by Gary Murphy
The penetration of Fianna Fáil into the bureaucracy appears to be very great, and is due mainly to the fact that the party has had a near monopoly on public office for almost fifty years and has, by its own success, generated social categories created in its own image.8
No matter how deep this penetration, the scale of the economic crisis in the 1950s, and its concomitant electoral fluidity, persuaded the party that it was not guaranteed electoral success in perpetuity. The attempt by Fianna Fáil to change the electoral system to a first-past-the-post system would seem to be further evidence that Ireland’s largest political party felt its secure hold on Government was under threat, and it is clear that this was not simply due to the vagaries of proportional representation via the single transferable vote.
The search for the promised land in post-war Ireland took place in an atmosphere of unprecedented political uncertainty. Political matters and political success did motivate Lemass, but they were not his only concerns in an Ireland that had lost 300,000 people to other lands through emigration since Fianna Fáil first took power in 1932. Political concerns did not motivate Whitaker or, for that matter, those on the other side of the free trade fence, such as J.C.B. MacCarthy. Their concerns were of a more nationalist bent: nationalist in terms of loyalty to the state and attempting to get the state out of the economic mire it was stuck in. Somewhat paradoxically, the population as a whole did not seem to view the EEC as a panacea to Ireland’s ills, as the levels of ignorance surrounding that organisation in the early 1960s were truly staggering. When, in 1961, the Irish Press asked 943 people if they had heard of the Common Market, 36 per cent of those polled said they had a ‘vague idea’ of it, while the same percentage said they had ‘never heard of it’.9Given those figures, it is appropriate to ask whether anyone outside the political elite was actually listening to the leaders of the Irish state in relation to EEC membership. Yet what is important to note here is that it is the job of politicians to lead. In the case of both the movement to free trade and entry into the EEC, that is what Seán Lemass more than any other politician of this era did.
The lesson for current policy-makers dealing with certainly the gravest economic crisis since the 1950s is that leadership and political decision-making matters. Even when the general populace seems to be unmoved by, or even unaware of, major policy initiatives, it is the responsibility of political leaders to argue for them and drive them through. Politics might be about power, but it also leads to apathy amongst a significant section of all electorates. That apathy can only be overcome through engaged citizenship, but such engaged citizenship must be spurred on by political leadership. The rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in the June 2008 referendum was, in the main, due to an anaemic campaign by the proponents of the ‘yes’ vote. The referendum showed that the public has to be convinced of the merits of European integration much more so than in the past, and it was therefore the task of the Fianna Fáil/Green Party/Progressive Democrats coalition Government to show much more substantive leadership in that campaign than it actually did. Politicians and policy-makers in the post-war period did not get everything right – and, in fact, got much wrong – but what they were able to do was show leadership and thus begin a process by which Ireland would be able to take its place in the world as a mature interdependent state able to provide a future for its citizens.
1 Michael Marsh, ‘Explanations for party choice’ in Michael Gallagher and Michael Marsh (eds), How Ireland Voted 2007: The Full Story of Ireland’s General Election (Dublin, 2008), pp. 128–9.
2 Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy, ‘Whose Ireland?’ in Girvin and Murphy, Lemass Era, p. 3.
3 Enda Delaney, ‘The vanishing Irish? The exodus from Ireland in the 1950s’ in Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea and Carmel Quinlan (eds), The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s (Cork, 2004), p. 86.
4 Hillery is quoted in Walsh, Patrick Hillery, p. 71.
5 Girvin and Murphy, ‘Whose Ireland?’, p. 5.
6 Patrick Honohan and Cormac O’Grada, ‘The Irish macroeconomic crisis of 1955–56: How much was due to monetary policy?’, Irish Economic and Social History, vol. xxv (1998); Barry, ‘Theoretical and pragmatic elements in the civil service debates on trade liberalisation’.
7 See for example R.F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000 (London, 2007), p. 17.
8 Tom Garvin, The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics (Dublin, 1981), p. 224.
9 Gary Murphy and Niamh Puirséil, ‘“Is it a new allowance?”: Irish entry to the EEC and popular opinion’, Irish Political Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, p. 536.
Bibliography
Abbreviations
AG – Attorney General
CAB – Cabinet
DCU – Dublin City University
DO – Dominions Office
DT – Department of the Taoiseach
EC – European Community
EFTA – European Free Trade Area
GATT – General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
ICTU – Irish Congress of Trade Unions
ILSHA – Irish Labour History Society Archive
ITUC – Irish Trade Union Congress
NAI – National Archives of Ireland
NAI DFA – National Archives of Ireland Department of Foreign Affairs
NAI DT – National Archives of Ireland Department of the Taoiseach
NARA RG – National Archives and Records Administration Record Group
NLI – National Library of Ireland
PUTUO – Provisional United Trade Union Organisation
TID – Trade and Industry Division
UCDA – University College Dublin Archives
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National Archives of Ireland (NAI), Dublin
Department of the Taoiseach, S Files
Department of Finance, F Files
Department of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade Files
Department of Industry and Commerce, TID Files
Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Congress Archives
Department of Finance, Dublin, D Files, F Files
National Archives, London
Dominions Office
National Archives and Records Administration of the United States, Washington, DC
State Department (RG59)
Private Papers
C.S. Andrews papers, University College Dublin Archive (UCDA)
Frederick H. Boland manuscript, copy in possession of the author
Joseph Brennan papers, NLI (National Library of Ireland)
John A. Costello papers, UCDA
Eamon de Valera papers, UCDA
Seán MacEntee papers, UCDA
Patrick McGilligan papers, UCDA
William Norton papers, Irish Labour History Society (IHLS)
Pádraic O’Halpin papers, UCDA
Mackenzie King diaries: www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/king/index-e.html
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Fianna Fáil party papers, UCDA
Fine Gael party papers, UCDA
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Dáil Debates
Seanad Debates
Central Bank Reports
Newspapers and Periodicals
Bell, The
Christus Rex
Cork Examiner
Economist
Evening Herald
Hibernia
Industrial Review
Irish Council of the European Movement Newsletter
Irish Independent
Irish Industry
Irish Monthly
Irish Press
Irish Times, The
Irish Times Review and Annual, The
Leader, The
Round Table
Standard, The
Statist, The
Studies
Sunday Independent
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Sir Christopher Audland
Colm Barnes
Tom Barrington
John Carroll
Patrick Lynch
John F. McCarthy interview with Seán Lemass
Domhnall McCullough
Joseph McCullough
Charles Murray
Donal Nevin
J.C. Nagle
Tadhg Ó Cearbhaill
Aodogan O’Rahilly
Louis Smith
T.K. Whitaker
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