De Valera's Irelands

by Dermot Keogh

  37 Clear, C., Women of the House, chapters 8, 9 & 10; McNabb, Patrick, ‘Social Structure’ in Newman, J. (ed.), The Limerick Rural Survey 1958–64, Muintir na Tíre, Tipperary, 1964, pp. 226–7; see also, for example, the short story ‘Fine China’ by Elizabeth Brennan in The Irish Countrywoman, vol. 9, 1963–4, pp. 23–7. The Emigration Commission also noted the problem of multigenerational families. Eamon de Valera had been worried about this for some time, and had set up the Interdepartmental Committee on the Question of Making Available a Second Dwelling House on Farms, which reported in 1943 (NA S13413/1) that such a provision might encourage subdivision, and advised against it. However many of the Land Commission inspectors who responded to the questionnaire sent out by the Committee (the only research which they carried out) noted the problem of the extended rural farm family. Useful and readable surveys of the Irish family in the twentieth century are to be found in Curtin, C. and Gibbon, P., ‘The Stem Family in Ireland’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 20, no. 3, July 1978, pp. 429–53, and Fahey, Tony, ‘Family and Household in Ireland’ in Clancy, Patrick (ed.), Irish Society: Sociological Perspectives, IPA, Dublin, 1995, pp. 206–33.

  38 See tables in Appendices, compiled from the Office of the Registrar General, Annual Re­port 1923–52, up to 1949, Table 10, 15 or 17 (variously), Marriage, Birth and Death Rates by Provinces, Counties and County Boroughs. After 1952 there was no longer a regional breakdown of maternal mortality. From 1953, Central Statistics Office, Vital Statistics 1953 (1955) T3/33, table XXVII, xxxv; ibid., 1954 (1957), T3/34, xxxiii; ibid., 1955 (1958), T3/35, xxx; and so on.

  39 Loudon, Irivine, Death in Childbirth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992. This is the most comprehensive and readable survey of death in childbirth over the past several hundred years, up to the present day.

  40 Barrington, Ruth, Health, Medicine and Politics in Ireland 1900–1970, IPA, Dublin, 1987, passim; Revised Midwives Bill 1931, NA S942.

  41 See Appendix 2. Apart from the distinction between deaths from puerperal sepsis/ fever and other causes of maternal mortality, which were set out in the annual sta­tistics cited in note 39, all information on the breakdown of causes of maternal morta­lity 1938–1950 is to be found in Annual Report of Registrar-General 1950, table XXXI, xliii, and for selected years in the 1950s, from the Vital Statistics for those years.

  42 Dockeray, G. C. and Fearon, W. R., ‘Ante-Natal Nutrition in Dublin: a Preliminary Sur­vey’, Irish Journal of Medical Science, no. 175, 1939, pp. 80–84.

  43 In 1936, 98 out of the 273 maternal deaths, or 35%, took place ‘elsewhere’, i.e., some­where other than a hospital or nursing home, effectively, at home; in 1950, 36 of the 99 maternal deaths, or 36%, took place at home. Abstract V: ‘Causes of Deaths in Saor­stát Éireann by Sexes, Ages and Places of Occurrence’, Report of the Registrar-General for 1936; Table 20, ‘Deaths in 1950 Classified by Cause Showing Place of Occurrence’, Report of the Registrar-General for 1950.

  44 Spain, Alex, ‘Maternity Services in Éire’, and Quinn, James, ‘A Suggested Maternity Ser­vice for Éire’, in Irish Journal of Medical Science, no. 229, January 1945, pp. 1–23. A num­ber of similar opinions were expressed in letters to medical journals, see for example, letter from P. J. Greene, GP, Loughrea, to the Journal of the Medical Association of Éire, vol. 14, no. 3, 1944, pp. 57–8.

  45 Healy, Mary, For the Poor and For the Gentry: Mary Healy Remembers Her Life, Geography Publications, Dublin, 1989, pp. 84–7; Humphreys, Alexander, New Dubliners: Urbani­sation and the Irish Family, Routledge and Keegan Paul, London, 1966, p. 120.

  46 A comparison of the maternal mortality rates and services in counties Mayo and Kil­dare up to 1953 (one of the worst and one of the best serviced areas respectively) is made in Clear, C., Women of the House, chapter 6, and it is suggested that a higher pro­portion of midwives and services in a largely rural area did not significantly reduce maternal mortality.

  47 Barrington, Health, Medicine and Politics, p. 131. My own research also indicated that ‘handywomen’ or female relatives were very common as birth attendants in rural areas up to the 1950s.

  48 The information on women attending ante-natal clinics is taken from the annual reports of the Department of Local Government and Public Health up to 1946. The hostility of trained midwives to handywomen is evident in the appendices to these reports and in numerous articles in nurses’ newspapers, see, for example, ‘Editorial’, Irish Nurses Union Gazette, no. 13, May 1925.

  49 Connolly, G., ‘Extract from the Annual Report’ (Discussion of the Dublin Maternity Re­ports), Irish Journal of Medical Science, no. 371, November 1956, p. 528.

  50 Barrington, Health, Medicine and Politics, chapters 6 & 7.

  51 Children’s Allowances were introduced in 1944, conceived of as subsidies to low bread­winner incomes, payable to the fathers of families. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, pp. 277–85. See also correspondence on family allowances, 13/11/39–16/3/43, and Report of Inter­­departmental Committee on Family Allowances NA S12117, A, B.

  52 My own evidence for this is the personal testimony which I solicited, in which women – and men – from this period thought of these allow­ances as women’s money, and had to be reminded by me that they were in fact payable initially to fathers. It is strik­ing that even in families where the male head was mean with money and otherwise domin­eering, the woman still collected this. Because of the manner in which I solici­ted testimony (by letters in newspapers), there was a higher probability that the infor­mants (because of their very survival) would have had a positive experience of ‘family life’. Yet it was striking that these allowances were seen as payable to women by a variety of informants, urban and rural, farming (on good land and on bad) and non-farming, lower-middle-class and working-class, male-dominated or female-domi­nated families.

  53 Healy, John, No One Shouted Stop, formerly Death of an Irish Town, Mercier, Cork, 1968, chapters 1–4; McCourt, Frank, Angela’s Ashes, Flamingo, London, 1996.

  54 Department of Health, National Nutrition Survey Parts I–VII (1948–52), K53/1–6; Gene­ral Survey, Table 22, p. 23.

  55 Loudon, Death in Childbirth, op. cit.

  56 Recent revelations about Sweden’s eugenic policies up to the 1970s in the work of Scan­dinavian historian Gunnar Myrdal.

  57 There was a strong eugenic strand in the ‘voluntary motherhood’ movement and the feminism of the first half of this century was often associated with eugenicism, see Greer, Germaine, Sex and Destiny: the Politics of Human Fertility, Secker and Warburg, London, 1984, passim, but especially chapter 6; Bock, Gisela and Thane, Pat, Mater­nity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880–1950s, Routledge, New York, 1992; Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, Mothers of a New World, Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, Routledge, New York, 1993. Lucy Kingston, Irish feminist and pacifist highly active in the defence of women’s citizen­ship. and working women’s rights in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, revealed eugenic be­liefs in her diaries, see Lawrenson Swanton, Daisy, Emerging from the Shadow: the Lives of Sarah Anne Lawrenson and Lucy Olive Kingston, Attic, Dublin, 1994. For a eugenically-minded health manual of the period, see Stone, Abraham & Stone, Hannah, A Marri­age Manual: a Practical Guidebook to Sex and Marriage, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1940.

  58 Emigration Commission Report, Reservation no. 8 by Mr Arnold Marsh, pp. 234–7; for a non-eugenic advocacy of birth control and smaller families, see Reservation no. 1 by W. R. F. Collis and Arnold Marsh, pp. 220–21 and Reservation no. 6 by Rev. A. A. Luce, pp. 230–1.

  59 ibid., pp. 98–101, and in Dr Lucey’s Minority Report, p. 341. These were not universal, but common enough, and exacerbated by poor nutrition and exhaustion; piles, vari­cose veins, neuralgia, fallen arches; then the dangers for subsequent pregnancies of a prolapsed womb, slack uterine muscles which might not contract efficiently in labour, placenta praevia, anaemia, high blood pressure, and of course, any condition the mother had
, like heart disease or weakness in the lungs, could be worsened by continual preg­nancy. See, for example Feeney, J. K., Master, Coombe Hospital, Dublin, ‘Complica­tions Associated with High Multiparity: a Clinical Survey of 518 cases’, Journal of the Irish Medical Association, vol. 32, 1953, pp. 36–55; Solomons, Michael, Pro-Life? The Irish Question, Lilliput, Dublin, 1992, pp. 5–6 on his own experience and that of his father, both Dublin obstetricians in this century; O’Connell, John, Doctor John: Crusading Doc­tor and Politician, Poolbeg, Dublin, 1989, p. 30.

