Ireland Since 1939 Read online

  By 1938 Fianna Fáil, which had come to power with a disproportionate reliance on the votes of small farmers and with a regional support base that was stronger in the west than in the centre and east of the state, had begun to acquire the status of a majority ‘catch-all’ party with an extremely wide and diverse electoral constituency. Its loss of some electoral support from disappointed farmers and landless men had been diminished by the 1933 Unemployment Assistance Act, which for the first time provided support to small farmers and farm labourers. These groups together with the urban working class were also beneficiaries of the most significant of the government's social improvements: a crash slum-clearance and house-building programme that led to the construction or renovation of 132,000 houses between 1932 and 1942. An average of 12,000 houses a year were built with state aid between those years, compared with fewer than 2,000 a year between 1923 and 1931. Housing was one area of social expenditure in which de Valera's government clearly outperformed Craigavon's.57

  Central to Fianna Fáil's. electoral success were those economic and welfare policies that allowed it to appeal to both the working class and an expanding manufacturing bourgeoisie. Although there is some dispute about whether official figures that show industrial employment rising from 162,000 in 1931 to 217,000 in 1938 may in part be a product of improved enumeration procedures,58 even the sceptics agree that a substantial increase did occur.59 This was complemented by the government's more frequent use of publicly owned corporations when private enterprise was unwilling or unable to develop national resources. These included an Irish Sugar Company, a Turf Development Board, an Industrial Credit Company, the Irish Tourist Board and a national airline, Aer Lingus. As more and more of the actual or aspirant manufacturing class shifted their political loyalties to a party once perceived as practically ‘Bolshevist’, the urban working class saw in the Fianna Fail government a welcome break with the conservatism and pro-rural bias of its predecessor. Although some of the more radical impulses of Seán Lemass as Minister for Industry and Commerce were countered by the formidable conservatism of the officials in the Department of Finance, supported by the Minister Seán MacEntee, Lemass did much in the decade to establish his claim that the existence of Fianna Fail made the Irish Labour Party unnecessary. Some of the leaders of the Irish trade union movement increasingly saw Fianna Fáil as an ally. As the membership of trade unions affiliated to the Irish Trade Union Congress grew from 95,000 in 1933 to 161,000 in 1938, this was unsurprising.60 The pro-labour bias of the government was also perceived in measures designed to improve working conditions through the introduction of Joint Industrial Councils, Trade Boards and the Conditions of Employment Act (1936).

  But the gains of this activism were almost exhausted by 1938. The limits of import-substitution industrialization on the basis of a small home market had been reached by the end of the 1930s. Consumers often paid for the undoubted employment gains with higher prices and inferior products. Small-scale and inefficient production meant much of the new industry would be incapable of selling abroad. What extra jobs were created were insufficient to absorb rural depopulation, and unemployment had reached 145,000 in January 1936.61 The problem was in part a reflection of the fact that emigration, the traditional solution to the Irish economy's inability to employ its people, had been blocked by the Great Depression. Despite de Valera's claim in a speech to Irish emigrants in London in 1933 that ‘We shall not rest until we have lifted the doom of exile which for so long has lain upon hundreds of thousands of Irishmen in every generation’,62 there was a major resumption of emigration to the United Kingdom from 1935 once that country's economy began to show signs of recovery.63

  The Irish Labour Party hoped to benefit from the dissatisfaction of those who had looked to Fianna Fail for a more radical set of policies on both the economy and the national question. Created in 1912 by the Irish trade unions, it had faced the daunting task of development in a political system where the predominant fault line in the 1920s and 1930s reflected a national and not a class issue. During the Civil War, Labour had deplored the excesses of both sides while trying to emphasize the primacy of socio-economic issues. In the 1920s the party continued to decry the concentration on constitutional issues left over from the Treaty and the Civil War. Before Fianna Fáil committed itself to constitutional politics and entered the Dáil, Labour was able to establish itself as a moderate, reformist alternative to Cumann na nGaedheal. In the election of 1923 it won 10.9 per cent of the vote and fourteen seats. In the next election, in June 1927, its support had risen to 12.6 per cent and twenty-two seats out of 153. However, once Fianna Fáil entered the Dáil the party was faced with an even more formidable competitor for the working-class vote. For, although the small size of the South's industrial working class (14.6 per cent of the workforce in 1936) 64 militated against the development of the party, it was also the case that even within this restricted constituency Labour was not the hegemonic force.

