by Gary Murphy
Patrick Lynch, however, recalled ‘the freshness and vigour of trade union thinking on the desirability of a consensus on the broad economic issues such as income policies and economic planning’.54He described the representatives of the ICTU as being free from partisanship and as people who produced many original contributions directed solely to the common good, and he maintains that the support of the unions was essential for the success of economic planning that Whitaker was promoting. Donal Nevin has also talked of the importance of the unions’ role in bodies such as the NIEC and the CIO, arguing that they could have taken the attitude that ‘it is none of our business but instead played a positive role’.55While this may be so, the ICTU’s first policy statement on entry into the EEC urged caution, and advised the Government, rather unrealistically, to pursue alternative strategies such as searching for new markets.56More interestingly, Nevin maintains that Congress as a unified body left its negotiators – usually Ruaidhrí Roberts and himself – to formulate their own stance, and adopted their reports on various economic policies unanimously. Before the ICTU was united, many full-time craft-union officials involved in complex negotiations with Government and the employers on pay and other issues had little knowledge of economic problems. Nevin has stressed how the union movement – and himself in particular as research officer – relied on the advice of academic economists, such as Paddy Lynch, for their policy positions.57
Freer trade is coming
The CIO was involved in incorporating the industrial-interest groups into Government structures, and within this framework Lemass met the FII and ICTU in January 1962 to discuss the implications of the application for industry. Lemass told the FII that it would have only a short period of time to adapt to the new conditions, and would then have to face the full brunt of competition. He recognised that some industries would not be able to make this transition easily, but said that the Government was aware of this and would seek some concessions from the EEC. Colm Barnes, president of the FII, protested that Irish industry could not survive what would amount to a 50 per-cent cut in tariffs. As he was to recall later:
While we realised that the EEC would not tolerate stragglers, we thought it would be a massive act of self-deception on the part of the Government if they thought that industry could withstand such tariff cuts. Looking back now industry was very weak, but once you were in there was great security because you had a captive market and high tariff walls which kept out imports. If we had entered in 1963 on these grounds native industry already weak would have been decimated.58
Lemass, in response, noted that the EEC would probably not give special concessions to Ireland, and that while negotiation was possible, the principle of a transition period leading to the elimination of tariffs had to be accepted. It was doubtful whether the EEC would agree to selective tariff cuts, but if there was a possibility of securing a special protocol, it would be necessary to specify the sensitive industries. He estimated that if Ireland joined in 1963, effective protection would be gone within three years of accession, and that, consequently, this was the time span to be dealt with. Within that period, and the longer transitional-period, adjustment might be made after consultation with the EEC, but he believed that the limits were well established.59
At another level, a former Government official has spoken of the frustration felt by those officials who undertook the CIO surveys:
We would have an appointment to meet with the Managing Director of some firm down the country and we would arrive only to be told that he was gone playing golf or was off at the hunt, our experiences were literally of that kind. That was the mindset of industrialists at the time. They had no faith in the CIO.60
Countering this, Joseph McCullough – who was heavily involved in industry – comments:
I was a general manager in a tyre manufacturing firm at the time. Civil servants from Industry and Commerce came down to see us but really they were hopelessly ill-equipped. The idea that these fellows could help us to organise when they were not even organised themselves was ludicrous. What happened was that civil servants were being transferred from one section of Industry and Commerce to another but they were all really of the same mindset.61
Another industrialist has commented on how great opportunities were lost due to the attitudes of businessmen:
Due to that lack of self confidence, which was largely within small business, and not having enough strong entrepreneurial spirit, major opportunities were lost. However, we had no business people to lead us, only politicians and civil servants. Yet there was a feeling that they did not know business, the nitty gritty of it, only the theory and as a result business people tended to try to ignore them. Their attitude to the CIO would be an example of that.62
Although the ICTU gave only lukewarm support to the original application, it offered no dissension to Lemass’ strategy when it met him three days later. Lemass urged the trade unions to accept that changes were underway in Ireland’s relationship with the wider world, and that existing preferential arrangements with Britain were already weakened. He reiterated his intention to seek membership under the best terms possible, but said that they would have to operate on the assumption that tariffs would have to be removed by the beginning of 1970. He stressed that it was his view that:
State aids to industry designed to promote efficiency should be regarded as desirable … though the form of aid in some cases would be modified … In general it appeared likely that the question of adjustment to common market conditions would be a problem of the position of individual firms rather than industrial groups.63
This implied that even in the absence of EEC membership, considerable changes in the Irish economy would be necessary. The ICTU responded to the Government’s stance by calling a consultative conference to debate the impact entry into the EEC would have on its movement. Though it issued no formal response to its meeting with Lemass, the ICTU could have been in no doubt that he was determined to bring Ireland into the EEC. Hibernia criticised the unions and the other economic actors for their general reluctance to comment publicly on economic issues: ‘What is particularly lamentable is that the universities, the large business corporations, the trade unions, the private banks and the political parties make so little contribution to economic thought and discussion in Ireland’.64
It would seem that the ICTU was more concerned about the EEC than EFTA due to the political connotations associated with the former. Donal Nevin, for instance, told the 1961 annual conference that ‘there is no doubt that entry into the Common Market would mean a surrender of control over economic policy’, while the following year, John Carroll of the ITGWU told the conference that the ICTU had not done enough to ‘point out to all of us the importance to our nation of the political ramifications of membership of the EEC’.65Some trade unionists, such as M. O’Donnell of the Irish National Union of Vintners’, Grocers’ and Allied Trades’ Assistants, believed that ‘the political aspect of this question is to a great extent a myth’.66Moreover, the question of the EEC being a bulwark against communism was raised by many speakers at the 1961 conference in Cork as a reason for entering the EEC. Irish entry into EFTA would not have the same political connotations as entry into the EEC, and the Cork conference showed that there was division over this issue within the ICTU.
The ICTU eventually responded to the EEC application by delivering a policy statement at the annual conference in Galway in July 1962. The main thrust of this was that the conversion of the Irish economy to conditions of free trade should proceed:
… at a pace, over a certain period of time and in such a manner that our object of securing a continuing increase in total employment shall be kept within such limits that redundant workers will be able to secure equally good employment in Ireland without adversely affecting the intake of new entrants into industry.67
Providing ample employment opportunities for redundant workers, while at the same time seeking similar opportunities for new entrants to the labour market
, was inevitably going to prove difficult. While the ICTU conceded that this objective might not be attainable in the context of EEC membership, what it did not point out was that there would be no chance of achieving this aim in protective isolation. While the ICTU does appear from this to have had significant doubts about free trade, it was nevertheless willing to support the general thrust of Lemass’ free trade intentions, which were inevitably focused on the EEC.
Inevitably, some unions were intransigently opposed to entry into the EEC – the Draughtsmens’ and Allied Technicians’ Association, for one, proclaiming ‘we are definitely anti-Common Market’.68Yet while many unions – particularly in assembly and textiles – were worried about the effects of free trade, most realised that they had to face up to the fact that it was coming. In effect, it was the economic rather than the political ramifications of EEC entry that worried trade unionists, though a good many recognised the problems inherent in Irish industry. One ITGWU representative felt that the EEC could be the answer to the country’s economic problems:
We have nothing to lose on the economic front. We have roughly 40,000 unemployed per year and 40,000 emigrate each year. Can it be very much worse than that, irrespective of what already adverse affects the Common Market has upon us? There are many protected industries in this country that refuse to install modern plant and machinery.69
At the 1963 congress, a member of the executive council remarked:
It has been made abundantly clear to us now that what sufficed in the past will not do so in the future. A state of complacency does exist at all levels of industry whether it be with management or with the workers.70
It was with this awareness of complacency that the ICTU was willing, however reluctantly, to join Lemass on the road to free trade.
The ICTU held a consultative conference in March 1963 to discuss the preliminary reports issued by the CIO on the state of Irish industry. The CIO had published reports on the leather, footwear, paper and paperbond, cotton, linen and rayon, motor vehicle assembly and fertiliser industries, and estimated that these could be faced with considerable redundancies if EEC rules were applied to Ireland. Unions representing workers in these industries communicated with the ICTU to voice their fears and to ask that consideration be given to policy in the light of these findings.71One ITGWU representative, for instance, noted the seriousness of the reports, proclaiming that the motor-assembly industry was likely to be drastically hit by free trade:
These reports give serious food for thought because they indicate that unless many changes are made in our industrial set up we will be unable to meet the competition of free trade conditions. That these changes must be made all agree … under the policy of protection many have failed to keep up with the changing times; failed to modernise; failed to introduce new techniques. Now following the CIO reports, these industries find themselves in serious difficulty. The changes that should have been made as a matter of course over the years were not made.72
Indeed, the motor industry would be hit substantially by EEC membership and the removal of protective support, though it took until July 1984 before Ford closed its manufacturing base in Cork.
For his part, Lemass saw the CIO reports as proof positive that ‘the policy of protection has been clearly and officially shown in post-war circumstances to be defective in promoting or compelling the effort needed to ensure the continuing efficiency of industry’.73The ICTU recognised that if Irish industry was to survive, it had to export; to export, it had to be competitive. It would not be possible in the EEC to manufacture for export while receiving protection at home. Even if Ireland did not enter the EEC, there were two good reasons why this policy should not be continued, it argued: primarily, protected home industries tended not to export, and concealed the cost of inefficiency within high-priced products for the protected market; secondly, the consumer was subsidising the cost of inefficiency through higher prices, and this represented a drain on the national economy. The problem the ICTU faced was how to ensure that heavy reductions in employment did not result from the elimination of tariffs in the process of reorganising Irish industry. The manpower and social-affairs committee of the OECD had accepted recommendations that member countries should make an active labour-market policy an essential element in their economic policies for growth and development. The ICTU eventually adopted a somewhat catch-all position: it supported the reorganisation of industry as desirable, yet said that the extent of any reorganisation should be such that redundant workers could be absorbed. This could be achieved, it suggested, by the establishment of a planning body to gather employment information and adjust investment to overcome cyclical disturbances.74It is not clear, however, how the ICTU anticipated such a body working or if it really believed that it would solve the unemployment problems that would inevitably arise once Ireland entered the EEC.
The CIO, in its final report, concluded that the sectors it had examined were not adapting to the new economic environment, even though Ireland had not entered the EEC and was not likely to until 1970 at the earliest, and despite the Government offering to provide advice and finance to aid the transition. It found that most industrial sectors were not internationally competitive, that they concentrated on production for home consumption, and that unless adjustment took place there would be a considerable loss in employment.75
By the early 1960s the Government had decided that the future direction of the Irish economy lay in it being associated with the EEC. The trade union movement was initially lukewarm in its endorsement, but was co-opted by Lemass and subsequently involved in discussions on the future development of economic policy. The ICTU, it must be said, was not seduced by its important role in Government policy formulation; it realised that its main priority of protecting the welfare of its members could be best achieved by formally negotiating and working with the Government. The Lemass Governments of the early 1960s had actively sought the input of the trade union movement, as well as other interest groups, in what was effectively a realignment of Government economic policy in which agricultural and industrial policy was placed on an equal footing for the first time in the history of the state. The ICTU therefore concluded that workers’ welfare could best be protected and enhanced from within a trading bloc, and by the union movement being in a position of influence – which it had not had before – rather that being isolated in the
wilderness.
The Government, industry and the trade unions recognised that Irish industry would have to develop rapidly to meet the rigours of free trade. As the president of the ITGWU, John Conroy, pointed out:
Freer trade is coming and unless we all realise this and prepare we will find that every workshop and factory not fully and efficiently equipped will cease to produce to economic requirements and all the employees will find themselves unemployed.76
The CIO had pointed out the unpreparedness of industry for the transition from a protective framework to an interdependent economy. The ICTU, through its involvement in various Government-sponsored bodies, had entered the mainstream of economic policy formulation, and in the light of free trade conditions, it seemed that there could be no return to a protectionist position. Wage negotiations overlapped throughout this period with the evolution of an external economic stance, and the union movement recognised that higher wages and higher productivity depended on the expansion of the Irish economy. All parties involved recognised that there could be no return to protectionism, and resolved to adopt a trilateral approach in an attempt to revolutionise the Irish economy in the light of new free trade conditions. A consensus had formed to the effect that it was better to face an unpredictable world as a member of an economic alliance rather than persist as an isolated economy, and that export-led growth was required.
Ireland’s economic interests had taken on a wider agenda – one that required the input of industry and the trade union movement. The European issue was vigorously debated at the ICTU’s annual conferences in the early 1960s, yet while its
position would change radically by the time of the referendum on entry into the EEC in 1972, there can be little doubt that as the CIO reports of the early 1960s were issued, the ICTU concluded that entry into Europe would be advantageous to its members. The ICTU and the majority of unions saw that protectionism had failed and that the challenge of free trade would have to be faced.
Union attitudes of the early 1970s were unquestionably much different than those of a decade previously. The intervening years had seen a deterioration of relations between the ICTU and the Fianna Fáil Government on a number of issues, not least on the direction of the economy. After a lengthy examination of the European issue in the early 1960s, Congress had tentatively embraced that ‘spurious progeny’, but would soon spurn it once it took on a life that the union movement could not agree with.77
A prosperous rural community
One of the main beneficiaries of Ireland’s entry into an economic bloc would be the farming community – a sector of society central to Lemass’ attempts to realign Irish economic policy. The course of state–farmer relations from the foundation of the National Farmers’ Association (NFA) in 1955 to the official formalising of relations between the Government and that organisation in 1964 was a rocky one. The 1950s saw a redefinition of state–farmer relations: the specifically farmers’ political parties of earlier decades had been unable to establish Irish politics on a rural-versus-urban footing. The original Farmers’ Party did manage to win a handful of seats in 1922, but failed to consolidate this modest achievement; its vote faded away within a decade, with the remnants of the party subsumed into Fine Gael. In 1939 another farmers’ party emerged: founded in Athenry, Clann na Talmhan built a base amongst small farmers, and its policies included land reclamation and redistribution. It performed spectacularly in its inaugural election, in 1943, gaining over 100,000 first-preference votes – close to 10 per cent of the first-preference vote. It was unable to sustain this level of support despite participating in the 1948–51 and 1954–57 Inter-Party Governments, and its demise came about in 1965.78