheaded common sense is not incompatible with true nationalist idealism.’50

  Once it began to participate fully in constitutional politics, Fianna Fáil adopted a left-of-centre social and economic programme, opposing the government's conservatism and not simply its alleged pro-British orientation. In its first electoral contest in June 1927, Fianna Fail had been attacked by the leader of the Labour Party for allegedly drawing twelve of its fifteen manifesto pledges from earlier Labour programmes.51 Its electoral success was based on more than stealing Labour's clothes, for from its inception the party's leadership had poured all their energies into building a formidable political machine. At the core of the party-building process were the numerous old IRA companies that were transformed into local cumainn (branches). The famed discipline of the party, together with its lack of serious debate and the authoritarian tinge to its internal culture, derived from this militarist component in its formation. Founded in March 1926, the party had 460 cumainn by November, and by the summer of 1927 it had 1,000.52 By contrast, Cumann na nGaedheal never grasped the possibilities inherent in mass organization, and many of its leaders maintained a patrician contempt for party branches, which were seen as a hindrance to the work of government. This elitist disdain for the demands of a competitive party system combined with the government's conservative economic and social policies to ease Fianna Fáil's road to power.

  Although de Valera would periodically claim that he had been deeply influenced by the ideas of the socialist leader and 1916 martyr James Connolly and the party's progressive image, Fianna Fáil cultivated business support from its earliest days, promising a more radical regime of tariff protection and proclaiming its concern to govern in the national interest. It was with the support of those whom the party's national organizer referred to as its 200 or so ‘wealthy friends’,53 together with their rich American friends, that the party was able to launch a daily paper, the Irish Press, in 1931.

  Although Seán Lemass, architect of the party's electoral hegemony in urban areas, boasted of the ‘slightly constitutional’ nature of Fianna Fáil, de Valera demonstrated that there were strict limits to his willingness to accommodate those republicans who refused to accept the new constitutional order he set out to create when the party took office for the first time in 1932. Many members of the IRA had deserted the organization to join Fianna Fáil as it emerged as a radical nationalist challenger to what it depicted as the reactionary pro-British policies of Cumann na nGaedheal. The leadership of the IRA had instructed its members to work and vote for the party in the elections of 1932 and 1933, and the first two years of the new government saw an increase in IRA militancy and in the bitterness of political and ideological conflicts.

  The new government was faced with an economy already suffering from the shock to the country's exports delivered by the Great Depression. The all-important cattle trade was experiencing major problems, and added to these economic concerns was a widespread fear of de Valera's ‘communistic’ agrarian policies amongst the larger farmers. It was from this class that most of the support for the short-lived Blueshirt movement derived: an unstable mixture of civil war animosities, fascist sympathies and economic self-interest.

  Unionist newspapers would make much of the street clashes between Blueshirts and the IRA in the 1932–4 period, depicting the South as in a state of burgeoning chaos. In fact de Valera showed a willingness to use repressive measures in the form of military tribunals against what were depicted as opposing sets of extremists. After offering the IRA a number of carrots, from mass releases of prisoners in 1932 to employment in the state's security apparatus, and failing to extinguish its elitist vision of itself as the ‘real’ government of Ireland, he did not hesitate to outlaw the organization in 1936.

  Like Craig, de Valera proved much more successful in marginalizing political challengers from the extremes than he did in delivering on the economic and social dimensions of his political project. As with his northern counterpart, constitutional questions would prove an important means of compensating for economic and social failures. He waged a relentless war of attrition against the vestiges of imperial subordination in the Treaty: the abolition of the oath of allegiance, the downgrading of the position of the Governor-General and the abolition of the right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The process culminated in the promulgation of a new Constitution, adopted by referendum on 1 July 1937. The Governor-General was replaced with an elected President, while the already abolished Free State Senate was replaced with a vocationally selected body with much reduced powers. The tonal shift was completed by renaming the Prime Minister, known as President of the Executive Council under the Free State Constitution, as the Taoiseach, meaning ‘Chief’ in Irish. However, much more significant were Articles 2 and 3, which laid territorial and jurisdictional claim to Northern Ireland. Together with the Constitution's indebtedness to Catholic social theory, a ban on divorce and, in Article 44, its recognition of the ‘special position’ of the Catholic Church, it deepened the North–South divide. Despite this, de Valera continued to pressurize the British government to reopen the partition issue and attempted to use the resolution of other unfinished business from the Treaty settlement to achieve this.

  The refusal of de Valera in July 1932 to continue to transfer to the British Exchequer the annuity payments due from Irish farmers under the various British Land Acts provoked retaliatory British duties on Irish exports. The subsequent economic war, together with the already significant effects of the slump in international demand, saw the value of the most important single item in exports, live cattle, decline from £19.7 million in 1929 to £.1 million in 1934.54 The economic war and the adverse international conditions served to accelerate and at the same time to justify Fianna Fáil's own economic and social project, which it liked to portray, at least in the early 1930s, as broadly ‘progressive’. In the countryside it stood for a generalized agrarian radicalism. In order to break Irish dependence on the British market, it was argued that tillage production should be favoured over a strong emphasis on livestock. Tillage was to be encouraged to meet domestic grain demand and help make the country self-sufficient in food.The party's rhetoric depicted the small farmer rather than the large rancher as the stable basis of the Irish nation. The Land Commission was to be used to redistribute land on a large scale to small farmers and landless men. As many families as possible were to be settled on the land. Radical agrarianism was complemented by a strong commitment to industrialize through the vigorous use of import tariffs and quotas. The protected home market was to be saved as much as possible for native capitalists by the Control of Manufactures legislation to limit the power of foreign businessmen. The programme was given a left-of-centre tone by a commitment to welfarist policies in areas including pensions, unemployment insurance a
nd housing. De Valera, who was not averse to summoning up the ghost of James Connolly, the socialist martyr of the 1916 insurrection, had gone as far as declaring that his government's objective was to end the conditions that had forced hundreds of thousands of Irishmen to emigrate since the Great Famine of the 1840s.55 By the end of the decade, if some of the undoubted achievements of the Fianna Fáil project were visible, so too were its limitations.

  This was particularly clear in rural Ireland, where the government's agrarian radicalism sharply diminished as fear of a decline in living standards led to a growing emphasis on the need to trade with the nearest large market. In 1935 a Coal–Cattle pact was agreed with Britain, and from 1936 onwards there was a steady reintegration of Irish agriculture into the British market. The impact of Fianna Fáil efforts to alter radically Irish agriculture was slight. By 1939 the tillage acreage was a mere 2 per cent above its 1930 level, and cattle raising remained the dominant enterprise despite a severe price decline. The flight from the land continued, and the decline of the small farmer class was not arrested. The pace of land redistribution had slowed considerably by the late 1930s. Delegates to Fianna Fáil's annual conference in 1938 complained about the government's desertion of its small farmer constituency and a new political party, Clann na Talmhan (‘Children of the Land’), was created that year as an expression of small-farmer discontent,56 which was strong along the western seaboard and in the south-west, where there was a concentration of small farmers working poorer land in districts that were particularly hard hit by emigration.