  Most noticeable was its stark weakness in the two main urban centres, Cork and Dublin. From the 1920s until the 1960s, Labour's strongholds were in a number of largely agricultural counties in the east and south-east, where the state's agrarian proletariat was concentrated. Neglected by Fianna Fáil, whose, agrarian policies were fixated on the needs of the small farmers, these labourers constituted a third of the agricultural workforce in twelve counties, and it was in these counties, including Wexford, Waterford and Tipperary, that Labour's most reliable support existed. Elsewhere the party's structure and plodding concentration on material issues narrowed its appeal.

  Until 1930 it maintained its organic link with the trade union movement: of its forty-four candidates in the June 1927 election, twenty-seven were trade union officials. The trade union movement, which had expanded during the 1916–21 period, was badly hit by the depressed economic conditions of the 1920s, and its urban heartland in Dublin was seriously damaged by a bitter conflict within the country's largest union, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU). At the heart of the dispute was the role of James Larkin, who had founded the union in 1908 and incarnated the spirit of intransigent revolutionary syndicalism that had manifested itself in his partnership with the Marxist founder of the Irish Labour Party, James Connolly, and in his charismatic leadership of the workers during the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913. Out of Ireland from 1914 to 1923, he returned to a radically different situation but showed no inclination to scale down what William O'Brien and the other moderate organization men who ran the ITGWU considered his unrealistically militant vision of trade union struggle. Bitter internal wranglings, a court case and finally Larkin's expulsion from the ITGWU in 1924 led to his formation of a rival union, the Workers' Union of Ireland.

  Larkin's mythic status amongst the Dublin working class meant that the dispute had severe implications for Labour in the city. The ITGWU leadership's involvement in the party led to a bitter Larkinite assault on Labour's timidity and its moderation on constitutional issues. Larkin had been a strong opponent of the Treaty, and he echoed IRA taunts about the party's English leader, Thomas Johnson, being an imperialist who could not understand Irish nationalism.65 Labour did move closer to Fianna Fail from 1927 onwards, making it clear that it would be prepared to consider a coalition agreement with Fianna Fáil if that party entered the Dáil.66 This strategy simply confused some of its supporters, while others who had been attracted by its pro-Treaty stance now deserted it. In the September 1927 election, the first after de Valera led his supporters into the Dáil, Labour's support dropped to 9 per cent and thirteen seats as the electorate polarized between the two major parties. It did particularly badly in Dublin, where a Larkinite assault resulted in Johnson losing his seat.

  As long as Fianna Fáil's promises of a progressive, republican project were untested by office or, as in the early 1930s, in the first flush of realization, Labour faced a real danger of obliteration as a distinctive political force, as was evident in its electoral performance in 1932 when it won a me
re 7.7 per cent.67 Supporting de Valera's minority government in 1932 brought further decline as Fianna Fáil appealed for a secure majority with which to implement its programme, and in the snap 1933 election Fianna Fáil's support rose from 44.5 per cent to 49.7 per cent, while Labour was reduced to its worst-ever performance with a mere 5.5 per cent. Its new leader was a prominent trade unionist, William Norton, General Secretary of the Post Office Workers' Union. Norton's leadership was a sharp break with the past. He had played a central role in the severing of the link with the unions in 1930 to enable the party to appeal beyond such a sectional constituency. A convinced nationalist, he was friendly with de Valera and ditched Labour's neutrality on constitutional issues in favour of a straightforward acceptance of mainstream republicanism.68 There were signs that as the limits of Fianna Fail's social radicalism became clear, Norton's left-republicanism might bring gains. In the 1937 election Labour's support rose to 10.3 per cent and thirteen seats. Yet de Valera's capacity to exploit the unfinished business of Anglo-Irish relations to marginalize any Labour challenge was far from exhausted. Here de Valera's triumph in the Anglo-Irish Agreement on 25 April 1938 was decisive. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was determined to do as much as possible, short of the coercion of the North, to put relations with de Valera on a new and amicable basis. In part this reflected a concern to end the bitterness of centuries, but he also saw success as a means of providing an example of appeasement in action.69 The centrepiece of the Agreement was the return of those ports that Britain had retained control of under the Treaty: Cobh, Berehaven and Lough Swilly. Chamberlain's hope that de Valera might consider a defence treaty to allow Britain access to them in times of war proved illusory. The economic war was ended on terms extremely favourable to Ireland: the British agreed to drop their demand for a settlement of the financial dispute over the land annuities from £26 million to £10 million. Ireland was granted the same trade terms as other dominions, with the result that, while UK exports to Ireland were still subject to restrictions, Irish exports gained free entry to the British market.70 British attempts to press Belfast's demand for lower duties on Ulster exports to the South were rebuffed with the claim that such a concession was impossible, given the oppression of Catholics in the North. For the first time since 1922, inquiries into the activities of the Stormont regime were carried out by the Home Office and the Dominions Office.71

