A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  Episode 243

  THE INTER-PARTY GOVERNMENT

  On hearing of Adolf Hitler’s suicide, the War of Independence veteran and Fianna Fáil TD Dan Breen openly shed tears. As for the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, he decided to express his condolences on the death of the Führer by calling on the German Minister in Dublin, Edouard Hempel, on 2 May 1945. Joseph Walshe, Secretary to the Department of External Affairs, remembered:

  Literally on bended knees, we asked him to remember all the Irish-Americans who had lost their lives, but because he had been up to the United States Embassy two weeks previously to condole on the death of Roosevelt, he was afraid of being accused of being partisan.

  His Assistant Secretary was surely right to observe that de Valera had made a ‘ghastly mistake’. The UK Representative in Éire, Sir John Maffey, reported that in the public mind the Taoiseach’s ‘condolences took on a smear of turpitude’. Churchill, never reconciled to Éire’s neutrality, said in his victory broadcast:

  If it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish forever from the earth. However, with a restraint and poise to which, I say, history will find few parallels, His Majesty’s Government never laid a violent hand upon them … and we left the Dublin Government to frolic with the Germans and later the Japanese representatives to their hearts’ content.

  De Valera’s radio broadcast in response was warmly welcomed as statesmanlike by Irish listeners but not by many beyond Éire’s frontiers. The state found itself isolated and marginalised, and the Taoiseach’s insistence on raising the issue of partition at every diplomatic opportunity merely produced irritation among those dealing with the ruin and tensions in the world following the most terrible conflict in history.

  In power without a break since 1932, Fianna Fáil seemed incapable of restoring Éire’s fortunes. Emigration rose from 24,000 in 1945 to 40,000 in 1948. In spite of this, the level of unemployment climbed; and, to add to the government’s woes, atrocious weather during the summer of 1946 ruined much of the wheat harvest, and the winter of 1946–7 was remembered as the worst of the twentieth century. The butter ration was reduced from four ounces to two ounces per week, and bread rationing was imposed in 1947.

  Although he had enjoyed a comfortable majority since the election of 1944, de Valera decided to go to the country in February 1948. His principal reason for doing so was the appearance and expansion of a new republican party. Clann na Poblachta (meaning ‘Family of the Republic’) had been formed in July 1946 by people who had been campaigning on behalf of members of the IRA interned during the Emergency. Seán MacBride, the party leader, had been a Chief of Staff of the IRA, and, indeed, twenty-two out of twenty-six on the first executive committee had been in the IRA at various times since the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. This was a republican party with a difference, however, in that it attracted to its ranks young radicals and social reformers who put together an inspiring programme of regeneration.

  In the election Clann na Poblachta won ten seats. De Valera was confident he could form a coalition government, but he was wrong. Instead all the opposition TDs came together to form what became known as the ‘inter-party government’. Made up of deputies from Fine Gael, Clann na Poblachta, Labour, Clann na Talmhan (the farmers’ party) and twelve independents, this could certainly be described as a rainbow coalition.

  MacBride became the Minister for External Affairs and refused to have Richard Mulcahy, the former Civil War general and leader of Fine Gael, as Taoiseach. Instead John A. Costello, a former Attorney-General, agreed to lead the government. Son of the executed 1916 leader Major John MacBride and Maud Gonne, Seán MacBride, speaking fluent French, seemed at first to cut quite a dash in diplomatic circles. Meanwhile de Valera, out of power for the first time in sixteen years, toured the United States, Australia, New Zealand and India, denouncing the political partition of Ireland. MacBride felt that his anti-partitionist credentials were impeccable and refused to be upstaged: he vehemently denounced partition at the newly created Council of Europe. However, at a time when the Cold War was threatening to become a hot war during the Berlin Airlift, world statesmen refused to be moved by the strident denunciations of British rule in Northern Ireland by these two Irishmen.

  ‘If any country is attacked by Communists, we’re in it,’ MacBride told George Garrett, the US envoy to Dublin. The minister was keen to be seen as a valiant Cold War warrior. He threw himself behind the Irish hierarchy’s fund-raising campaign to help prevent the election of a communist/socialist coalition in Italy. The inter-party government directly contributed more than £4,000; in all, £60,000 was raised from people in Ireland who no doubt concluded that they played a pivotal role in saving Italy from the wicked rule of infidel left-wingers by helping to secure an election victory for the Christian Democrats. However, Americans and western Europeans alike were not impressed when MacBride turned down an invitation to join NATO on the grounds that it was a military alliance which included the UK, and that to join would be ‘repugnant and unacceptable’ since ‘six of [Ireland’s] north-eastern counties are occupied by British forces’. Senior civil servants were deeply embarrassed by the minister’s crude attempt to trade action on partition for membership of an international body.

  It was Costello, not MacBride, who made the most dramatic alteration in the state’s relationship with the rest of the world. No doubt Fine Gael could not long have resisted Clann na Poblachta’s insistence that de Valera’s External Relations Act of 1936 (which removed all reference to the British crown but kept the state in the Commonwealth) would have to go. It is still not certain whether or not the cabinet had formally agreed to it before the Taoiseach’s visit to Canada in the summer of 1948.

  The Taoiseach arrived in Montreal on 30 August 1948. Then at a dinner, after the toast to ‘The King’ had been given, the Canadian Minister for External Affairs asked: ‘Doesn’t that cover you?’ Costello responded that it did not ‘because we were not real members of the Commonwealth’. Finally on 5 September the Sunday Independent appeared with the headline ‘EXTERNAL RELATIONS ACT TO GO’. Was this just an inspired guess? In any case, Costello decided to announce his government’s decision to repeal the act at a press conference in Ottawa on 7 September.

  Most citizens thought the right place to declare that Éire was about to become a republic was on Irish soil, not in Canada. When the state formally became the Republic of Ireland on Easter Monday 1949, the occasion elicited tepid enthusiasm at best. Indeed, the whole episode revealed an embarrassing amateurishness in the highest circles of government.

  Episode 244

  THE MOTHER AND CHILD CRISIS

  Like Ireland, India became a republic in 1949 but, unlike Ireland, remained in the Commonwealth. This option was not considered by Taoiseach John A. Costello and his inter-party government. Fortunately the British allowed the new Irish Republic to retain the privileges of its former membership: the Irish did not have to carry visas or passports to the UK, and no change was made to advantageous trade arrangements.

  Largely composed of elderly and middle-aged men who had long languished in opposition, and of the idealistic young men of Clann na Poblachta, the inter-party government was impatient to put into effect its ambitious programme to revitalise the country.

  Much was achieved. The number of houses built with state aid jumped from 1,600 in 1947 to 14,000 in 1953. The Independent TD James Dillon proved a particularly dynamic and colourful Minister for Agriculture. In 1949 he launched his Land Rehabilitation Project to bring back into full production 4 million acres largely lying idle. Since one aim of the Marshall Plan was to make Europe self-sufficient in food, Dillon’s ambitious scheme helped the state to obtain £6 million in grants and £46 million in loans from the government of the United States.

  Dr Noël Browne, employed in Newcastle sanatorium in Co. Wicklow, had campaigned vigorously as a Clann na Poblachta candidate in Dublin South
-East. His manifesto referred to ‘the slow rot and death each year of approximately 4,000 young Irish men and women from TB’.

  Duly elected, Browne at the age of thirty-two was appointed Minister for Health on the same day he first entered the Dáil. Immediately he threw himself into a drive to wipe out tuberculosis. He had strong personal reasons for doing so: TB had killed both his parents and three of his sisters and left his brother a helpless cripple; and he himself had contracted the disease while a medical student in Trinity College, losing the use of one of his lungs. The death rate in Éire from tuberculosis was 124 per 100,000 compared with 80 in Northern Ireland, 79 in Scotland and 62 in England and Wales.

  The immediate problem was the acute lack of beds for sufferers. Browne found the additional space in sanatoria by using not only the interest but also the capital of the money allocated from the Hospital Sweepstake Fund. Expenditure on TB increased fourfold. He launched mass vaccination with BCG, which lowered the incidence of childhood tuberculosis in particular. By 1952 115,992 vaccinations had been carried out in schools, factories and mobile units. J. G. Browne, the County Manager for Roscommon, met the minister to discuss his part in setting up the first regional sanatorium in Castlerea:

  He sprang up from his desk and hurried across the room, shaking my hand warmly, and thanked me for attending so early…. He then set me a deadline; June 30th. It was tough going…. I lost half a stone weight in the process, but it was a labour of love, because (I met him regularly at that time) he was so enthusiastic and appreciative and was obviously working so hard himself.

  The battle to defeat tuberculosis, the ‘white death’, was being rapidly won. Browne was already moving on with the aim of improving state health facilities for mothers and children.

  Browne was largely unaware that his high-profile campaign against TB had been observed with some distaste by the Catholic hierarchy and the medical profession. In particular, John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin and son of a doctor, was hostile to the extension of state medical provision. In 1943 he had effectively broken up the Anti-Tuberculosis League, fearful that it was becoming a pressure group for state-sponsored health reform. Then in 1947 the Fianna Fáil government introduced a Health Bill, to modernise the Irish health service in respect of mother and child welfare and infectious diseases. Privately the bishops drafted a comprehensive condemnation, claiming that to give such power to the public authorities ‘is entirely and directly contrary to Catholic teaching’. De Valera delayed making a response and was let off the hook by the fall of his government in 1948.

  Costello was such a devout Catholic that he had an altar built in his house and had declared: ‘I am an Irishman second: I am a Catholic first.’ He also was to say: ‘If the hierarchy give me any direction with regard to Catholic social teaching or Catholic moral teaching, I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong.’ At the first cabinet meeting of the inter-party government it had been agreed to send a telegram to the Vatican indicating their desire

  to repose at the feet of your Holiness the assurance of our filial loyalty and of our devotion to your August Person, as well as our firm resolve to be guided in all our work by the teaching of Christ, and to strive for the attainment of a social order in Ireland based on Christian principles.

  In 1950 Browne decided to draft a Health Bill similar to that of 1947: it was to provide free but voluntary ante-natal and post-natal care for mothers, and give free medical care to all children up to the age of sixteen. On 10 October 1950 James Staunton, secretary to the hierarchy, wrote to Costello to say that if Browne’s scheme was adopted, it would ‘constitute a ready-made instrument for future totalitarian aggression’. Staunton went on to declare the bishops’ belief that the state ‘may help indigent or neglectful parents; it may not deprive 90 per cent of parents of their rights because of 10 per cent necessitous or negligent parents’. He continued:

  Education in regard to motherhood includes instruction in regard to sex relations, chastity and marriage. The State has no competence to give instruction in such matters. We regard with the greatest apprehension the proposal to give to local medical officers the right to tell Catholic girls and women how they should behave in regard to this sphere of conduct at once so delicate and sacred.…

  Doctors trained in instruction in which we have no confidence may be appointed as medical officers under the proposed service, and may give gynaecological care not in accordance with Catholic principles.

  A month passed before Costello passed on this letter to Browne. With his civil servants, the minister drafted a prompt reply which the Taoiseach refused to send. Nothing happened until March 1951, when Browne sent a pamphlet to the bishops explaining the Mother and Child Scheme. McQuaid responded at once, repeating ‘each and every objection’ that had been made in October.

  On 6 April Browne gave a prearranged broadcast (in Irish as well as in English) on Radio Éireann to explain the scheme. Just before going on air he read the hierarchy’s detailed denunciation of the scheme. Then he attended a cabinet meeting where he discovered that not a single minister supported him. The ministers voted to drop the scheme. Five days later, on the insistence of his party leader, Seán MacBride, he was forced to resign. Browne took his revenge by allowing the Irish Times to publish all the confidential correspondence on the crisis.

  An intense debate on church–state relations ensued inside and outside Dáil Éireann, and particularly in the press. It was not surprising that Browne, contemptuously dismissed by MacBride with a flick of cigarette ash, went over to the opposition and was joined by another Clann TD, Jack McQuillan. The inter-party government disintegrated soon afterwards.

  Episode 245

  ‘WHAT WE HAVE WE HOLD’

  On 2 June 1941 the Rev. Dr J. B. Woodburn, the retiring Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, gave a warning in his sermon:

  After the big Blitz of a few weeks ago I was inexpressibly shocked by the sight of people I saw walking in the streets. I have been working 19 years in Belfast and I never saw the like of them before—wretched people, very undersized and underfed down-and-out looking men and women. They had been bombed out of their homes and were wandering the streets. Is it creditable to us that there should be such people in a Christian country?…

  We have got to see that there is more talk of justice…. If something is not done now to remedy this rank inequality, there will be revolution after the war.

  But there were no barricades on the streets when peace returned. After its decisive victory in the polls in July 1945 Clement Attlee’s Labour government began at once to implement its radical programme. Unionists at Westminster, horrified at the prospect of high taxation and increased government control, voted consistently with the Conservative opposition. But Unionists in Stormont voted, often enthusiastically, for welfare legislation opposed by their Westminster party colleagues. The explanation is that the Treasury in London agreed that Northern Ireland would enjoy the same standards of social services as those prevailing in the rest of the United Kingdom, provided parity of taxation was maintained.

  The outcome was the most striking advance in the material welfare of the people of Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics alike, in the twentieth century. After the German raids 53.3 per cent of Belfast’s housing stock was destroyed, damaged or deemed unfit for habitation. Billy Grant, the first working-class government minister, set up the Housing Trust and supervised an impressive increase in council house building. Even before the war was over, Stormont acted decisively to treat victims of TB and eventually to extirpate this disease which was responsible for almost half the deaths in the 15–25 age group. The National Health Service—open to all, totally free and almost completely comprehensive—came into operation in Britain in July 1948. Almost identical legislation followed in Northern Ireland in the same year. Sweeping away the Poor Law, this new service had, because of past neglect, a greater impact in Northern Ireland
than in any other region of the UK.

  Unseemly religious wrangling caused delays and prevented the main substance of Britain’s 1944 Education Act being replicated in Northern Ireland until 1947. Protestant clergy and their supporters bitterly resented the scrapping of the 1930 Education Act’s insistence on Bible instruction in state schools. And, since the Catholic hierarchy insisted on separate Catholic schools, the dual system continued. Indeed, the 1947 Education Act ensured that young people in the region would be educated separately for longer than before.

  Nevertheless, the changes were profound: for the first time free and compulsory education was available to all; and for those who obtained the necessary entrance qualifications, free places (with grants for most students) were provided at university level. Academic selection, by means of the ‘eleven plus’ qualifying examination, kept intact the grammar schools (with most costs covered by the state and able to charge fees trifling by comparison with public schools in Britain), and so inequalities continued, though at a reduced level.

  Once it had crossed the Irish Sea, the tidal wave which had swept Attlee and Labour to power in 1945 produced only a gentle ripple in Northern Ireland. There was only a modest increase in MPs of various socialist persuasions at Stormont. The Prime Minister, Sir Basil Brooke (later raised to the peerage as Viscount Brookeborough), and his Unionist government continued to enjoy a comfortable majority. The task of keeping the unionist camp together was helped by the refusal of the constitutional question to disappear below the horizon. Nationalist MPs and senators set up the Irish Anti-Partition League on 15 November 1945 in Dungannon, ‘with the object of uniting all those opposed to partition into a sold block’. Nationalists abandoned their erratic abstentionism in the hope of winning support for their cause from the Labour government at Westminster. This hope was not realised. Herbert Morrison, a member of Attlee’s government, said to de Valera that ‘to expect us to coerce Ulster was expecting too much, especially in view of the troubled world in which we all lived’.