Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  Expectations were high, and there was talk of a possible Labour government. In fact, the result of the election was a shattering disappointment and marked the end of the go-it-alone policy. Labour's share of the vote increased to 17 per cent, but this reflected a substantial increase in the number of candidates from forty-four in 1965 to ninety-nine in 1969. Overall the party lost four seats, with gains in greater Dublin being overshadowed by disastrous results in traditional rural bastions.

  Labour's optimism had had some basis, but its main defect lay in an overly unilinear view of the process of economic and social modernization in Ireland that ignored the continuing strength of rural and small-town Catholic traditionalism. Its activists blamed a ‘red smear’ campaign carried on by Fianna Fáil. There had certainly been such a campaign, with Labour being accused of wanting to introduce ‘Cuban socialism' in Ireland. Visions of Labour imposing collective farms on the small farmers of Kerry and other areas may well have lost some Labour TDs crucial votes. More significant would have been the Catholic Church's long-standing identification of ‘socialism’ with atheism and its associated immoralities. One Fianna Fáil candidate in Mayo, not content with the totally unfounded claim that Labour in power would legislate for abortion and divorce, added, ‘it would be great for the fellow who wanted a second wife every night.’71 But the problem with the ‘red smear’ argument was that many of the party's own rural TDs were also dismayed at the radical noises coming from Dublin and did all they could to dissociate themselves from the party's national campaign, fighting the election on purely local issues and their record of constituency service. In a society in transition Labour's new-found radicalism would have disconcerted many of its traditional supporters no matter what Fianna Fáil chose to allege about it.

  While a radicalized Labour Party was vulnerable in many constituencies – according to the 1971 census only 52 per cent of the Republic's population lived in towns with a population of 1,500 or more – it did have a substantial potential base of support in Dublin. Conor Cruise O'Brien, as a cosmopolitan intellectual, a divorcé who had remarried, and a supporter of the Republic establishing diplomatic links with Cuba, was the epitome of Labour's threat to traditional Catholic values. Yet, standing for the first time in Dublin North-east, he came second to Charles Haughey, the leading Fianna Fail TD in the constituency.72 The imperviousness of a sizeable section of Dublin's electorate to a traditionalist message can be explained by a number of factors. Although government policy aimed at dispersing industrial development away from the east coast and the Dublin area in particular, in the early 1970s just under a half of the total manufacturing employment was still in the greater Dublin area.73 Economic expansion encouraged the self-confidence associated with union militancy, which strained Fianna Fáil's relation with sections of the working class to the benefit of Labour, and this was given concentrated expression in Dublin. It was also the case that a substantial amount of the new public sector employment, which expanded significantly in the 1960s, was located in Dublin. The decade saw the beginning of a long-term process of expansion of white-collar unionization and militancy in the public sector.

  Expansion also lessened the pressure to emigrate and, as this had affected younger workers disproportionately, it increased the size of that section of the working class less prone than their parents to accept clerical direction.74 Although by international standards the Republic in the 1960s was still an intensely Catholic country, there was some evidence of change. A 1962 survey into the attitudes of Dublin Catholics towards religion and clerical authority carried out for the ultra-orthodox Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, revealed sharp differences between those who had completed secondary education and the rest. Whereas an extraordinary 88 per cent of the sample endorsed the proposition that the Church was the greatest source of good in the country, an almost equally massive 83 per cent of the educated group disagreed with it.75 In the early 1960s less than 20 per cent of schoolchildren went on to complete secondary education. By the end of the 1970s this had risen to just under 50 per cent.76 This rise in participation in secondary education and an associated expansion of higher education did much to produce what Tom Garvin has called the ‘post-Catholic and á la carte Catholic’ segment of the population.77

  In the early 1960s Lemass and other members of the political elite displayed a continuing willingness to indulge clerical pressure. A proposal from the Director of the National Library for a book-sharing arrangement with Trinity College, aimed at avoiding duplication and cutting costs, was submitted by Lemass to McQuaid for his opinion and dropped as soon as McQuaid opposed it. Similarly, an attempt by the Minister for Education to extend nationally an experiment in comprehensive schools begun in the western and border counties was threatened with opposition by McQuaid until he was reassured that they would be denominational, non-coeducational and managed by the parish priest.78 But as the decade progressed there were some signs of a less deferential attitude. In part this reflected the more liberal environment encouraged by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, which had opened in Rome in October 1962. Vatican II, with its emphasis on improving relations with the Protestant Churches and on a more demotic Catholicism, served to highlight the conservative, not to say reactionary, position of the Irish hierarchy and of McQuaid in particular.

  Much of the change was an inevitable consequence of the radical turn in economic policy that was made at the end of the 1950s. The emphasis in Economic Development on the need for efficiency, competitiveness and quality raised major questions over the sustainability of the state's continued acquiescence in an educational system whose whole ethos was so heavily influenced by the non-material values of the Catholic Church. As late as 1962 the annual report of the Council of Education, the official advisory body representing teachers and the Catholic school authorities, was arguing that the principal objective of education was the religious and moral development of the child and that the aim of science teaching in secondary school ‘is cultural rather than practical’.79 It also dismissed the idea of universal secondary education as utopian. With the exception of a separate system of vocational schools providing technical education, secondary schools charged fees until the late 1960s. The result of this approach was evident in the stark contrast with Northern Ireland. While secondary school enrolments had doubled in the South between 1945 and 1963, there had been a more than fivefold increase in the North.80

  Lemass and his Minister for Education, Patrick Hillery, initiated reform with the appointment of a small expert body, chaired by the economist Patrick Lynch, which produced the seminal Investment in Education report in 1965. Its chosen focuses – on the relation between the education system and the country's manpower requirements and the participation rates of different socio-economic groups – were an implicit challenge to the status quo and the Church's heavy investment in it. The state's increasing involvement in promoting change, which culminated in the introduction of free secondary education by Hillery's successor, Donogh O'Malley, in 1967, was one significant indication of the decline of the Church's hegemony in an area where its dominance had been hitherto uncontested.

  Another such area was the censorship of books and films. Here the government's emphasis on Ireland's new openness to investment and trade and its desire to be a participant in the European project made it less willing to tolerate the widespread image of the Republic as existing in a backward, priest-ridden time warp. The strict censorship of films and books under legislation passed in the 1920s and concerned with anything ‘subversive of public morality’ and ‘indecent or obscene’ had been encountering increasing domestic criticism from the small Irish intelligentsia in the 1950s. The five-member Censorship of Publications Board had been reconstructed in 1957 in order to ensure a more liberal composition. However, the fact remained that previous decisions had resulted in many of the major literary works of the twentieth century being banned, including most of the best works of contemporary Irish writers.81 Brian Lenihan,
who became Minister for Justice in 1964, liberalized film censorship by the simple expedient of licensing films for viewing by persons above a certain age, and, in 1967, introduced legislation that provided for the unbanning of books after twelve years. The result was the release of over 5,000 titles. While the liberalism of the Irish censors still had very narrow limits, and novels that would be major literary successes in Britain in the 1960s like The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien and The Dark by John McGahern continued to be banned, it was increasingly the censors and not the authors and publishers who were on the defensive.

  A far more potent threat to traditional values than the appearance of Steinbeck or Sartre in bookshops in Dublin, Cork and Galway was the arrival of television. From the early 1950s it had been possible to receive programmes from Britain and Northern Ireland in the border counties and along the east coast. A report prepared for the government in 1956 had estimated that 7,000 homes in the Republic had televisions. It warned about the dangers of cultural pollution, given that British programmes were ‘governed by ideas that are wholly alien to the ordinary Irish home’. Particular exception was taken to the ‘frank’ treatment of sex and the emphasis on the royal family and the ‘British way of life’.82 A major motivation behind the setting up of an Irish television service in 1961 was therefore a traditionally nationalist and Catholic one. However, the strong opposition of Whitaker and the Department of Finance to a publicly funded service meant that the state broadcaster, RTE, was financed by advertising, and the dynamics of competition with the BBC and Ulster Television soon exerted more influence on production values than did moral protectionism.

  By the end of 1962 there were 93,000 television licences in the state, and by 1970 the figure had soared to 438,000.83 The relative inexperience of staff and the cost of making programmes meant that there was a substantial reliance on imports from Britain and the US. Combined with the influence of British television along the east coast and despite the aims of those who set it up, Irish television became a powerful force for the Anglo-Americanization of Irish popular culture. It also encouraged a more critical public discourse and a new openness to discussion of such issues as contraception and divorce on programmes including the phenomenally successful Late Late Show. Following trends in Britain there was a less cautious and deferential style in the handling of current affairs. In both countries the decade saw the emergence of political satire and a more daring and mocking mood that spread out from television to the staid preserve of radio and the print media. Lemass, who had seen in television a potent means of propagating the gospel of modernizing nationalism, was soon disturbed by programmes that, as he saw it, focused too much on the defects and shortcomings of the Republic. He intervened privately and occasionally in public to try to curb unruly broadcasters, but with little effect. Increasingly it became clear to all but the most obdurately reactionary politicians and clergy that the rules by which they exercised power and authority were being remade and that the mere invocation of the value of traditional forms of life and thought would be insufficient to defend them.

  Factions in Fianna Fáil

  Although television undoubtedly encouraged the long-term process of liberalization of Irish society, its capacity to bring almost instantaneous images of the flaring up of violence in Derry and Belfast in August 1969 into living rooms throughout the South provided a powerful impetus to a wave of territorial nationalism that seemed for a brief period to threaten the stability of the state. The northern eruption had all the more impact because of the effects it had on a governing party that was already showing signs of an unprecedented degree of internal division.

  Lemass's approach to the leadership of party and government had differed starkly from that of de Valera. Whereas the latter had tended to deal with divisions through a process of avoidance or such extended discussion that unity was effected through boring dissidents into submission, Lemass's style was brusque and peremptory. The change of style was reflective of the much more radical and activist content of his government's programme of economic liberalization and modernization, which left less time to consider questions of party management at a time when some of Lemass's new departures were bound to cause internal conflict. The pursuit of a free trade agreement with Britain and the end of restrictions on foreign capital raised the hackles of the champions of protectionist economics in the party. The policy of détente with the Stormont regime was also deeply unsettling for those still loyal to the idea of it as an unjust Orange junta. Lemass's engagement with the leaders of Irish trade unionism annoyed sections of the party suspicious of what was perceived as an anti-rural and anti-farmer bias and produced the first cabinet resignation on a policy question in the party's history when his Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Smith, left the government in protest at its alleged capitulation to ‘trade union tyranny’.84

  On top of radical policy reversals, Fianna Fáil had entered the process of transition to a party leadership no longer sanctified by its participation in the Irish Revolution of 1916–23. Lemass had begun the process of organizational renewal following the defeat in the 1954 election, bringing in a potential replacement cadre for the 1916 generation. Some of these, including George Colley and Eoin Ryan, were the sons of the founding members of Fianna Fáil, while others, such as Brian Lenihan and Charles Haughey, were sons of republicans who had taken the Free State side during the Civil War. Together with Neil Blaney and Kevin Boland, they had revitalized the tired and complacent Fianna Fail electoral machine. Haughey, Lenihan and the brilliant but undisciplined and alcoholic Donogh O'Malley were fervent supporters of Lemassian economics. This was probably sufficient in itself to arouse the suspicion and hostility of those, like Seán MacEntee and Frank Aiken, who had long harboured doubts about the compatibility of the Lemass project with traditional republican values. However, it was the flamboyant lifestyle of the group labelled the Camorra by James Dillon, the leader of Fine Gael, that caused most unease.85 As the prosperity associated with economic expansion manifested itself in building and redevelopment programmes, property values rocketed, as did the fortunes of those unscrupulous enough to use their insider knowledge to buy land that they knew was destined for development.

