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

  When John A. Costello announced that Éire would become a republic in September 1948, Attlee did not hesitate to reassure Brooke that his government had not changed its stance. On 28 October Attlee told MPs at Westminster: ‘The view of his Majesty’s government in the United Kingdom has always been that no change should be made in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland without Northern Ireland’s free agreement.’ This guarantee he enshrined in the Ireland Act of 1949.

  Meanwhile Brooke went to the polls in February 1949 in what was dubbed the ‘Chapel Gate Election’ by the Belfast Telegraph because collections were taken after Mass outside many southern churches for Anti-Partition League candidates. With the slogan ‘What we have we hold’, in a campaign marked by noisy sectarian clashes, Brooke increased his majority substantially.

  Some nationalists concluded that violent methods were the only ones which would work. In December 1956 a revitalised IRA launched ‘Operation Harvest’, a campaign of attacks along the border, but it proved little more than a minor irritant. The reality was that these generally were quiet years in Northern Ireland. The horrors of depression remembered from the 1930s did not return. Except for unemployment black spots in Derry, Strabane and west Belfast, the economy appeared to be doing well. Despite much flagrant discrimination, Catholics as well as Protestants enjoyed a rise in living standards. But Northern Ireland remained heavily dependent on traditional export industries, and, as the 1950s drew to a close, these were in trouble.

  On 16 March 1960, as the RUC band played ‘Waltzing Matilda’, 20,000 spectators cheered vociferously as Dame Pattie Menzies broke a bottle of Australian red wine against the bows of the Canberra and the 45,270-ton P & O liner entered Belfast Lough. Few realised that this was the end of an era: this was the last liner to be built at Belfast. Owing to a lack of further orders, the workforce shrank severely. Linen still employed 76,000 in 1951. When the Korean War ended in 1953, however, the industry—now competing with synthetic fibres—moved into terminal decline. Brookeborough seemed to have no answer to an alarming rise in the numbers of unemployed and to election successes by socialist candidates. In February 1963 his Unionist colleagues forced him to stand down.

  Episode 246

  THE VANISHING IRISH

  The census of 1951 showed that the population of the Republic of Ireland had increased by 0.2 per cent since 1946; despite high levels of emigration, this was the first gain to be recorded since reliable enumerations had begun in 1841. After that the sheer scale of the outflow more than wiped out a rise in the rate of natural increase. Between 1951 and 1956 net migration totalled nearly 200,000 people, the average annual loss of 39,353 persons being the highest recorded since 1900. In the year 1957 over 58,000 left the state. The population recorded in 1956 was just below 2,900,000, the lowest figure recorded for the twenty-six counties since 1841. Britain was by far the most favoured destination; between 1946 and 1952 only 16 per cent went overseas, mostly to the USA.

  During the war Britain’s fear of the spread of infectious diseases obliged de Valera’s government to set up health embarkation centres in Dublin. Approximately 55,000 people were deloused there between 1943 and 1947. James Deeny, the government’s chief medical adviser took J. J. McElligott, Secretary to the Department of Finance, to these centres, starting with the Globe Hotel in Talbot Street:

  In various rooms doctors in white coats were examining the people for lice. This was the health embarkation scheme in action. From the Globe Hotel we went to Iveagh Baths. There I saw something I will not forget. The baths had been emptied. On the floor of a pool were large sherry half casks. Men with rubber aprons and wellington boots were hosing people down and bathing them with disinfectant in the casks. All around were naked men, seemingly in hundreds. The place was full of steam and the smell of disinfectants.

  Now naked men en masse are not a pretty sight and the atmosphere of shame, fear and outrage was easy to feel…. A fellow with an electric iron was killing the lice in cap-bands and braces since steam disinfection, which the clothes were receiving, would perish leather and rubber. McElligott, a man with proper sensibilities, promptly came over faint and had to be taken outside and revived in the fresh air.

  These procedures, along with travel permits, were discontinued after 1947, and the UK placed no restrictions on Irish immigration when Éire became a republic in 1949. The Dublin government abandoned all attempts to regulate the outflow in 1952. The haemorrhage of people was greatest in the west and north-west. Co. Leitrim headed the list for the years 1951–6, with a rate of 23.1 per 1,000, an all-time high.

  What should the government do? Could it arrest this spectacular surge in emigration? A particularly worrying aspect was that the migrants were young and that the rise was largely accounted for by the doubling in the numbers of women leaving between 1946 and 1951—for every 1,000 males emigrating there were 1,365 females. The strong demand in Britain for nurses largely explains why 72 per cent of female emigrants were under the age of twenty-four; most of these young women left Ireland in order to take up training in nursing.

  The Catholic Church was particularly worried about the ‘moral welfare’ of girls crossing the Irish Sea, and this was the main reason why it set up the Catholic Emigrant Welfare Bureau under the auspices of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. The Vocational Commission went so far as to recommend that emigrants should have to pay ‘at least five hundred pounds’ before they were allowed to leave.

