by Gary Murphy
This speech fundamentally supported Whitaker’s stance, and reassured the country’s premier civil servant that the Government was committed to export-led growth. Lemass recognised that existing investment and output were not sufficient to maintain the level of demand he believed necessary to obtain full employment, and he became a wholehearted supporter of Whitaker’s export-led ideas. Whitaker himself had instructed his officials that it was ‘desirable that this Department should do some independent thinking and not wait simply for Industry and Commerce or the IDA to produce the ideas’.41
Thus, it was in the atmosphere of a new Government and a more active and interventionist Department of Finance that Economic Development was born. Whitaker has stated that it was Gerard Sweetman’s tenure of office as Finance minister that did much to pave the way for Economic Development. Not only did Sweetman appoint Whitaker as secretary at the Department of Finance in breach of seniority principles, he also established the Capital Investment Advisory Committee and initiated the Irish application for membership of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These innovations were intimately linked to the immediate origins of Economic Development. Sweetman also introduced tax reliefs for exports (in 1956) that emphasised the need for a substantial increase in volume and efficiency of national production.42Whitaker advanced a three-pronged strategy: more planning, fewer tariffs and greater emphasis on productive investment. Lemass did not hesitate in joining him.
‘That least distinguished decade’
Lemass and Whitaker were not alone. At a wider level, the mid-1950s saw developments that went some way towards solving the psycho-logical problems Todd Andrews talked of in 1957:
Psychologically speaking we have not fully severed the British connection and our economic and administrative reflexes were too much conditioned by our past historical and present economic association with Britain. We are inclined to rely too much on the British framework of reference for our ideas on policy. If we have the confidence in ourselves which we are entitled to have, and if we have a determination to act as well as to think, I believe it possible to achieve this wish … A psychological blight seems to have descended on the country and the young people in particular seem to have lost confidence in our future.43
Studies, the influential Jesuit journal, devoted an entire issue in spring 1955 to ‘Ireland Tomorrow’. The editor had made ‘no attempt to tailor the essays to a rigid, preconceived pattern’, and found it ‘all the more remarkable, therefore, to discover the common undertone running through these pages: the plea for a more creative outlook’.44This was just one example of the discontent running through the various political journals. The Leader – under the editorship of UCD historian, T.D. Williams, and UCD economist, Patrick Lynch – Hibernia and The Bell – edited by the radical socialist, Peadar O’Donnell, from 1946 to its demise in 1954 – produced provocative and well-informed political and economic comment.45
At an official level, the degree of worry amongst public servants as to the welfare of the country was crystallised in the 1953 launch of the journal Administration, ‘designed to give civil servants an outlet to express opinions on professional matters and eventually to form an institute of public administration’.46The previous year saw a number of younger officers in the civil service set up the Association of Higher Civil Servants, and it was through Administration that they ‘could vent some spleen, as it were’.47The establishment of Administration was, as Garret FitzGerald points out:
… a remarkably brave venture in those dark days of the early 1950s, when uniquely amongst industrialised countries in the dynamic post war years, the Irish state, just three decades old, was sunk in the economic stagnation and intellectual torpor of that least distinguished decade of its history.48
Early in 1952 an inspired group of civil servants in the Department of Local Government at the Custom House, together with colleagues from some other departments, established an informal committee to organise meetings on issues of public policy. Headed originally by Patrick Doolan – collector of Customs and Excise – its first meetings drew an inordinate response, with Tom Barrington recalling that on some occasions ‘up to five hundred people would turn up’. Doolan ‘was fed up with the way the Association of Higher Civil Servants was bellyaching about pay rather than discussing policy-making initiatives. That was the driving force for him.’49The committee – which included Barrington, Brendan Herlihy and Des Roche – managed to persuade the association to finance the discussion group, and within six months of its first meeting, Administration appeared, publishing in journal-form papers that were read to the discussion group, together with other commissioned papers. Administration quickly saw its readership rise to 2,000. It received support not only from within the civil service but also from the local-Government service. Furthermore, academics – foremost among them Basil Chubb and Patrick Lynch – involved themselves from the start. Whitaker also used the journal as an outlet for his thoughts. The importance of the foundation of Administration was that it illustrated in a most fundamental way the restless discontent in parts of the civil service. This concern was reflected in pockets of influence throughout the country.