  Haughey, who had entered the Dáil as TD for Dublin North-east in 1957 and been appointed Minister for Justice at the age of thirty in 1961, was at the centre of rumours and allegations about what an opponent would later call ‘low standards in high places’. Although the son-in-law of Lemass, his rapid promotion was a reflection of his undoubted abilities. Peter Berry, the formidable Secretary of the Department of Justice, declared him the best minister he had ever served.86 But it was his connections with the worlds of business and property development, and his increasingly ostentatious lifestyle, that drew the most gossip. Haughey had bought his first racehorse in 1962 and by the end of the decade owned a number of them as well as a farm and one of the Blasket Islands off the Kerry coast, which became his holiday retreat. In 1969 he bought Abbeville in Kinsealy, County Dublin, an eighteenth-century mansion that had served as the summer home of several Lord-Lieutenants of Ireland, and with it a 250-acre estate.87 Some senior members of Fianna Fáil shared Gerry Boland's view that Haughey ‘would yet drag down the Party in the mire’.88 Others such as Frank Aiken saw Haughey as the epitome of the ‘materialistic’ and ‘de-nationalizing’ effects of Lemass's leadership and wanted a successor who was truer to traditional republican values and not associated with what a survey of the decade referred to as ‘an unsavoury get-rich-quick cabal… [with] the sleek Mercedes and mohair suits’.89

  Lemass was subsequently criticized by MacEntee and other Fianna Fáil veterans for failing to provide for a smooth succession.90 This criticism tended to ignore the degree to which the post-1966 divisions in the party had their origins in inevitable tensions generated by the policy departures of the late 1950s. Fianna Fáil's traditional depiction of itself as a national movement rather than as a mere political organization had as its corollary a strong emphasis
on maintaining an outward show of disciplined unity, and many in the party found the idea of a succession race deeply unsettling. But if there had to be a contest, there was at least a reassuring absence of any conflict of ideas. No candidate issued a statement of principles or publicly identified himself with any policy positions. Of the two original front-runners, Haughey and George Colley, the Irish Times commented that while Haughey was ‘the modern man, essentially pragmatic and business-minded’, Colley was a ‘chip off the traditionalist block’.91 The central attraction of Colley to the party elders who supported him was that he was seen as hostile to what was perceived as Haughey's ruthless materialism. In fact, on central economic policy issues and on Northern Ireland there was no recorded difference of opinion between the two. Despite this, Lemass's original attempt to get either Dr Patrick Hillery or Jack Lynch interested in the succession may have reflected his fear that a Haughey/Colley contest would allow those traditionalists defeated in such key areas as free trade and Northern Ireland to stage a comeback.

  Although Lynch had originally resisted Lemass's overtures, the decision of Neil Blaney to intervene in the contest brought further, and this time successful, pressure from the Taoiseach. A TD for the border constituency of Donegal, Blaney had little time for policies of rapprochement with Stormont, and Lemass was aghast when he became a candidate. Jack Lynch had entered the Dáil as a TD for Cork in 1948 at the age of thirty-one and had been appointed Minister for Education by de Valera when Fianna Fail returned to power in 1957. Under Lemass he had been centrally associated with the new directions in economic policy, first as Minister for Industry and Commerce and from 1965 as Minister for Finance, where he had developed a very good personal relationship with T. K. Whitaker. He was a strong supporter of Lemass's overtures to O'Neill but lacked the protective shield of a revolutionary pedigree, although this was compensated for to some degree by his record of prowess in Gaelic games, where he had the unique achievement of winning six senior All-Ireland hurling championships in succession.92 Promoted by Lemass as a unity candidate, Lynch was accepted on those terms by both Blaney and Haughey, who withdrew from the contest, and he easily defeated Colley by fifty-nine votes to nineteen in the election by the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party on 9 November 1966.