  Emigration was a key issue in the 1948 election which brought the first inter-party government to power. Seán MacBride, the new Minister for External Affairs, read with approval a memorandum from his department which concluded that ‘the most effective method of protecting the interests of young female migrants is the imposition of an age limit below which girls would not be allowed to emigrate’; this ban was, he felt, ‘the only satisfactory solution of the problem’. Rejecting MacBride’s proposal, the government instead put its faith in the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, established in March 1948.

  The commission sat for six years, and by the time the report was published in April 1954 the second inter-party government was in office. In December 1949 Dublin Opinion included a cartoon showing the ‘Dublin Opinion Commission on Emigration’ and bearing the caption ‘The Commission furnishes its report after having sat for five seconds. The people emigrate because they think they will do better elsewhere. They will return when they think they will do better here.’ This indeed could be regarded as a succinct summary of the Emigration Commission’s findings.

  In counties such as Kilkenny, where mixed farming and dairying predominated, emigration rates were relatively low because work was available all the year round. In western counties, where holdings were small, overcrowded and with much poor land, and where incomes could be supplemented only with ill-paid temporary work provided by local authorities, the only hope for young men to improve their prospects was to go to Britain. In Tuam, for example, the commissioners reported, ‘some of the men stated that plenty of work was available on the small family holding but completely without payment’. The modest prosperity of the village of Lahardane in Mayo, they continued, seemed to depend almost entirely on remittances, mostly from America.

  One twenty-nine-year-old man in Tullow, Co. Carlow, preparing to leave, told the commissioners that all nine of his brothers and sisters were working in Britain. He and others demonstrated that relatives and friends gave valuable advice on wages, available work in Britain, and places where migrants could find accommodation. One commissioner said he was told that ‘the lure of England, emphasised by the “grand” appearance of the returned emigrants when they came home on holidays, was a main factor’ in female emigration. Young men due to inherit small, infertile farms did not constitute ideal prospective husbands. The commissioners reported:

  For the female emigrant, improvement in personal status is of no less importance than the higher wages and better conditions of employment abroad, and some of th
e evidence submitted to us would suggest that the prospect of better marriage opportunities is also an influence of some significance.

  This in turn encouraged young men to leave. In Sligo, the commissioners added, the poor prospects of males ‘prevented them from marrying, and in some areas prospective partners were difficult to find’.

  This great outflow naturally led to major distortions in social patterns. ‘In short,’ John A. O’Brien concluded in The Vanishing Irish, a book published in 1954, ‘64 per cent of Ireland’s population is single, 6 per cent widowed and only 30 per cent married—the lowest in the civilised world.’

  Episode 247

  THE YEARS OF STAGNATION

  On St Patrick’s Day 1943 the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, said on Radio Éireann:

  The Ireland which we have dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be living the life that God desires that men should live.

  During the ensuing years these words sounded increasingly hollow. The fields and villages of rural Ireland were rarely joyous with the sounds of industry; the laughter of comely maidens was heard less often as so many packed their bags to take up nursing training in England; and, dissatisfied with constant frugality, athletic youths left to become ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’, working on building sites across the Irish Sea.

  ‘No one shouted Stop,’ the journalist John Healy declared in frustration and despair, contemptuous of the ‘Celtic mistery of the politicians of the day’. In The Death of an Irish Town, published in 1968, he looked back at what had happened to his home town of Charlestown, Co. Mayo. Out of his senior class of twenty-two boys in 1944, thirteen had emigrated abroad, six had left for Dublin and Westmeath, and only three remained in Charlestown. He continued:

  We had people and we exported them faster than cattle and like cattle, and while fathers, sons and daughters cried all the way to the train and the bus and the ship, the flow back of emigrant cheques and money orders evaporated the maternal and wifely tears so that on the threshold of the Post Office or The Hibernian Bank below in Main Street you could smile a little more with every passing week.

  ‘The big and fatal tide wave of emigration is over now,’ Healy admitted. ‘Today a few leave Charlestown every year, but it is merely the muscular spasms of a corpse.’ Dublin had become ‘a monstrously swollen head on a shrunken body, a gross cancer which feeds and devours its body’.

  In 1973 Hugh Brody published a detailed sociological study in Inishkillane, a name he coined (to protect its identity) for a rural parish in the south-west. Brody painted a black picture of hopelessness resulting from decades of emigration. The parish priest had conducted a survey to show that nearly 90 per cent of those born between 1940 and 1945 had already left the parish. By 1950, Brody concluded, ‘the population began to experience serious imbalances…. Hundreds of other rural parishes are in much the same predicament as Inishkillane.’ He counted 231 households in the parish and observed that ‘An extraordinarily large number of these homes are occupied by acutely isolated people.’ He found that there were 32 bachelors, 4 spinsters, 3 widowers and 13 widows ‘living entirely alone’; 21 bachelors and 10 spinsters living with siblings; and 23 couples who lived alone—‘a total of 115 chronically isolated people, between them occupying 80 houses’. Inevitably the incidence of mental illness was very high. He continued:

  Since the girls now refuse to stay in the countryside, the last son of a family who stays at home is unlikely to marry. In the parish today, therefore, one son in each family is faced with a choice between staying celibate at home and emigrating with the chance of marriage…. Some girls dutifully return for Christmas and summer holidays, but virtually none come to marry.

  ‘The conditions for covert liaisons and flirtations are absent,’ he added. ‘Those who have decided to stay at home do so in the full realisation that the decision almost certainly entails a life of chastity.’

  Since the state had exported so many young people dissatisfied with conditions at home, it was unlikely that those remaining would elect governments capable of pursuing radical economic policies. By appointing Seán MacEntee as Minister for Finance in 1951, de Valera ensured that only traditional conservative solutions would be applied to the Republic’s economic plight. The severely deflationary budget of 1952 increased income tax by a shilling in the pound and raised the prices of bread, butter, tea, sugar, alcoholic drink and petrol. This not only added to the general air of gloom but also presented An Foras Tionscail, the underdeveloped areas board set up in 1952 by Seán Lemass, with an almost impossible uphill task.

  Independent TDs withdrew their support in 1954, and the ensuing election put a second inter-party government in office, a coalition of Fine Gael, Labour and Clann na Talmhan with John A. Costello again as Taoiseach. The new administration failed to seize the opportunity offered, and the Finance minister, Gerard Sweetman, applied the same pre-Keynesian medicine with even greater enthusiasm than MacEntee. The publication of census statistics in 1956, showing that the population of the state had fallen to an all-time low, forced Costello to go to the country in March 1957. Fianna Fáil returned to office with 78 seats. This was de Valera’s greatest electoral triumph. But the incoming Taoiseach was seventy-four years old and almost blind, and he disappointed many by retaining most of his ‘old guard’ in his cabinet. While he remained it was unlikely that adventurous new policies would be applied. The siege economy, cowering behind its high tariff wall, would not be dismantled.

  At a time when the rest of western Europe was enjoying spectacular growth, the Republic’s economy remained in the doldrums. Agricultural employment, comprising 40 per cent of the workforce in 1950, suffered a decline of almost a quarter over the next ten years. Between 1951 and 1961 25,000 jobs were lost in the construction industry. Real wages failed to rise, and, indeed, an industrial worker earned less in 1958 than he or she earned in 1950. Few attempts were made to find more distant markets: the UK still took nearly 90 per cent of the state’s exports, and since these were overwhelmingly agricultural, the returns were kept down by low prices on the British market arising from the system of farm deficiency payments in operation there.

  Largely as a result of pressure from his own party, de Valera stepped down on 17 June 1959. On that same day he was elected President of Ireland by a comfortable majority. Seán Lemass succeeded as Taoiseach without a contest. Veteran politician though he was, Lemass would inaugurate the radical change in direction that the state desperately needed.

  Episode 248

  CHURCH AND STATE AND THE IRA

  The controversy over Dr Noël Browne’s Mother and Child Scheme in 1951 proved a gift to propagandists of the Ulster Unionist Party. Catholic bishops continued to supply ample material to allow Lord Brookeborough, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, and in particular Harry Midgley, Education minister from 1949, to lard their speeches with scathing comments.

  Eamon de Valera, Taoiseach again in 1951, proved more adroit than his inter-party predecessors in dealing with the Catholic hierarchy. Nevertheless, his Fianna Fáil government was forced to include a means test in the 1953 Health Act, and it would be many years before the state could be said to have a national health service. The ban imposed on Catholics entering Trinity College, first imposed by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin in 1944, was adopted by other dioceses in the country. Joseph Walsh, Archbishop of Tuam, gave direct instructions that in his diocese, as from 1 October 1953, all dance halls—whether or not in the control of the clergy—should close not later than midnight in winter and 1 a.m. in summer. This arrangement was
quickly adopted in many other dioceses. Nor did the hierarchy hesitate to pronounce on foreign affairs. Both Bishop Michael Browne of Galway and Bishop Cornelius Lucey of Cork publicly supported Senator Joe McCarthy in his notorious witch-hunt against communists in the USA. Cardinal John D’Alton, Archbishop of Armagh, rebuked the Fianna Fáil government when it voted that communist China should be considered for membership of the UN.

  The hierarchy was particularly exercised by the dangers of ‘evil literature’. Frequent pronouncements in Lenten pastorals encouraged the Censorship of Publications Board to greater efforts: about a hundred books a year were banned in the 1930s, but between 1950 and 1955 the annual average was six hundred. After a discussion with McQuaid in November 1953 on the issue of publications ‘objectionable on moral grounds’, de Valera directed Gerry Boland, the Minister for Justice, ‘to put an end to the sale of books of the kind in question’. Revenue officers had to seize all paperback novels ‘with titles, jacket designs, or illustrations suggestive of indecent content’. McQuaid wrote to the Taoiseach afterwards to thank him for his efforts ‘to prevent the diffusion of evil books’. Authors having their works banned included John Steinbeck, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Seán O’Faolain, Liam O’Flaherty and Seán O’Casey. Even so, the standing committee of the hierarchy felt obliged to write again to de Valera in January 1958 about ‘the necessity for effective defence of the public interest’ arising from the ‘increase in evil publications’.