An analysis of Anglo-Irish economic relations prepared by British officials in 1960 depicted Lemass's succession to de Valera as a political watershed:
With the ending of Mr De Valera's lengthy dominance of the Irish political scene and the emergence of Mr Lemass, himself a businessman, at the head of a more business-like administration, the political atmosphere in the South is changing. The spirit of 1916 and 1922 is on the wane. While it is too much to expect that any political leader in the Republic would ever abandon the hope that Partition will one day cease, Mr Lemass has been realistic enough to admit that this must be a long term objective.
It was much less optimistic about the Republic's economic prospects:
Their efforts to diversify their economy by the development of secondary industry have had only limited success. They depend, and are likely to continue to depend for as far ahead as can be seen, on selling their agricultural goods to the United Kingdom, but their prospects of expanding their market here are very poor… it is impossible to be optimistic about the Republic's economic future.1
What has subsequently become seen as the ‘Lemass–Whitaker watershed’ in the economic history of the Republic was also less than obvious to most of the state's citizens at the time. During a symposium on Whitaker's Economic Development, one economist pointed out that, outside of a small circle in Dublin, the impact of the document's publication had been extremely limited. It had done little to lift the mood of despondency and loss of confidence that had settled on the nation.2 Trade unionists criticized Whitaker for his refusal to put job creation as the primary objective of the development programme. Certainly there was little to spark popular enthusiasm in Economic Development. It was no selling point to inform the public that the implementation of the programme would lead to a doubling of national income after thirty-five years.3 Although it was soon evident to informed observers that the repeal of restrictions on foreign investment was bringing a rapid influx of capital from the US and Europe, there was little sign that the new mood of optimism amongst sections of the political, industrial and financial elite was percolating down to the broader population.
Lemass's reconsideration of the economic nationalist regime was threatening for employers and workers in the many sections of Irish industry that would find it difficult to compete with imports if there were a substantial reduction in the protective tariffs they enjoyed. Yet Lemass was aware that the creation of the European Economic Community and Britain's attitude to it would have profound implications for the Republic. Britain initially attempted to organize a rival group of countries to the EEC within a European Free Trade Area (EFTA). This threatened the privileged access of Irish agricultural exports to the British market, and in response in 1959 Lemass had opened negotiations with Harold Macmillan's government to try to achieve a radical revision of the framework governing Anglo-Irish trade. In return for the extension of the British system of price support to Irish farmers, he offered the removal of tariff barriers against British goods. However, pressure from British farmers and the Northern Ireland government blocked his proposals.
This did nothing to blunt the drive to liberalize the Irish economy, for it was soon apparent that Britain was reconsidering its attitude to the EEC, which meant Ireland had no option but to follow. As Lemass had explained to British officials in 1960, he ‘did not believe that small countries could stand alone and the Republic had no alternative but to link her economy with that of the United Kingdom’.4 With 90 per cent of its agricultural exports and 70 per cent of its exports of manufactured goods going to the UK, it would have been impossible for the Republic to consider joining the EEC if Britain had maintained its original sceptical position. In July 1961 Lemass announced that if Britain applied to join, Ireland would apply too. It was being made clear to Irish industry that the days of a protected home market were numbered.
Resistance came from both the Federation of Irish Industry (FII) and Lemass's old department. Officials at Industry and Commerce argued that many of the 65,000 workers in the main protected industries would be vulnerable and that tariffs would have to be maintained for at least another decade.5 However, some industrialists accepted that a phasing out of tariffs was inevitable. In 1960 Lemass had told the FII that it should study the problems that different sections of industry would face with freer trade. The organization had employed Garret FitzGerald, a young economics lecturer and financial journalist, to carry out a pilot study of the highly protected woollen and worsted industry. His report concluded that, unless there were drastic improvements in efficiency and marketing, the industry would face serious difficulties under free trade conditions and many firms would disappear.6 This survey encouraged the government to create the Committee on Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1961. Composed initially of representatives of industry, officials and independent experts, it was extended to include workers’ representatives and became the first of a number of tripartite institutions that Lemass was to use very successfully to build a national consensus around themes of economic modernization, growth and planning.
The CIO surveyed twenty-two industries employing about half of the total manufacturing workforce in the Republic. Its report painted a depressing picture. While there were some sectors that hoped to hold their own in a free trade situation, many more (including footwear, knitwear, wool, shirts, paper, steel and electrical equipment) expected considerable losses and the possibility of going out of business.7 Lemass's response was that only systematic tariff reduction would provide the necessary drive and discipline to ensure improvements in efficiency and an expansion of exports. Although this harsh message was somewhat softened by the fact that the government committed itself to a phased reduction, starting with across-the-board cuts of 10 per cent in 1963 and 1964, there was no concealing that by the end of the decade, or soon after, Irish industry would have to sink or swim in a free trade environment. But fundamental to pacifying industry and possible doubters in his own party was the clear commitment that liberalization did not mean laissez-faire. An Industrial Reorganization Branch was created in Industry and Commerce, and substantial amounts of financial and technical assistance were to be provided for those industries that demonstrated a commitment and a capacity to change.