  Capitalizing on his triumph, de Valera called an election for June 1938 focusing on how the Agreement would make Irish neutrality possible in world conflict and claiming that he was much more optimistic about an end to partition than he had been in 1932.72 The result was a major victory for Fianna Fáil, which won over 50 per cent of the vote, its share rising from 45.2 per cent to 51.9 per cent. As J.J. Lee has pointed out, de Valera was wise to seize the opportunity offered by the Agreement to snatch his election triumph. A deteriorating economic and financial situation was reflected in a harsh budget in May 1939.73 The inquiries into the allegations of Stormont's ill-treatment of Catholics had produced a critical report by the Dominions Office: ‘it is everywhere inimical to good and impartial administration where government and party are as closely united as in Northern Ireland.’ However, the Home Office line of defence of the regime won out, in large part because Spender, as head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, could point to increasing numbers of Catholic applications to the NICS.74 Thus, despite the moribund nature of the northern government, it appeared that there was little chance of London destabilizing it, unless de Valera was prepared to barter the neutrality policy that was so popular in the South.

  2. War and the Welfare State

  Nationalists and the Second World War

  The attitudes of northern nationalists to the war were heavily influenced by their fraught relation with the state. However, there were important differences of approach that reflected the longer-term division between the Nationalist Party and Sinn Féin. In the early years of the new regime nationalists in Belfast and the east of the province had been more inclined to support participation in parliament as a means of highlighting injustices and pressuring for redress, particularly in the area of education. Living in areas where Catholics were in a minority, and with the bitter experience of the inter-communal violence of the 1920–22 period, they were less likely to be supporters of republican militancy. The influence of Joe Devlin's constitutional and reformist populism had been decisive there. Support for abstentionism and Sinn Féin was much stronger in the west and south of Northern Ireland, where nearness to the border and the existence of local Catholic majorities had initially encouraged hopes of a strategy of exit from the state through repartition. Most northern republicans had been pro-Treaty and after the collapse of the Boundary Commission in 1925 had moved towards an uneasy coalition with the Devlinites and the Catholic Church to adopt a policy of qualified and fitful participation in the northern parliament. A new organization, the National League of the North, was set up in 1928 with Devlin as President and Cahir Healy, a Fermanagh insurance agent who had been a founding member of Sinn Féin, as Secretary.1 Committed to the ‘national reunification of Ireland’, the new organization's initial tendency to support Devlin's policy of participation was from the start unpopular with a sizeable section of those from the pro-Treaty Sinn Féin tradition, and as the 1930s progressed the support for abstentionism grew.

  Devlin's own participation in parliament had only ever been a partial and qualified one, the main purpose of which was to campaign for the defence of Catholic education in the North. On this question at least he had the support of the bitterly anti-unionist Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Joseph MacRory, and the other northern bishops. The universal concern of the Catholic Church that it control all aspects of the education of Catholic children was in Northern Ireland complicated by the distrust and antagonism felt by the hierarchy towards the new state. The liberal Minister of Education, Lord Londonderry, had, in the Education Act of 1923, tried to refashion the North's education system along more integrated lines by excluding religious instruction while at the same time creating three classes of elementary school, each enjoying a different level of financial assistance. Only those that were fully controlled by local authority education committees were fully funded by the Ministry of Education for salaries, running costs and capital expenditure. Those that accepted a management committee with four members chosen by the school trustees and two representatives of the education committee received all the cost of salaries, half the running costs and a discretionary amount towards capital costs. The ‘four and two’ committees were rejected as the thin end of the wedge of total control by a Protestant state, and thus Catholic schools became part of the ‘voluntary’ sector, where the Ministry paid the salaries but there was no contribution to running and capital costs. Lord Londonderry's genuine but abstract liberalism he had naively considered the ‘four and two’ committees as a compromise attractive to both the Protestant and Catholic Churches actually disadvantaged the Catholic Church, which lost the grants it had received under the pre-partition provisions amounting to two thirds of its building and equipment costs. Pressure from the Protestant Churches and the Orange Order forced the government to modify the 1923 Act to ensure that schools controlled by the local authorities were ‘safe for Protestant children’ by providing for representation of Protestant clergy on appointments committees and by installing religious education. As compensation, the 1930 Education Act provided Catholic schools with capital grants of 50 per cent.2

  The 1930 Act had come as a result of a threat by the Catholic bishops to take legal action against the 1923 Act, which they claimed violated the provision of the Government of Ireland Act forbidding the endowment of any Church. This victory, compared to the futile manoeuvrings of Nationalist politicians, encouraged a process by which the Catholic population of Northern Ireland increasingly focused its practical horizons on building a distinct civil society within a Protestant-dominated state. The inter-war period had seen a prolife
ration of Catholic organizations: the Catholic Arts Guild, the Catholic Young Men's Society, the Legion of Mary, the Catholic Boy Scouts and even a Catholic Billiards League. At a time when the openly proclaimed policy of the government was that the state was a Protestant one, the seeming dead-end of constitutional or semi-constitutional opposition, together with the flourishing Catholic *state within a state’, tended to increase the influence of abstentionist sentiment within nationalist politics.

  The victory of Fianna Fail in the 1932 election had strengthened republican optimism. IRA membership in the North rose dramatically while northern supporters of Fianna Fail such as Eamon Donnelly, a former republicanabstentionist MP for Armagh, and pockets of ‘anti-Treaty republicans’ such as the National Defence Association in the Newry and south Armagh area, began to campaign vigorously against any recognition of the northern parliament. In the 1933 Stormont election the National League's candidate in south Armagh was defeated by a republican-abstentionist, and Eamon de Valera was nominated and returned unopposed by Nationalists in South Down.3 Devlin himself saw his majority in Belfast Central cut into by a republican prisoner, and after his death in 1934 northern nationalism lacked any substantial figure who could have attempted to bring its fractious elements together.

  The 1935 riots in Belfast inevitably strengthened northern Catholics’ sense of themselves as a besieged minority within a hostile society and with a government that was, at best, indifferent to their fate.4 Those such as Devlin's successor as MP for Belfast Central, the Catholic barrister T. J. Campbell, who continued to favour attendance at Stormont, were increasingly overshadowed by supporters of abstentionism either as a tactic or as a fundamental matter of principle. The government had responded to de Valera's success in the 1933 election by introducing legislation that required all candidates in Stormont elections to make a declaration that they would take their seat if elected. Republicans were still able to pressurize Healy and the other Nationalist MP for Fermanagh to step down in favour of abstentionist candidates in the 1935 Westminster election, but Healy was strongly opposed to any attempt to adopt a similar strategy for Stormont. However, northern sympathizers of Fianna Fáil led by Eamon Donnelly, now a Fianna Fáil TD, favoured a radical strategy of boycotting Stormont while allowing northern Nationalists to take seats in the Dáil. In the 1938 Stormont election the result of these divisions was that in three Nationalist constituencies the local organizations refused to nominate candidates, and the seats were lost, reducing Nationalist representation to eight MPs.