  60 Ó Gráda, Cormac, Ireland: a New Economic History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, pp. 218–25.

  61 Healy, For the Poor and For the Gentry, p. 87. It is however likely that such a sense of griev­ance might not have been expressed to me, for a number of reasons.

  62 Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, p. 193.

  63 See note 52, above, and Clear, C., Women of the House, passim.

  64 See correspondence on children’s allowances, reference given note 51.

  Better sureshot than scattergun: Eamon de Valera, Seán Ó Faoláin and arts policy

  Brian P. Kennedy

  In early 1987, I interviewed Seán Ó Faoláin, a sprightly man in his eighty-seventh year, who walked without the aid of a stick, was well groomed, wore thick-lensed glasses, and expressed strongly-held opinions, offered to me freely and with a good sense of humour. Ó Faoláin told me that ‘the artist is a rare bird. There are only about two or three in every gene­ration.’ He believed that ‘little amounts of money do not create great art. Even big amounts of money do not create great art. The artist is there or he is not there.’1This sounds very like the so-called ‘bubble up theory’ of Charles J. Haughey outlined in the only lengthy interview ever conduct­ed with him on the subject of arts policy.2Although Haughey defended the independence of the Irish Arts Council, he stated: ‘I don’t think you should be too concerned about structures and infrastructures. Art is very much its own thing. It bubbles up unexpectedly here and there … I don’t think you should policy-ise it’.3

  The development of arts policy in Ireland, as in many countries, has seen a continuing tension between those who believe in fostering condi­tions for growth in the arts through specific initiatives, like Seán Ó Fao­láin and Charles J. Haughey, and those who wish to plan, foster and pro­mote it through co-ordinated government intervention. Clearly the estab­­lishment of a Ministry of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht in 1992 reflects a different, more centralised and pro-active approach to arts policy. Seán Ó Faoláin’s policy as Director of the Arts Council from 1956 to 1959 can be described as ‘better sureshot than scattergun’. It was better to target expenditure on particular initiatives than to attempt, with very limited resources, to spread money thinly on a wide range of arts activities.

  The Arts Council, or to use its statutory title, An Chomhairle Ealaíon, was established by the Arts Act, 1951, and was, after the Arts Council of Great Britain, only the second such organisation in the world. It is, in ef­fect, a type of quango, a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organi­sa­tion, and operates the arms-length principle which is supposed to keep it free from political interference. According to the Arts Act, 1951, the arts are ‘painting, sculpture, architecture, music, drama, literature, design in industry and the fine arts and applied arts generally’. The first director of An Chomhairle Ealaíon was Patrick J. Little and he worked tirelessly to promote arts activity throughout Ireland. He believed in a type of com­munity arts policy of art for the people and by the people: ‘The appeal should be as wide as possible for the benefit of the community as a whole’, and he considered that: ‘Rural Ireland holds the heart of Ireland and it will not do to confine the Council’s activities to urban centres’.4The Arts Council’s purpose was, in Little’s view, ‘to stir the spirit of in­dependent artistic functions’.5

  Some people were cynical about these sentiments coming from a poli­tician. The poet and author Patrick Kavanagh wrote, tongue in cheek, that there had traditionally been ‘Four Pillars of Wisdom’ in Ireland – ‘the Christian Brothers, Croke Park, Radio Iran and the Queen’s Theatre’. ‘Wearing the cultural smile which withers all life within range of its ven­om’, politicians were now attempting to impart further wisdom:

  Government ministers, not being content to confine their confused dis­cussions to economics and high finance, have recently been adding to their repertoire to gabble matters concerning Irish art and letters. Phrases like ‘Irish culture’ and ‘Irish cultural relations’ are beginning to compete with the worn-out and tired references to ‘our glorious martyrs’. Men who in a well ordered society would be weeding a field of potatoes or cutting turf in a bog are now making loud pronouncements on art.6

  There was a degree of truth in the contention that some politicians had questionable motives when using the theme of the arts for speech mate­rial. Little was an idealist whose motives were not in doubt. His ten­dency to philosophise gave him a reputation as a political lightweight. He seemed too sincere for hard-nosed politics. The public relations work involved in launching the Arts Council suited his temperament. He was rarely out of the news during his years as director, opening exhibitions, promoting festivals, pleading for the restoration of historic buildings and lauding the work of amateur arts groups.7He was wildly ambitious and the Department of the Taoiseach felt it necessary to keep a close eye on the Arts Council’s activities. Dr Nicholas Nolan, assistant secretary in the department, telephoned the Council’s office at least once each week to receive a progress report.8He was concerned especially that the Coun­cil should be known by its legal title ‘An Chomhairle Ealaíon’. This creat­ed a practical problem because ‘a great many people did not know where to look for the telephone number in the Phone Directory’.9People looked for it under ‘Arts Council’ and found nothing. Dr Nolan gave permis­sion for the additional entry to be made in the telephone book: ‘Arts Council – see Comhairle Ealaíon’. This type of bureaucratic ingenuity was typical of the tight control maintained by the Taoiseach’s Depart­ment. The Arts Council had been foisted on the department whose officials, by their actions, indicated a distrust of the new institution.

  By the end of 1952, the Arts Council had spent about £10,000 and the emphasis had been on funding for drama and music groups in accor­dance with Little’s policy. The Taoiseach and his department were not impressed. In their opinion, the Arts Council’s main task was the promo­tion of the visual arts and industrial design. It was decided to call rep­resentatives of the Council to a meeting with the Taoiseach on 15 January 1953. An agreed report was prepared in which Eamon de Valera outlined the policies he thought the Council should pursue.10From de Valera’s point of view, the meeting provided an opportunity to use his influence although he ‘stressed the fact that he had no desire to interfere with the discretion of the Council in the exercise of their functions’. His wishes were expressed politely: ‘It would be a pity,’ he remarked, ‘if the Council were to depart from the original intention with regard to their functions.’ He thought that music was perhaps a matter for Radio Éireann and the Department of Education. Drama was, in his opinion, much less in need of encouragement than the visual arts and design in industry.

  The Taoiseach advised the adoption of two important guidelines. He suggested ‘that the Council should exercise special care in regard to any branch of art for which an existing state organisation was catering’ (that is, grants should not be given from two state bodies to one organi­sation). The second guideline in the agreed report read: ‘The Taoiseach said that the restoration of the Irish language was not, in itself, a function of the Council, and money was being spent in other directions by the State for this purpose.’ The Arts Council followed the Taoiseach’s advice literally and refused all future applications for funding of arts activities by Irish language groups.

  It may seem surprising that it was Eamon de Valera who established the key guidelines for the Arts Council in its early years. This was due to P. J. Little’s di
rect influence because he was de Valera’s trusted advisor on cultural matters. Little represented Waterford County in Dáil Éireann from 1927 to 1954. He was de Valera’s parliamentary secretary from 1933 to 1939 before being appointed Minster for Posts and Telegraphs from 1939 to 1948.

  Edward MacLysaght thought that de Valera ‘almost alone of leading public men in Ireland at the time, was not only sympathetic but positive­ly helpful in promoting cultural endeavours’.11In contrast, Mervyn Wall, while acknowledging that de Valera had ‘many virtues’, has said:

  The regrettable thing was that he hadn’t the slightest understanding of, or interest in, the arts. He didn’t think them important. I remember a public statement of his in which he said that he couldn’t see any reason for playing the work of foreign composers in Ireland, as we already had our own beauti­ful Irish music. When he was in his fifties, he visited the Abbey Theatre to see a play about Saint Francis of Assisi, remarking rather innocently that he had never been in the Abbey Theatre before, a truly remarkable admission.12

  De Valera’s admission was not so remarkable – Cosgrave had admitted in 1924 that he had never been to the Abbey. But how can these two op­posing views of de Valera be reconciled?

  De Valera certainly viewed the fine arts as a luxury which the coun­try could not afford. In 1928 he said that the country:

  had to make the sort of choice that might be open, for instance, to a servant in a big mansion. If the servant was displeased with the kicks of the young mas­ter and wanted to have his freedom, he had to make up his mind whether or not he was going to have that freedom and give up the luxuries of a cer­tain kind which were not available to him by being in that mansion … If he goes into the cottage, he has to make up his mind to put up with the frugal fare of that cottage. As far as I am concerned, if I had that choice to make, I would make it willingly. I would say, ‘We are prepared to get out of the man­sion, to live our lives in our own way, and to live in that frugal manner.’13