His optimism was partly based on the positive response that some northern manufacturers had given to his proposal for a North–South free trade agreement. Despite the rejection of the proposal by Brookeborough,33 a number of northern businesses ignored Stormont and approached the Ministry of Industry and Commerce in Dublin directly to negotiate reductions. Eventually Brookeborough was forced to modify his line and declare publicly that he would not stand in the way of manufacturers who sought better treatment from Dublin.34 Lemass was impressed with this Ulster bourgeois pragmatism and tried to encourage it as much as possible, asking the state airline, Aer Lingus, to consider ordering aircraft from Short Brothers and Harland, and Irish Shipping to encourage Harland and Wolff to tender for vessels it needed.35 The optimism that pervaded his approach to the North was based partly on the apparent contrast between the difficult conditions facing the province's staple industries in the early 1960s and the first signs of economic expansion in the South. The publication of the Hall Report and its rejection of what he referred to as ‘begging missions seeking British subsidies’ were seen as prompting ‘enlightened opinion’ in Northern Ireland to reconsider the value of the continued division of the island.36
But, as some contemporary critics pointed out, there was a fundamental contradiction in Lemass's approach to the North. This was evident in the first major statement he made on Northern Ireland when he participated in an Oxford Union debate on partition on 15 October 1959. The speech certainly impressed some in the British political elite with its support for ‘the growth of a practical system of co-operation between the two areas even in advance of any political arrangement’ and the argument that ‘quite apart from any views one may hold about the eventual reunification of Ireland, is it not commonsense that the two existing communities in our small island should seek every opportunity of working together in practical matters for their mutual and common good?’ He had also warned that ‘we cannot expect speedy results: the barriers of fear and suspicion in the minds of partitionists are too strong to be demolished quickly.’37 Yet he also made it clear that, although he believed the fundamental barriers to unity were internal ones, the British government could and should undo its historic responsibility for partition by declaring that it would like to see partition ended ‘by agreement among the Irish’. Pressure on the British to declare in favour of the Irish nationalist project could only undermine the real efforts that were made to foster practical schemes of cooperation with Stormont.
While Brookeborough was in power and insisting on the Republic's full constitutional recognition of Northern Ireland as a condition of any North–South cooperation, there could be little progress. Terence O'Neill initially maintained the same position but was under some pressure from the Conservative government to respond to Lemass's overtures.38 With even the former Secretary to the Northern Ireland cabinet, Sir Robert Gransden, saying in private that he thought the demand for constitutional recognition ‘completely unrealistic’,39 Lemass went some way to accommodate O'Neill. He used a Fianna Fail dinner in Tralee to make his most important speech on partition. In it he declared that he recognized that ‘the government and parliament there exist with the support of a majority in the Six County area’ and insisted that ‘the solution of the problem of partition is one to be found in Ireland by Irishmen.’40 Although he also referred to Northern Ireland as an ‘artificial area’, the speech represented a significant shift. As Robert Savage has noted, Lemass's recognition of the government and parliament of Northern Ireland ‘was a significant gesture to Unionists and an extraordinary statement for a Fianna Fail leader to make’.41
O'Neill gave a guarded welcome, describing the speech as ‘not without courage’, but cautioned that ‘As long as every gesture of friendship and every possible co-operation was subordinate to a long-term undermining of the constitutional position, so long would they have to moderate with a good deal of caution their wish for co-operation with their neigh-bours.’42 Lemass's response was to ask his ministers for proposals for an Irish agenda at civil service level on cross-border cooperation, thus putting aside the demand for a summit with all the difficulties that that could create for O'Neill.43 The implication of all this was what the Secretary to the Department of the Taoiseach called a ‘new departure’ in the policy on partition, which would have at its core two elements: ‘to disregard London as a factor in maintaining partition’ and ‘to concentrate on the Parliament and people in the Six Counties’.44 However, the likelihood of a positive response from O'Neill was undermined by a number of speeches Lemass made on a visit to the US less than a month later. In an address to the National Press Club in Washington, he called on the British government to issue a statement that it would welcome an opportunity to end partition ‘when Irishmen wanted to get rid of it’.45 Later, at the United Nations, he repeated the request and added that ‘he believed that the circumstances of partition were also under review in Britain.’46
So on the one hand Lemass pursued North–South cooperation, while on the other he challenged the legitimacy and permanence of the state with which he was proposing to cooperate. These conflicting strands of his position reflected the substantial resistance from the more nationalistic elements within Fianna Fail to ‘concessions’ to the Stormont regime. His Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, was a bastion of traditional anti-partitionism and, given his closeness to de Valera, a possible focus of resistance to any new direction on northern policy. It was Aiken who insisted on seeing the North as an imperialist vestige that Britain should look at in the context of its post-war decolonization process.47 Lemass's policy of discouraging the civil service and the Republic's radio and television services from referring to Northern Ireland as ‘The Six Counties’ was not popular with some of his colleagues,48 and his officials reported some political resistance from ministers to his proposals for North–South discussions at a civil service level.49 Too radical a shift on Northern Ireland policy could have had severe political repercussions within a minority Fianna Fáil government at a time when he was proposing a radical reversal of economic nationalism. The result was that when O'Neill decided to meet Lemass it was more in response to pressure from Harold Wilson than to any positive inducement from Dublin.
But if Lemass's northern policy only partially accommodated unionist concerns, it did even less for Stormont's minority. The Taoiseach regarded northern nationalism as being as conservative and sectarian as the regime it opposed. In a speech to students at Queen's University after he retired, Lemass attributed a part of the responsibility for the North's problems to the ‘narrow attitudes’ of the Nationalist Party,50 and in a subsequent interview he commented of northern nationalists that ‘for them the day partition ended would be the day they would get their foot on the throat of the Orangemen.’51 The sort of trips made by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the early 1950s to meet northern nationalists had been discontinued as the official anti-partition campaign had waned. By 1960 there had not been a visit to Northern Ireland by an official from External Affairs for over four years. Eddie McAteer complained that Dáil deputies had more contact with parliamentarians abroad than with nationalists in Stormont.52 The attempt to develop functional cooperation with Stormont discouraged visits that unionists might see as destabilizing, and a request from External Affairs for a resumption of visits ‘if only to show the Six-County people that we are still with them’ seems to have been ignored.53
What little interest Lemass had in northern nationalism seems to have focused on any signs of fresh thinking, particularly those associated with the formation of National Unity, a new grouping of younger nationalists critical of the Nationalist Party, in 1959. He used Erskine Childers, a Protestant and the son of one of the first republicans executed during the Civil War, as his most direct link with developments in the North. This in itself was revealing, as he regarded Childers as a lightweight and after inheriting him as Minister for Lands demoted him twice within the space of two years.54 Nevertheless, Childers's advice cou
ld only have encouraged the Taoiseach to continue with his focus on improving relations with Stormont while largely ignoring the concerns of the minority. After a visit to Belfast in March 1961 Childers wrote to Lemass of the ‘utter breakdown of the Nationalist Party’ and went on to give an analysis of the discrimination issue that was at stark variance with the traditional nationalist perspective:
Discrimination is decreasing, although it still exists. We hear of the local authorities who show discrimination in the allocation of houses, but there are quite a number who are not guilty of this practice, about whom we hear nothing. Discrimination in industry varies enormously. Some of the new English and American industries permit no discrimination whatsoever; in some cases they have been suborned by local pressure. In the case of the older industries, a few are absolutely fair and square in their attitude. Others employ numbers according to the population in the district to make sure that no Catholic men ever become foremen. In fairness to managements in some industries, it would be the men themselves who would create the trouble and who exercise pressure through the shop stewards regardless of what the managers think.55
Within the Department of External Affairs there was little stomach for attempts by northern nationalists to raise the discrimination issue. Much of the material that had been used during the anti-partition campaign was out of date, but when McAteer approached the Department with material for a new pamphlet the response was dismissive. A senior official was scathing:
I must assume that the facts and figures it mentions are correct. But I ask myself what is the purpose of the pamphlet? There is no need to tell Irish Nationalists. They have been given the facts over and over again in previous anti-partition propaganda. If the pamphlet is directed at a non-Irish audience I very much doubt if it will get farther than their waste-paper baskets. I am afraid it is regrettable but true that very little, if any, interest in the problems of the Northern Ireland minority is taken outside Ireland.56
As the first stirrings of the civil rights movement emerged in Northern Ireland, Dublin was if anything even less concerned with the discrimination issue than was London. After the summit with O'Neill, Lemass's priority was the consolidation of new links with the northern regime in areas such as trade and tourism. It was made plain to McAteer that he should not look to Dublin but lead his party into a more constructive relationship with the northern state, and it was as a result of this pressure that the Nationalist Party at last agreed to become the official opposition at Stormont. The long-term significance of this approach was brutally spelt out by a Dublin official in response to demands from some in the Nationalist Party for support: ‘The alternative to taking any action at the present time must inevitably be that the gap between the Nationalists in the North and the people here will grow wider. This development will of course force the Nationalists to adopt policies which are fully in keeping with their status in the Six Counties.’57 The next few years would see the frustration of this southern desire for the minority to sort out its relationship with Stormont under its own steam, while those who had had deep reservations about the Lemass approach tried to use the northern crisis to overthrow the whole edifice of partition.
Politics and Social Change in the 1960s
John Horgan has described the 1960s as ‘socially turbulent years’,58 and Kieran Allen has claimed that the Republic was significantly affected by the wave of political and cultural radicalization associated with the anti-Vietnam war movement and the student uprisings of 1968.59 While in any international framework of comparison this might seem an exaggeration, there is no question that, after the stagnation of the previous decade, the governments in the Republic faced an unprecedented range of traditional and new demands. Industrial militancy, while not a new phenomenon, did develop an intensity that led to the decade being labelled a period of ‘unparalleled turbulence in Irish industrial relations’.60 The multiplicity of trade unions made any national agreement negotiated between the ICTU and employers difficult to enforce at a time when many groups of workers were keen to use improved economic conditions to extract the maximum that the market could bear. A sectional concern with the defence of pay relativities was an important source of miltancy, and there was also considerable tension between groups of rank-and-file trade unionists and national leaderships regarded as too inclined to compromise with employers and the state.
The authoritarian streak in Fianna Fáil's relation to the unions, first evident during the Emergency, reappeared when in 1965 a breakaway union of telephonists began to picket telephone exchanges to support a demand for recognition. Lemass lambasted these ‘ananti-state activities’, and strikers were jailed for breaching a government injunction against picketing. When their comrades attempted to protest outside the Dáil, the government did not hesitate to use the Offences against the State Act to ban such activities. In 1966 a strike by fitters in the state Electricity Supply Board (ESB) was met by legislation outlawing strike action in the industry and providing for heavy fines against both unions and individual strikers. This produced a major confrontation in 1968, when the legislation was used to jail more than fifty strikers in a dispute over pay.61 The culmination of this period of unrestrained wage bargaining was the maintenance craftsmen's strike in early 1969, which lasted for six weeks and was a source of unprecedented bitterness not simply between workers and employers but between the strikers and other unions and the leaders of the ICTU.
Some on the Irish left interpreted this industrial militancy as a potential threat to capitalist rule.62 This inflated its political significance. Just as in Northern Ireland militant trade union consciousness was quite compatible with traditional political affiliations, a Gallup survey found that only 37 per cent of trade unionists supported Labour.63 However, there was some spillover from industrial militancy into politics. Specifically, there was a substantial increase in the size and self-confidence of the Irish Labour Party. As Emmet O'Connor has noted, William Norton, who resigned as leader in 1960, had come to personify ‘the achingly, conservative, clientelist style of Labour deputies’.64 The dispiriting experience of the second inter-party government had left Labour, after the 1957 election, with 9 per cent of the vote and twelve Dáil deputies. Its only secure electoral base was amongst agricultural labourers and other rural workers in small towns and villages in Munster and Leinster. It had only one seat in Dublin.65 Like Norton, most of its deputies were trade union officials whose main focus was on their union business and their constituencies. Conservative, Catholic and fiercely anti-intellectual, they showed little interest in or concern about the national profile of the party or the need to seek new bases of support.
Norton's successor, Brendan Corish, had a background that was typical of the rural and familial basis of much of the Labour support at the time. He had won his Wexford constituency in a by-election caused by the death of his father and during the 1950s had shown little sign of a desire to swim against the stream, declaring in 1953 ‘I am an Irishman second; I am a Catholic first’ and defending those involved in the Fethard-on-Sea boycott of Protestants in 1957.66 However, as Labour leader he displayed some capacity to transcend his background. He encouraged the party to adopt a go-it-alone electoral strategy, rejecting future participation in a coalition government. The shift in Labour's ideological image was done in a gingerly fashion, with Corish explaining that Labour's socialism was a ‘Christian’ variety, and it would be towards the end of the decade before he dared to proclaim that ‘the Seventies will be Socialist.’ Yet there was evidence that, in the Dublin area in particular, Labour was trying hard to attract socially conscious sections of the middle class and a new generation of intellectuals and radicals through a more leftist profile.
Corish was heavily influenced by the new secretary of the party, Brendan Halligan.67 Halligan's key strategic idea was that Labour should force the two larger parties to coalesce by itself adopting a distinctive left-wing identity. Arguing that the two main parties had lost their raison d'être as the generati
on formed by 1916 and the Civil War faded from the scene, he identified a historic opportunity for the Labour Party to realign the political system along a more ‘normal’ left/right cleavage. Halligan was also at the centre of efforts to modernize the party. There was a serious effort to expand the number of branches: Labour in 1964 had only 248 branches, as compared with over 1,700 for Fianna Fáil and 600 for Fine Gael. By 1969 the party had 500 branches nationally and the number in Dublin had risen from twenty-nine to eighty-three.68 The party's traditional image as an appendage of the trade union movement was also undermined by the recruitment of a number of prominent intellectuals, such as the Trinity academics Justin Keating and David Thornley, and with the return to Ireland, after a high-profile diplomatic and academic career, of Conor Cruise O'Brien. By the time of the 1969 election only a fifth of Labour candidates were trade union officials, while the largest category was ‘professionals’ – in the 1961 election only one Labour candidate had been from this category.69
In the first two elections under Corish's leadership, Labour made steady progress, with 11.6 per cent of the national vote and sixteen seats in 1961 and 15.4 per cent and twenty-two seats in 1965. Corish and his young advisers became convinced that the rapidity of economic and social change in the Republic made a major breakthrough a real possibility. The 1969 ‘New Republic’ manifesto captured the mood of optimism:
The politics of the old Republic are over. The choice is no longer between two identical parties, divided only by the tragedy of history. The choice is now between the old Republic of bitterness, stagnation and failure, represented by the two Civil War parties, and the New Republic of opportunity, change and hope, represented by the Labour Party.70
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