By the mid-1950s it seemed that if the civil service did not attempt to reform from within, it would become simply a bureaucratic monster going through the motions of Government, offering old solutions to new problems, and extremely reluctant to try anything even remotely tainted with novelty. There were many within the policy community who believed that the civil service needed to be drastically reformed. Todd Andrews in 1957 wanted to:
… divide local Government into eight or ten regions, run them by a small number of elected representatives plus a manager endowed with the same powers as at the present. I would remove from local administration some of the functions at present exercised by county councils … I think we should change our ideas to permit the civil service to take a more active part in the affairs of the country than they are permitted to do at present … Civil servants should be able to comment outside their department remit and should be permitted to serve on local councils.50
While these may have been radical proposals – later, Andrews ceased advocating such developments when he realised that the managers did not want an expansion in their role – the more significant point is that there was a body of opinion in public life that maintained that a stagnant civil service was serving the country poorly, and that change was urgently needed.51
The Catholic church also entered the debate on the country’s economic affairs. Ruth Barrington maintains that the liberalisation of the Irish intellectual climate of the 1960s was seen in the fact that ‘bishops asked for increased state intervention in the affairs of the community, not less’.52While this is broadly true, some individuals within the hierarchy were advocating such a policy years earlier, though they couched their arguments carefully. William Philbin, bishop of Clonfert, was one of the first into the fray when he delivered in August 1957 a lecture entitled ‘Patriotism’. He argued that a highly developed national culture would give the world something to remember the Irish by other than ‘our name carved on a tree’:
For such ends we may not neglect economic realities. If our numbers diminish much further we shall not have the strength or the interest left to develop the spiritual and cultural resources of our people and to offer the world evidence of an individuality justifying our struggle for independence.53
Equating the struggle to gain a healthy, expanding economy with the national struggle for independence was a notion subscribed to by Whitaker when he argued throughout 1957 and 1958 that without a progressive economy, political independence would be ‘a mere facade’.54Philbin argued that national prosperity was vital if the country was to keep abreast of the rapidly increasing living standards in other countries. This, evidently, was the only way of:
… preventing our country of being drained of its most ambitious citizens. We cannot progress along these lines without the all out effort of all our
people. There is need for the whole of our patriotic energy … Surely a moral is easily drawn from the fact that our economic backwardness is being used more and more as an argument against the re-integration of our country. A healthy economy is a presupposition of any political progress. To exist at all is more important than the political manner of one’s existence … Our patriotism needs to be realist, not escapist, practical not spectacular and romantic. If only a remnant of the Irish people is left at home, living on a run-down economy, it will matter little how we are governed, we shall be a negligible factor in human affairs.55
In this, one can see implicit criticism of de Valera’s vision of the pastoral society. While this vision might have been entirely laudable, in economic terms it had failed, and there were those within the church willing to say so. A country not succeeding on the economic front had nowhere to go. Yet some within the clergy were enthusiastic followers of de Valera’s Ireland. Father Terence Cosgrove, parish priest of Kilnamona, County Clare, for instance, stressed that:
We in the Republic have not fared too badly at all, taking due account of all the circumstances … May Ireland be eminently successfully in her task, may she complete her work at home and may she be as she was in the Golden Age of history, an exemplar and a light to nations.56
Here, one can see illustrated two positions within the clergy on Ireland’s economic problems. In essence, Catholic comment on the economic issues came down to a matter of individual choice. It is interesting that Christus Rex – which styled itself as a Catholic journal of sociology – opened its pages for critical comment on the economy to writers of various ilks; one did not necessarily have to be a member of the clergy to contribute. Thus, Whitaker’s Economic Development came under much scrutiny. An anonymous contributor to the July 1959 edition wrote that while Economic Development gave a complete picture of national economic policy for the immediate future, and the diagnosis added up to a ‘partial confession of failure, there may be some misgivings about the future. It does not seem likely that there will be any lessening of the Government grip on our economic life’.57
Government interference in the economy and in the life of the citizen was something that had preoccupied the clergy for some considerable time. In April 1952 William Conway – then professor of moral theology at Maynooth, and later to become cardinal and archbishop of Armagh – offered one of the more balanced statements of the time when he examined the reasons for the rapid growth of state power. While he demonstrated that this growth was a response to genuine needs, and was accepted by Catholic social theorists, he argued that:
The growth and power of the state has become so sudden and so rapid that men of almost all shades of political and economic thought are beginning to wonder whether we have not loosed something which is getting out of control.58
Conway did acknowledge that the state ‘had not merely the right but the duty to interfere in economic affairs when the common good demanded it’, and declared that it was ‘no part of the church’s teachings … that state intervention is wrong in principle and therefore to be opposed in all cases’.59He insisted, however, that the church was right to be watchful and to oppose the Government when it felt that it had no other option. In essence, some in the Catholic church were prepared to comment individually on the economic situation and the role of Government, but, on the whole, the church formulated no concrete position on economic policy. This was the case with Economic Development: Whitaker deliberately quoted Philbin so as to lessen the possibility of its being damned with pejorative ‘socialist’ connotations of ‘planning’ – hence Whitaker’s preference for ‘economic programme’ as opposed to ‘economic plan’.60
Christus Rex also saw an important contribution on economic affairs from Labhras Ó Nuailláin, an economist from University College, Galway, who in April 1958 maintained that:
The prospect of a substantial expansion of industry based on Irish private enterprise alone does not appear to be very bright for some time to come. In many parts of the country, the people with capital have no enterprise; the people of enterprise, in many cases have no capital, and a good many enterprising young people have left the country altogether. The introduction of foreign capital and foreign technicians is not a thing to be deplored, but to be welcomed, especially when they bring new skills and industries with a large male labour content.61
Bringing in foreign expertise was one of the fundamental tenets of the new economic strategy Whitaker was planning for the Irish economy. Moreover, for Ó Nuailláin, ‘a long term comprehensive programme of planned development is imperative if we are ever to remedy the basic structural defects in our economy’. When these lines were written, Whitaker and his team were in the throes of completing Economic Development, and it does seem remarkable that within public commentary there was, to an extent, a convergence of minds on the solutions required to boost the Irish economy. Ó Nuailláin argued that the conventional notions and lines of approach adopted in the formulation of national economic policy since the foundation of the state would ‘have to be cast aside before this state will be firmly on the road to rehabilitation’. He continued:
One of such notions that must be abandoned is that the sole repository of wisdom lies in the headquarters of state departments. There are sections of the community, in the Professions, in the Trade Unions, in Industry and Commerce, in Agriculture and in the Universities, able and willing to give objective and competent advice and views on the essentials in a programme of national rehabilitation. The Government that seeks out the advice and support of such people and learns to canalise that reservoir of national pride and self respect so far untapped, will be the Government, no matter its composition, that will set this nation on the road to national prosperity.62
While there is no evidence that anyone engaged in national policy-making was influenced by this article and the argument contained within it, it is nevertheless interesting to note that Ó Nuailláin’s hypothesis calling for development of corporatist-style relationships between the economic interest groups and Government was, to a degree, taken on board in the years after the publication of Economic Development, when the various professional bodies were consulted during the making of national policy as the Government put in place a conscious political structure that integrated the organised socio-economic producing groups through a system of representation and co-operative mutual interaction.63
The role of the civil service was receiving more attention by the late 1950s. Todd Andrews in 1957 maintained that it would be better for the country if those individuals who entered the civil service out of monetary and job-security considerations went into industry instead, and argued that they would if national industrial development proceeded at a rapid rate.64A number of years earlier, a parliamentary party meeting of Fianna Fáil adopted a motion calling on the Minister for Finance ‘to take immediate steps to effect a gradual reduction in the number of civil servants so as to bring them into line with what the country can afford’. MacEntee, as minister, responded by explaining that ‘a special effort was being made to effect such a reduction’.65In essence, the argument about the civil service mirrored the debate about interacting with the economic-interest groups in that both were part of a re-examination of the way Government conducted its business in the period.
A radical reappraisal
The appointment of Whitaker as secretary at the Department of Finance in 1956 is normally considered to have been a radical departure for the civil service in the sense that traditional hierarchical expectations were ignored. More fundamentally, Whitaker came to the post with different expectations and an intellectual development distinct from many of his predecessors or colleagues. His challenge would be to take his senior colleagues with him in moving the Irish economy out of the desert and into the promised land. He realised that in addition to the economic element, this land would have social and political implications. It was within this context, and under Whitaker’s impetus, that the Irish Government looked to Eur
ope for a way out of the economic morass that the country found itself in.
Economic Development emerged from a crisis of national self-confidence provoked by the economic difficulties of 1956–57. Garret FitzGerald, for one, commented:
It seems scarcely probable that the authors whether politicians, civil servants, businessmen or economists would have felt able, or, in other cases, have been given the opportunity to put forward such radical reappraisals of traditional national policies, had this psychological crisis not taken place.66
This reinforces Whitaker’s view that the years 1955–56 had plumbed the depths of hopelessness, with the balance-of-payments crises overcome only at the cost of stagnation, high unemployment and emigration. In such a situation, a broad consensus of interested parties was needed in order to facilitate a new departure in economic policy that would transcend party politics. If the White Paper entitled The Programme for Economic Expansion had been launched without reference to the document on which it was based – Economic Development – there was a danger that it might not have received the bipartisan treatment that was necessary if it was to provide an agreed basis for the development of the Irish economy.67
Economic Development – completed in May 1958 – became the basis for the White Paper published on 11 November 1958. The fact that Economic Development was published at all and a full eleven days after the Programme for Economic Expansion is significant: Economic Development was published in order to stimulate national interest and make available to the general public the blueprint for a form of national recovery – something a White Paper could simply not do. In essence, it was a national policy programme prepared by the head of the civil service. Its most critical feature was the proposal to sharply accelerate the shift from protectionism towards free trade, and from discouragement to encouragement of foreign investment in Ireland. This involved a dramatic reversal of the rhetoric and, to a large extent, the practice of all policy, but especially Fianna Fáil policy, since 1932.68Whitaker argued that the Government should encourage industries that would be competitive in world markets and provide a continuing source of employment at home: