by Gary Murphy
108 David O’Mahony, ‘On not following Britain’s lead’, Hibernia, Oct. 1962.
109 Hugh Charlton, ‘Government, people and Common Market’, Hibernia, Nov. 1962.
110 Ibid.
111 E.J. Hegarty, ‘Statistics: the Common Market’, Christus Rex, vol. xvi, no. 1 (Jan. 1962), pp. 55–7.
112 Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, p. 497.
113 Ibid., p. 498.
114 J.H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923–1979 (Dublin, 1980), p. 354–5.
115 William J. Philbin, ‘The Irish and the new Europe’, Studies, vol. li, no. 201 (spring 1962), p. 31.
116 Ibid., p. 36.
117 Ibid., p. 43.
118 James Kavanagh, ‘The state and economic and social policy’, Christus Rex, vol. xvi, no. 4 (Oct. 1962), p. 277.
119 Irish Press, 18 Jan. 1962.
120 The Irish view is contained in NAI, DT, S.16877W, memorandum for the Government: application for membership of the European Economic Community, 8 Jan. 1962. See also S.16877K-M, which includes correspondence with the Council of Ministers.
121 Irish Press, 19 Jan. 1962.
122 Guardian, 19 Jan. 1962.
123 NAI, DT, S.16877Y/62, comments made to J.C.B. MacCarthy regarding Taoiseach’s statement, 18 Jan. 1962.
124 Ibid.
125 NAI, DT, S.16877W, memorandum for the Government: application for membership of the European Economic Community, 8 Jan. 1962.
126 NAI, DT, S.16877X/62, Department of Industry and Commerce to Department of Taoiseach, 8 Jan. 1962.
127 McCullough interview.
128 Barnes interview.
129 For a contemporary analysis of the CIO, see Brock, ‘The CIO Industrial Survey’; for an historical analysis, see Girvin, Between Two Worlds, pp. 203–5.
130 Nevin interview.
131 NAI, DT, S.17120A/62, meeting between the Taoiseach, the Minister for Industry and Commerce and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, 11 Jan. 1962.
132 O’Rahilly interview.
133 Fianna Fáil, F/729, presidential address by An Taoiseach to Fianna Fáil ard fheis, 16 Jan. 1962.
134 Ibid.
135 O’Rahilly interview.
136 Fianna Fáil, F/729, report of Fianna Fáil ard fheis, 16 Jan. 1962.
137 Sunday Independent, 11 Feb. 1962.
138 Irish Press, 12 Feb. 1962.
139 The Statist, 26 Jan. 1962, pp. 261–268.
140 NAI, DT, S.17246A/62, report on the Statist article, 26 Jan. 1962; Donal O’Sullivan, Brussels to Department of External Affairs, 29 Jan. 1962.
141 NARA, RG59, Office of British Commonwealth and Northern European Affairs, alpha-numeric files relating to Ireland, box 1, Burke to Prince, 20 Apr. 1962.
142 NAI, DT, S.17246H/62, transcript of meeting between Irish delegation and Committee of the Member States of the EEC, 11 May 1962.
143 Lemass is quoted in Joseph T. Carroll, ‘General de Gaulle and Ireland’s EEC application’ in Pierre Joannon (ed.), De Gaulle and Ireland (Dublin, 1991), p. 87.
144 NAI, DT, S.17246N/62, meeting of secretaries, 7 Sept. 1962.
145 Dáil Debates, vol. 298, col. 1688, 21 Nov. 1962.
146 Fianna Fáil, F/729, presidential address by An Taoiseach to Fianna Fáil ard fheis, 20 Nov. 1962. The address was entitled ‘Ireland in the new Europe: The case for Irish membership of the European Economic Community’.
147 Ibid.
148 John Walsh, Patrick Hillery: The Official Biography (Dublin 2008), p. 130.
149 Fianna Fáil parliamentary-party minutes, FF441/B, 5 Dec. 1962.
150 For an analysis of de Gaulle’s motives and its implications for Ireland, see Carroll, ‘General De Gaulle and Ireland’s EEC application’, pp. 81–97; see also Keogh, Twentieth Century Ireland, p. 247.
151 DF, F.121/30/62, memorandum on consequences of breakdown in British/EEC negotiations and measures to be taken, 31 Jan. 1963.
152 Fianna Fáil parliamentary-party minutes, FF441/B, 30 Jan. 1963.
153 Dáil Debates, vol. 299, col. 924, 5 Feb. 1963.
154 Ibid., col. 925.
155 Ibid., col. 942.
156 For an analysis of the ideological importance of Fianna Fáil’s switch from protectionism to free trade, see Susan Baker, ‘Nationalist ideology and the industrial policy of Fianna Fáil: The evidence of the Irish Press (1955–72)’, Irish Political Studies, vol. 1 (1986), pp. 57–66.
157 Dáil Debates, vol. 299, cols. 946–948.
158 Miriam Hederman, The Road to Europe: Irish Attitudes 1948–61 (Dublin, 1983), p. 65.
159 DF, F.1213763, Lemass speech at Advertising Club of Greater Boston, 18 Oct. 1963.
160 DF, F.1211662, Economic Policy Committee Meeting of OECD, Paris, 21–2 Feb. 1962.
Acknowledgements
I have been researching and thinking about post-war Ireland for some time, and have accrued significant intellectual and personal debts.
For advice and guidance at various times, I thank Frank Barry, Raj Chari, Robert Elgie, Tom Feeney, Tom Garvin, Tom Hachey, John Hogan, David Jacobson, Michael Kennedy, Dermot Keogh, Tim Meagher, Andrew McCarthy, Deirdre McMahon, Mark O’Brien, Emmet O’Connor, Seán O’Connor, Tim O’Neill, Kevin Rafter, Rob Savage, Joe Skelly, Mary Shine Thompson, Damian Thomas, Tony Varley and Bernadette Whelan. I am particularly grateful to Niamh Puirséil for bringing a number of documents to my attention, and for valuable and insightful comments on a variety of issues.
The imprint of three close friends is apparent throughout this book. Though they might not agree with all that is in it, I am very grateful to Brian Girvin, John Horgan and Eunan O’Halpin, who have all, in their various ways, supported me over the years. They have been generous both with their own research and time, and I owe all three a tremendous debt.
Over the years, I have had the privilege of interviewing some of the leading luminaries of Ireland’s post-war economic development; I am grateful to them all. Some are now sadly deceased. A particular memory is of a cold April afternoon when I met with the late Paddy Lynch in his house in Wellington Road. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my academic life, which began with him quizzing me on my knowledge of Keynes and what it was like to have been educated at UCC, and ended with me helping to move furniture around his vast house. In between, he gave me two hours of his time, and it was clear to me that the Irish state was lucky indeed to have had this intellectual titan serve it.
I am grateful to the various archives and libraries that I have used. In particular, I thank the staff of Dublin City University (DCU) Library, National Archives of Ireland, National Library of Ireland, University College Dublin Archives, Irish Labour History Society and the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. I also thank Colm Gallagher of the Department of Finance and Philip Hannon – then of Fianna Fáil – for granting me early access to papers that were not in the public domain.
I thank the team at Mercier Press, particularly Wendy Logue, for being enthusiastic supporters of this project and for seeing it through to publication so professionally. I thank Declan Ryan and Anne Kearney of the Irish Examiner for use of the Examiner’s photo archive and Susan Kennedy of Lensmen for the use of its archive. I thank the publication assistance fund at DCU for supporting this work.
I owe a particular thanks to the staff of the Office of the Vice President of Research at DCU, who have had to put up with me since my secondment there as director of graduate research in 2007. I thank Eugene Kennedy, Declan Raftery, Tanya Keogh, Jonny Hobson, Fiona Killard, Fiona Brennan, Michelle Meehan, Ana Terres, Mark Rushforth, Mary Colgan, Niamh O’Dowd and Deirdre Donnelly for their support, professionalism and good humour.
Away from my desk, I have been lucky to have some close friends who have helped me keep my mind off the promised land. I thank Colm O’Callaghan, Michael Moynihan, Dave Hannigan, Denis Walsh, Donagh McGrath, Aengus Nolan, Michael O’Brien, Joe O’Hara and Colm O’Reilly. My Cork-born friends were particular
ly supportive during the dark days of the Cork hurling strike! Thanks also to Jack, Peg, Liam, Gina, Eric and Jacqui for being there.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife Mandy and children Amy, Aoife and Jack. Their presence in my life has made the writing of this book possible, and I could not have completed it without them.
Gary Murphy
Dublin, July 2009
Conclusion
Throughout late 2008 and early 2009 the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, spoke of his belief that the best way out of the worst economic recession since the 1950s was through consensus and the process of social partnership. The failure of the talks between the Government and the social partners to initiate a series of substantial savings to the exchequer led the Government in February 2009 to forsake the partnership process in major macroeconomic policy for the first time since 1987. Even then, Cowen was insisting that social partnership was alive and well.
Fianna Fáil has been the party most associated with social partner-ship. During the general election of 2007, the party was perhaps somewhat surprisingly returned to office for the third election in a row precisely because enough voters believed that Fianna Fáil was the best party to guide the country during what looked an inevitable downturn in the economy.1Yet political success brings with it the potential for hubris, as longevity in power can lead to complacency and conservatism. This is exactly what happened to Fianna Fáil in 1948. Political success from 1932 had made the party much more conservative, and by the end of the Second World War, it had long since lost the radicalism that it promised when first elected.2
The ending of the war can be seen as the moment when Ireland significantly begins to fall behind the Western European norm, as it becomes poor in comparative terms. The question the Irish body politic faced was how the independent Irish state could improve the economic and social welfare of its population. Most Irish nationalists had assumed that political independence would significantly improve Ireland’s economic position to the point where the state could provide enough employment opportunities for an increased population. By the time of the 1948 election, this had proven not to be the case. When Fianna Fáil sought another term in office, it did so having governed a state where the Irish economy was heavily subsidised and intensively protected. In addition, the strength of the economy was heavily dependent on privileged access to the British market and the success of British policy-making. This was a bitter pill for Fianna Fáil to swallow after sixteen years of Government, but the party offered little in the way of alternatives, and paid the price by losing power for the first time.
The crisis that Ireland faced in the 1950s led to the most fluid political situation since the establishment of the state. Political instability due mainly to voter disenchantment with the economy-plagued successive Governments throughout the period, as voters inevitably blamed the party in Government for the stagnating economy. Mass emigration – which returned after the end of the Second World War – increased steadily throughout the 1950s. The crisis of emigration, unemployment and the widening gap between the standard of living between Ireland and Britain, and – most sensitively – with Northern Ireland, could not be ignored by Ireland’s political elite. For the vanishing Irish of the 1950s, Economic Development, the Programme for Economic Expansion, Seán Lemass and T.K. Whitaker did not feature prominently in their first-hand accounts of leaving Ireland and the process of adjustment to life in Britain.3Yet for Lemass, who had a strong vision of a practical as distinct from idealised nationalism, such emigration hurt deeply. He more than any other politician of the period recognised that conditions in Ireland were driving young men and women out of the country, and his various policy suggestions during the 1940s and 1950s attempted to explicitly address this. While Lemass remained a nationalist, in contrast to de Valera his nationalism was promoted as an active commitment to change and development. De Valera seems to have had little interest in the economy or in the conditions under which Irish people had to live. His call to Irish emigrants in Britain to return home – as their living conditions in British cities were often poor – demonstrated a worrying lack of understanding about the underlying state of Ireland. What can be seen in the 1950s is Lemass developing a set of ideas that challenged the certainties of de Valera and the Fianna Fáil of Seán MacEntee, amongst others. As Patrick Hillery noted:
It was exciting with Lemass. He was through all the politics of Fianna Fáil, his brother was murdered, but he was stepping away from the bitterness, you know; he never went in for shouting or downing the other people [the opposition]. He had a kind of politics that I could go along with.4
More fundamentally, Lemass appreciated that the world outside had changed, that it did not owe Ireland a living, and that Ireland had to change to meet the challenge of this new environment.5That was the nationalism that led him – the apostle of protectionism in the 1930s – to tear down that particular house and build another on the foundations of free trade and – more slowly – entry into the EEC. Yet he was not clear how free trade and the benefits it would bring could be achieved without widespread disruption of the Irish economy, and nor was he sure whether the Irish economy could survive in a European trading bloc.
It is against this background that one should consider Lemass’ courtship of the various economic interest groups in the period. It was his view that the development of the country in economic terms necessarily revolved around a corporatist-style arrangement, with the Government leading these groups in a new economic partnership. For that to happen, Lemass realised that Government in its political form would have to be the hegemonic player in the policy-making system. Of even more importance was that he be at the head of such a system, and for that to happen he would have to devise a long-term economic strategy that would return Fianna Fáil to Government. While he bemoaned the fact that civil servants did not do enough independent thinking, he was firmly of the belief that it was political Government that should lead. This was the context within which the evolution of the formulation of public policy towards a more conscious and overt corporatist set of arrangements occurred. Within these parameters, the political interests – particularly in the form of Lemass – would lead, but it was intrinsic on individual interest groups – farmers, employers and trade unions – to play a full and active role in a modernising coalition of sorts. But of course, Lemass had to be in power to enact any significant policy change.
It is something of a caricature to portray Lemass as the saviour of modern Ireland. The second Inter-Party Government – while it undoubtedly made significant mistakes, perhaps principally in 1956 by prolonging the fiscal crisis – was not without its own ideas regarding Ireland’s future.6The package of grants, reliefs and other incentives to industry and agriculture to encourage expansion of production – which were to become the hallmark of the new system of foreign-led industrialisation under free trade – was first mooted by this Government in September 1956. This Government also initiated the Irish application for membership of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Implementing policy is, however, about being in Government, and politics is about winning elections. In that context, the second Inter-Party Government had too much of the aura of bad news about it, and its defeat in the 1957 general election left Fianna Fáil and Lemass to push the modernisation drive.
In the aftermath of the 1957 general election, Lemass was determined that his modernising coalition be brought together to bring Ireland into the promised land of economic development, where it could share in the prosperity apparent in Western Europe. Once Lemass became Taoiseach in 1959, he used the power of that office to promote an active expansion of the economy. Furthermore, he and the Fianna Fáil party accepted that Ireland had to be reintegrated into the global economy if it were to benefit from the worldwide expansion then under way. The key to this was entry into a trading bloc. The British decision to apply for membership of the EEC in 1961 was hugely important in this regard: it both forced Ireland to apply but also made it very dependent on
Britain, because without British goodwill, Ireland could not hope to gain any type of entry. More fundamentally, it oriented policy in a much more external way than had previously been the case, as Irish entry into the EEC became the overriding aim of Government economic policy.
The decision to apply for entry into the EEC copper-fastened the commitment to free trade and signalled the death knell for the narrowly protectionist policies dictated by de Valera’s commitment to economic nationalism and isolationism. Writing fifty years after Lemass came to power as Taoiseach, it is worth restating that this commitment to multilateralism has been maintained ever since, and open markets have been a keystone of Irish economic policy, leading to a situation where Ireland was ranked in the early twenty-first century as one of the most open economies in the world. This was a startling departure from previous Fianna Fáil policies. Indeed, the very man who introduced the original economic policies of protectionism removed them from the statute book.
The road to the EEC application led to a different economic policy – one that integrated Ireland into the wider world economically and, increasingly, politically. Lemass clearly would have been willing to give up Irish neutrality if that had been necessary to join the European Community, though that did not prove to be the case. The EEC application was a classic case of Fianna Fáil étatisme. Critics of Fianna Fáil have long since complained of the party’s tendency to treat itself as one with the state it should theoretically serve.7In adopting free trade and leading Ireland’s entry into the EEC, Fianna Fáil actually did the state some service by performing a somersault with regard to its dearly held mantras of self-sufficiency and protectionism. By doing what was good for Ireland in abandoning both, Fianna Fáil was also doing something good for itself. If nothing else, the immediate post-war period showed Fianna Fáil that the Irish people would not give it carte blanche at every election if it could not satisfy their economic needs. When considering Ireland’s search for the promised land of economic prosperity in the post-war period, Tom Garvin’s comments in 1982 are worth reflecting on: