Resistance to compulsory tillage within the farming community reflected the fact that cultivation was much harder without fertiliser, lime, chemicals and tractors. Irish farmers were compelled to produce more without modern productive aids. This was primarily a consequence of the British trade squeeze of 1941 but it was also, significantly, a consequence of Seán Lemass’ failure to stockpile adequate reserves of essential agricultural chemicals and machinery at an early stage in the Emergency.63 Many farmers would have concurred with James Dillon’s contention that ‘tillage without manure is not farming. It is mining – i.e., taking the fertility out of the soil without putting anything back.’64 Moreover much land, particularly in the west, was unsuitable for wheat growing.65 As The McGillycuddy of the Reeks, a County Kerry farmer, argued in a 1939 Seanad debate, compulsory tillage took little account of the variations in land nationwide and the ability of farmers to pay for seed, labour or implements. It was little more than an indifferent instruction to the farmer to ‘go and till as much land as I require you to do’.66
During the Emergency the conflict between small farmer and government was heightened by the farming community’s recurrent perception that they were viewed as small and insignificant by an arrogant and unthinking Dublin bureaucracy. This opinion was not specific to Ireland, of course, and neither was it entirely justified. The emphasis given to tillage was not only because of the demand from urban dwellers for bread but also because the extraordinarily high freight charges for maize and cattle feed greatly increased the cost of rearing cattle during the Emergency.67 As an incentive to farmers to grow more wheat, the government increased the fixed price of wheat with every hike in the tillage quota and announced the availability of credit to help with the demands of the order. This ensured – at least – that obliging farmers received some recompense for their efforts.
Nonetheless, farmers in independent Ireland had a miserable Emergency compared to those in Northern Ireland, where Basil Brooke’s Ministry of Agriculture took over control and distribution of agricultural machinery. In the short course of the Emergency old farming practices were substantially overhauled. As a County Down farmer put it, ‘people said that a tractor couldn’t plough like horses ... but sure the tractor was ploughing three times as much; when the horse is working he’s not eating, but when a tractor’s working it’s eating an awful lot’.68 Unfortunately for Ryan, widespread mechanisation of Ireland’s farms was not an option since the Department of Supplies was wrong-footed by Britain reneging on trade guarantees for agricultural machinery.69 Lemass’ department also, rather irresponsibly, continued to allow the export of machinery to Britain in the first fourteen months of the Emergency, only securing a paltry barter of agricultural machinery for beer in the closing stages of the war.70 Between 1939 and 1944 the number of tractors in the six counties rose from 550 to 7,000.71 By contrast, the horse was still very much in evidence in the neutral state. As the official history of Northern Ireland in the war years smugly notes, ‘to go south was to be transported in a matter of minutes from the twentieth to the seventeenth century’.72 Due to the British Government’s war effort, farmers in the northern statelet also had more access to fertilisers and phosphates; and, when the tillage ceiling was reached in 1943, Brooke was able to relax tillage quotas and extend the use of fertilisers.73 A combination of poor planning and British duplicity ensured Jim Ryan could not use similar solutions to ease the tillage burden.74
Compulsory tillage during the Emergency disproportionately affected farmers in the lower socio-economic bands. Despite the expansion of the urban population during the Emergency, Ireland remained a nation of smallholders. According to the 1936 census, half of Ireland’s working population was employed in agriculture and farms were small: about a quarter of them were under 15 acres.75 A 1941 source claimed that 60 per cent of Irish farms were 30 acres or less.76 In a Dáil debate of 1944 Oliver J. Flanagan asserted that the compulsory tillage scheme had not affected the ‘ordinary farmer’, but had succeeded in targeting the ‘rancher’, ‘one of the greatest enemies that we have in this country’.77 On the contrary, the evidence suggests that ‘ordinary’ farmers – whose farms were invariably unmechanised – were affected disproportionately by legislation that applied to farmers with as little as five acres.
Perhaps the government was unwilling to offend the patrons of the Golfing Union of Ireland, but during the six years of the Emergency the country’s links were spared the plough and spade, though in 1917 Irish golf courses had not escaped compulsory tillage.78 In Northern Ireland, by contrast, not even the lawns of Queen’s University or Stormont were exempt. Newsreel footage in 1940 showed the Northern Ireland Minister of Agriculture Basil Brooke (Lord Brookeborough) overseeing the ploughing of Stormont with newly imported tractors.79 Even Brooke’s own country estate was subject to tillage regulations. Lady Brookeborough recorded in her diary ‘1941 – much ploughing last year ... arable acreage 90 acres ... have now one Ferguson, one Ford/Ferguson and only two horses’.80
The front cover of the Dublin Opinion from February 1942. The magazine regularly parodied the stringency of the government’s compulsory tillage order.
Within the cabinet, it was Lemass who favoured land dispossession most strongly. In a 1944 memorandum he made a number of observations about Ireland’s agricultural economy, declaring himself in favour of reorganising the entire sector.81 Citing the high number of uneconomic holdings in the country, he argued that ‘land policy must be geared towards ownership based on ability to work the land’.82 Ominously, Lemass wanted the seizure of farmland by the state to continue after the Emergency, to complete the ‘elimination of incompetent or lazy farmers’.83 Lemass’ enthusiasm for widespread dispossessions was probably only matched by that of James Larkin, the trade union leader and socialist deputy, who urged that any farmer who ‘will not farm scientifically’ be dispossessed by the state.84
This keenness to dispossess was challenged, however, by the man responsible for enforcement of tillage orders. Ryan had consistently defended such expropriations in the Dáil, but he privately quelled Lemass’ enthusiasm for land dispossession. During the Emergency such displacements had proved ‘a delicate and difficult matter’.85 Ryan was perturbed by the deep-seated resentment against the coercive measures used by the department to increase the wheat yield.86 In a further admission of the robust resistance that compulsory tillage had met with, he warned that if displacement was pursued on the same scale post-war there would be ‘a danger of serious agitation and public disturbance’.87 Ryan, who possessed not only a greater understanding of farming than either Lemass or Larkin, but also a more evident distaste than the two Dublin TDs for any scheme redolent of Soviet-style agricultural collectivisation, recognised that dispossessions were viewed by the farming community as hostile encroachment showing a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of farming. ‘Unlike coal miners’, farmers did not ‘slack’ having attained a certain income, he contended.88 ‘There are a number of holdings in every parish falling below a reasonable productive capacity due to some fault on the part of the present farmer,’ Ryan conceded. But in these cases a young family member ‘would in time pull the place together and become a first class farmer’. It would, therefore, be ‘unthinkable to disturb the family in such cases no matter how much below the desired standard the farm might be’.89
Fianna Fáil’s powerful message of national unity, appealing to people to pull together to avert famine while reminding them that the geopolitical inferno causing the hardship was not of its doing, inspired many people in the Irish countryside to redouble their labour in the national interest. Commenting in 1944 on Ireland’s ‘essential planning problem’, a contributor to the Jesuit periodical Studies noted: ‘Except in a purely Totalitarian state no government could ... apply the regimentation necessary to ensure that the farming community on a whole would reorganise itself’, but added ‘except as a last resort in a national emergency’.90 Whereas the majority of Ireland’s farming commu
nity and agricultural labour force similarly regarded this ‘regimentation’ during the Emergency as a ‘last resort’ – a painful but exceptional necessity of wartime conditions – to Lemass, it seems, it was an exciting opportunity.
Lemass’ mindset was at loggerheads not only with Catholic social theory but with most people’s sensitivities at the time. The clash between Catholic social thought and the state’s seemingly coercive methods of enforcement in the countryside never occurred, however. The 1943 Report of the Commission on Vocational Organisation favoured replacing ‘the state’s despotic control of production and labour’ with ‘voluntary collaboration for the good of the nation at a critical time’.91 If the government’s intention to ensure fair food distribution and increase agricultural production sat comfortably with this desire in theory, the same cannot be said of its methods. Nonetheless, the commission overlooked the elephant in the corner: compulsory tillage. Nor is there evidence of a major clash between the Catholic hierarchy and the government over compulsory tillage. In large part this can be attributed to assurances of support for the scheme that Lemass secured from John Charles McQuaid, the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, in early 1941.92 Perhaps as an unspoken quid pro quo, despite their quest for greater agricultural productivity during the Emergency, Lemass and his developmentalist93 allies in government did not antagonise Catholic sensitivities to the home and family so far as to advocate a Women’s Land Army.94
That the land issue and agrarianism were at the heart of the independence struggle has led some commentators to speculate that agrarian radicalism died with the formation of the Irish state following the end of the Civil War in 1923.95 This conviction was repeated by Farmers’ Party senator Patrick Baxter in a 1939 Seanad debate. Farmers, he warned, had ‘never got a chance to pull themselves together since 1923’. This recent peace in the countryside would only continue ‘if Ministers approach this problem of getting increased production from the land...without applying the big stick from buildings in Merrion Street’.96 From 1939 onwards, though, many farmers perceived the big stick in the form of compulsory tillage. The growth of the Irish agrarian political party, Clann na Talmhan, during the Emergency is evidence of the re-emergence of bottom-up rural political agitation, even within state structures. The rise of Clann na Talmhan has been attributed to Emergency shortages in feed, fertiliser and fuel, and the conviction that fixed prices and rates were unfair to farmers.97 The incompatibility of all these factors with compulsory tillage requirements was repeatedly highlighted by Clann na Talmhan before and after their strong showing in the 1943 election.98 Resistance to the scheme was certainly, therefore, a significant and overlooked reason for the party’s growth at this time.
The compulsory tillage drive of the 1940s has never been the subject of serious historical analysis. Food shortages ensured that the farmer – the archetypal hard-working, frugal man who, to quote a Victorian bishop, was ‘the purest, the holiest, and the most innocent of society ... high enough in the social scale to be above extreme want and below the reach of the seductive and demoralising influences of great wealth and affluence’ – was again accorded primacy by the political and religious establishment.99 The subjects of this deeply patronising rhetorical embrace, Irish small farmers, responded by raising the amount of land under corn crops from a five-year average of just under a million acres (1935–9) to one and a half million acres (1940–4).100 As Ryan, in a typical invocation of the Famine era, contended: ‘you have to go back nearly one hundred years to beat that record’.101 While perhaps not the Stakhanovite effort desired by Lemass, this remarkable increase was achieved by the country’s farmers despite the absence of modern productive aids on many farms. Meanwhile, though never reaching a collective pitch of ‘notorious anarchy’, the individual and collective resistance of a significant minority of farmers provides evidence that agrarian dissidence, far from being dead and buried by 1923, was alive and well during the Emergency.
11
‘CONDITIONAL CONSTITUTIONALISTS’1
The reaction of Fianna Fáil grass-roots to the IRA border campaign, 1956–62
STEPHEN KELLY
Though not strictly speaking either riotous or based on a one-off assembly, the reaction of Fianna Fáil grass-roots to the IRA border campaign of 1956 to 1962 does enable us to explore the subculture of popular revolt. The IRA’s renewed campaign in Northern Ireland exposed a major fault-line between Fianna Fáil’s leadership and its grass-roots supporters on the use of physical force to secure Irish unity. For a small but vocal minority of Fianna Fáil members, the party hierarchy’s crushing of the IRA border campaign signalled that the ‘Republican Party’ had abandoned its primary objective of a united Ireland. While most Fianna Fáil members rejected the use of violence, there were a small number of supporters, including locally elected county councillors, who were unwilling to condemn as illegitimate the use of force to secure Irish re-unification and who could be termed ‘conditional constitutionalists’.
During a seven-year interlude under the leadership of Éamon de Valera and then Seán Lemass, the Fianna Fáil hierarchy desperately sought to keep control of the party’s official policy towards the IRA. From County Cork to County Donegal, disgruntled Fianna Fáil grass-roots members threatened to resign from the party in protest because of the perceived ‘draconian’ suppression of the IRA. Ultimately, under de Valera and subsequently Lemass the Fianna Fáil party did manage to retain control of policy towards the IRA, which eventually announced an end to its border campaign in 1962.
Nevertheless, the episode demonstrated that, for some members of Fianna Fáil, ideological aspirations for a united Ireland outweighed their loyalty to their party. What they saw as the ruthless suppression of the IRA, coupled with the Fianna Fáil leadership’s failure to secure Irish re-unification in the forty years since partition in 1920, brought them to breaking point. Many Fianna Fáil members viewed the IRA campaign as merely a continuation of the long quest to secure an independent, united Ireland. Indeed, for some Fianna Fáil supporters Ireland’s recent history – the 1916 Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War – was justification that ‘political’ violence was a legitimate course of action.
The attack by the IRA on 12 November 1956 on six customs posts along a 70-mile section of the Irish border in counties Armagh and Fermanagh signalled a new border offensive, later named ‘Operation Harvest’. The method was to be guerrilla warfare, with an ambitious plan to use flying columns from the Republic of Ireland to attack targets in Northern Ireland. In December of that year, the IRA began further attacks on key military positions of the Northern Ireland security forces: on 11–12 December, Counties Armagh and Fermanagh were again the targets, and a BBC transmitter site and the courthouse in Magherafelt, County Derry were also attacked. On 14 December, the IRA exploded four bombs outside Lisnaskea Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) police station in County Fermanagh.2 The renewed IRA campaign shook the foundations of Fianna Fáil and demonstrated how far a minority in the organisation openly sympathised with the use of physical force to help achieve Irish unity. Since the early 1930s, de Valera had maintained an almost missionary zeal against the use of physical force to this end. At Fianna Fáil Ard Fheiseanna (annual party conferences) and in Dáil Éireann he habitually spoke of the ‘futility’3 and ‘impracticality’ of violence.4 For a vocal anti-partitionist wing of Fianna Fáil, however, de Valera’s campaign against the use of force to win re-unification was traditionally greeted with outward contempt; grass-roots delegates at Ard Fheiseanna regularly demanded that the Irish government ‘invade the six counties’.5
From the mid-1950s Fianna Fáil headquarters in Dublin’s Mount Street increasingly received letters from despondent local supporters criticising the Fianna Fáil leadership’s willingness to back the second inter-party government’s suppression of the IRA. In early 1955, an agitated party member from County Wexford demanded that, in view of Fianna Fáil’s ‘republican outlook’, the party should support the IRA
and use ‘every opportunity as forcibly as possible’ as a means of resolving partition.6 In March 1955, a concerned party follower from County Waterford informed Seán Lemass, deputy leader of Fianna Fáil and TD for Dublin South, that at a recent debate on partition at a local meeting of a Law and History symposium at Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, a large number of young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five had made insulting remarks about de Valera and Fianna Fáil over the party’s approach to partition, instead vocally lending their support to the IRA campaign.7
In response to the renewed IRA attacks, Lemass believed the party was at a ‘crossroads’, warning that if supporters did not ‘speak in the same voice’ they might as well ‘wind up Fianna Fáil’.8 The party leaders routinely spoke against the use of violence to end partition and the ‘illegality’ of the IRA campaign.9 Lionel Booth, Fianna Fáil councillor for Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and future TD, a Protestant and respected businessman,10 believed the time had arrived for the organisation to educate those ‘hot heads’,11 supporters who were sympathetic to the ‘irresponsible’ actions of the IRA.12
It was the military shambles of 1 January 1957, following an IRA ambush of Brookeborough RUC police station, County Fermanagh, which exposed a growing divergence of opinion within Fianna Fáil on the use of violence to end partition. In the ambush two IRA men, Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon, were killed.13 The raid became a legend overnight, South and O’Hanlon were martyrs within the week and their deaths became the source of numerous ballads sung through the years.14
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