De Gaulle's veto on Britain's application in 1963 did not ease the pressure for change. Lemass returned to his earlier objective of a free trade agreement with Britain as a transitional measure towards eventual EEC membership. Although the Conservative government remained unsympathetic, the return of Labour in October 1964 was seen in Dublin as propitious. This initial optimism suffered a blow when, owing to a balance of payments crisis, the British imposed a 15 per cent levy on all imports with the exception of food and raw materials. However, Lemass skilfuly used Wilson's desire for a breakthrough in Anglo-Irish relations to reopen the trade question, and on 14 December 1965 the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement was signed in London.
The Agreement seemed to some traditional nationalists a gross betrayal of Fianna Fáil's founding principles. In the Dáil, Seán Treacy, a Labour TD from the republican heartland of County Kerry, attacked Fianna Fáil for reneging on its principles: ‘[they] have perpetrated an act of union with Britain more final, binding and irrevocable than the Charter of Henry II or the Act of Union.’8 There was also opposition within the Department of External Affairs, which had produced a paper on the political implications of the Agreement arguing that ‘the resulting concentration of our trade “eggs” in one basket would inevitably have an inhibiting effect on our freedom of action in the political field and would expose us to greater political pressure by Britain.’9
Lemass displayed both his underlying radical purpose and his finely honed political skills in jettisoning economic nationalism. He contributed powerfully to a recasting of Irish nationalist discourse, which has been well summed up by Peter Mair:
Whereas in the earlier period the national interest had been seen to demand political, cultural and economic isolation, in the later period it came to imply the achievement of material prosperity. Independence per se was no longer sufficient, rather economic and social self-respect were necessary… Nationalism remained a key motif, but by the 1960s the success of the nationalist endeavour was to be measured in wealth and economic growth rather than in cultural or territorial integrity.10
Soon after becoming Taoiseach, Lemass had defined the supreme national task as ‘to consolidate the economic foundation of our political independence… it should be no exaggeration to say that our survival as an independent state depended on our success.’11 Economic success became the supreme national value because only through it could national unity be restored. While his approach to Ulster unionism and the northern state could be refreshingly revisionist, he did not hesitate to use anti-partitionism as a means of giving a nationalist veneer to policies that could have appeared heretical to traditional Fianna Fáil supporters. Economic success in the Republic would remove one of the main unionist objections to unification:
There are people today in the north-east of the country who say that we are here paying an uneconomic price for our freedom. We have got to prove them wrong. We have got to demonstrate that we can bring about a higher level of achievement and greater progress with freedom than without it.12
By 1961, with the first clear evidence of the success of the new policies, Lemass was publicly contrasting the ‘dynamism’ of the South with the North's growing unemployment problem and Brookeborough's resort to begging missions to London:
We are proving that there are better ways of dealing with the country's problems than by sending deputations to plead for help from others. The bread of charity is never very filing. I am convinced that the success of our economic programme can be a decisive factor in bringing about the change of outlook which the North requires and the discarding of all the old fallacies and prejudices on which partition has rested.13
Traditional territorial nationalism was also used to disarm the criticisms of tariff reductions that came from large sections of Irish industry. In advance of any free trade agreement with Britain, Lemass offered tariff reductions to northern manufacturers, to the chagrin of their counterparts in the Republic. When delegations of angry southern industrialists met Jack Lynch, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, they were rebuffed and told that the reductions ‘would be a considerable help in reducing suspicion and advancing national unity’.14
The shift in nationalist discourse was impelled by harsh economic realities, but it was soon rooted in economic success. By December 1962 a delighted Lemass could boast in the Dáil that ‘in many industrial occupations [there was] a scarcity of workers and in many areas full employment had been realised.’15 The performance of the Republic's economy for the next decade would continue to justify his early optimism. During the period 1959–72 manufacturing output increased by 5.9 per cent per annum, as compared with an overall growth rate of just under 4 per cent. Employment in manufacturing rose from 169,000 to 212,000. The pattern of the export trade showed a marked change: in 1960 industrial goods represented only one third of total exports, but by 1972 this share had risen to 55 per cent. An important source of change was the influx of foreign capital attracted by the government's relaxation of controls, its commitment to join the EEC, its generous tax allowances, and other inducements and wages that were low by American and West European levels. By 1973 new foreign-owned firms employed some 40,000 workers, or one fifth of the manufacturing workforce in the Republic.16
Economic historians sceptical of the role played by Economic Development and the First Programme for Economic Expansion have pointed out that during the 1960s international trade was buoyant, the terms of trade moved in Ireland's favour, and the doubling of the British rate of growth between 1959 and 1963 had a locomotive effect on the Irish economy.17 It is also true that moves to open up the economy and attract foreign capital had been initiated by the two inter-party governments. Yet, it is difficult to deny the elements of decisiveness and coherence that Lemass gave to the process of reintegrating the Republic into the international economy. Perhaps even more important was his determination that Ireland's development strategy would not be based on a liberal model but would take a semi-corporatist form involving partnership between the state, trade unions and employers.
The reunification of the trade union movement in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in 1959 encouraged Lemass to return to some of the themes of social partnership that he had first raised during the Emergency. Some of his own close associates were critical of his allegedly benign and uncritical attitude towards organized labour. In fact, his approach towards the Irish trade union movement, whatever its limitations as an economic strategy, was very much a vital political resource. It enabled him to re-establish Fianna Fáil's image as a broadly progressive force, something that had been severely damaged by its uninspiring performance in government and opposition during the 1950s. Gone was de Valera's emphasis on the virtue of frugality: as Lemass told delegates to the 1959 Ard-Fheis, ‘We used to say that we preferred freedom in a hair shirt to the fleshpots of serfdom, but that is not a choice we have to make. I believe in the beneficial force of disciplined nationalism.’18
Although there had been no trade union involvement in the formulation of the First Programme, the leader of the largest union in the country, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, praised the government for ‘its imagination, initiative, enthusiasm and tendency to long term planning which has attracted many new industries to the country’.19 The executive of ICTU was pleased to be wooed by Lemass through involvement in the CIO, in trade union advisory councils set up to consider problems of industrial adaptation to free trade, and, from 1963, in a new tripartite forum of unions, employers and government, the National Industrial Economic Council (NIEC), chaired by T.K. Whitaker.20
A central purpose of Irish corporatism, as of its European counterparts, was to control wage demands that could threaten Irish industry's competitiveness. In the period 1960–64 unit wage costs rose by 17 per cent in the Republic, compared to 7 per cent in Britain.21 Trade union leaders were expected, in return for a consultative role in economic policy-making and the promise of real economic and social gains for their members, to deliver wage discipline. From this perspective Irish corporatism failed. The removal of the fear of unemployment led to a new confidence amongst rank-and-file trade unionists who were determined to press for higher wages and shorter hours. There was a sharp upturn in industrial conflict: in 1964 Ireland topped the world league in man-hours lost through strikes.22 Lemass's frustration with what he complained was the ‘lack of cohesion and authority in the trade union movement’23 had initially encouraged an attempt to impose discipline. A White Paper, Closing the Gap, published in February 1963, proposed that the Employer–Labour Conference produce binding guidelines for wage increases and a pay freeze in the public sector. The sharp response from the ICTU, which withdrew its representatives from all government-sponsored bodies including the CIO and the Employer–Labour Conference, produced a rapid retreat, and the rest of Lemass's premier-ship would see little application of the stick but much of the carrot in the government's approach to the unions. He was soon to declare that national policy should take a ‘shift to the left’ and promised more government measures to ensure the translation of economic progress into improved social conditions in areas such as education, health and state benefits. This was more than rhetoric: social spending by government, which had declined from 14.8 per cent of GNP in 1952 to 13.7 per cent in 1962, rose to 16.6 per cent in 1966.24 Lemass was also involved in the negotiations that led to the first national wage agreement in 1964, which some of his critics in the party regarded as too generous.
The political pay-off for Lemass's identification with economic programming and his positive relationship with the leadership of the trade union movement was seen in the 1965 general election. In his first election as Taoiseach in 1961 it had been too early for the gains of the new policies to be registered and, with a low turnout reflecting what J. J. Lee calls ‘uncertain public morale’, Fianna Fáil's vote dropped from 48.3 to 43.8 per cent and its number of seats from seventy-eight to seventy, leaving Lemass to lead a minority government.25 However, in the 1965 election its share of the vote rose to 47.4 per cent and its number of seats to seventy-two, at a time when it faced the most significant challenge from the Labour Party since 1943. It was the first time in Fianna Fáil's history that it gained votes as an incumbent government after a full term of office.
But if the political achievement of Lemass was clear by the time of his retirement in 1966, his economic legacy was more ambiguous. Those who, like Whitaker, had doubts about his nudging of public policy to the left seemed to draw increasing support from the evidence that economic growth was accompanied by strikes, wage inflation and increasingly large balance of payments deficits. Economic programming itself was being thrown into question by the widening gap between forecasts and results. The First Programme had avoided setting specific targets; the Second Programme, launched in 1963, did commit itself to more precise objectives, including a net increase in employment of 81,000 by 1970 and a reduction of net emigration to 10,000 a year by the same date. While the forecasts for industrial growth were fulfilled, the continuing problems of agriculture meant unemployment remained higher than expected, and emigration, which had fallen in the early 1960s, rose again in 1965 to over 20,000 and did not fall below 15,000 for any year between 1963 and 1967.26 Government expenditure also rose faster than planned. As a result of these major discrepancies the Second Programme was brought to a premature conclusion and replaced by a (supposedly more realistic) Third Programme to cover the period 1969–72. Given the rapid economic transformations that the Republic was undergoing in the 1960s and its more open relation to the international economy, the whole programming project had an air of unreality about it. Yet, at its heart was Lemass's search for a development project based on class collaboration rather than on conflict. This would leave a lasting imprint on public policy in the South.
Lemass's reputation as a supreme iconoclast, as a radical force making an often reluctant party substitute reality for fantasy, has been seen as exemplified in his policy towards Northern Ireland. Indeed, J. J. Lee has argued that he was the first Taoiseach actually to have a northern policy.27 The core of this policy was constructive engagement with Stormont, and its symbolic highpoint was his meeting with Terence O'Neill at Stormont on 12 January 1965, the first such meeting since 1922. However, there were important elements of continuity with his predecessor's approach to Northern Ireland.
It is true that, as Jonathan Bardon states, Lemass abandoned the overt irredentism of previous governments.28 However, some of what have been seen as his innovations – for example, the idea that northerners could be attracted only by a higher standard of living in the Republic – had already been articulated by de Valera, who had many other subtle and even heretical views on the subject. Despite the traditional nationalist fixation on Britain's primary responsibility for ending partition, de Valera as he approached retirement had shifted the focus, telling a group of American journalists in 1957, ‘The solution of the partition question was strictly an Irish problem, one that must be worked out between Irish people in the north and south. It must be achieved on a satisfactory basis for both sides.’29 This directly anticipated one of the central themes in Lemass's discourse on Northern Ireland. In his Ard-Fheis speech in 1957 de Valera also raised the notion of functional cooperation that would dominate Lemass's approach: ‘the proper way to try to solve the problem of partition was to endeavour to have as close relations as possible with the people of the Six Counties and get them to combine with us in matters of common concern.’30
If Lemass produced little that was new in the way of ideas on Northern Ireland, his premiership was notable for a serious attempt to implement those that de Valera had articulated but had done little about for fear of annoying the more republican section of the party – above all his veteran Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken. His more active approach to Northern Ireland was in part a reflection of his long immersion in economic and industrial policy, which made him prone to see the radical policy reversals of the late 1950s as creating the material basis for political accommodation. It has been already noted how he used the supreme importance attached to Irish unity in Fianna Fáil's traditional ideology to sell EEC membership to the party. However, there can be no doubting the genuineness of his belief that the dismantling of customs barriers associated with the European project would have major political spillover effects: ‘In the long term economic considerations influence and determine political arrangements. The identity of economic interest in the two areas into which Ireland is now divided will, in time, bring about political unity.’31 Although he was also prepared to recognize that the division on the island was more than a tariff barrier – ‘it represents a spiritual cleavage which has its origins deep in our history’ – there could be no doubting his belief that religious and cultural divisions were increasingly anachronistic survivals that would be displaced by economic modernization. His own private religious agnosticism and his renowned lack of interest in the Irish language and the other cultural accoutrements of Irish identity,32 so important to de Valera, caused him to underestimate the power of more primordial voices in both nationalism and loyalism.
His optimism was partly based on the positive response that some northern manufacturers had given to his proposal for a North–South free trade agreement. Despite the rejection of the proposal by Brookeborough,33 a number of northern businesses ignored Stormont and approached the Ministry of Industry and Commerce in Dublin directly to negotiate reductions. Eventually Brookeborough was forced to modify his line and declare publicly that he would not stand in the way of manufacturers who sought better treatment from Dublin.34 Lemass was impressed with this Ulster bourgeois pragmatism and tried to encourage it as much as possible, asking the state airline, Aer Lingus, to consider ordering aircraft from Short Brothers and Harland, and Irish Shipping to encourage Harland and Wolff to tender for vessels it needed.35 The optimism that pervaded his approach to the North was based partly on the apparent contrast between the difficult conditions facing the province's staple industries in the early 1960s and the first signs of economic expansion in the South. The publication of the Hall Report and its rejection of what he referred to as ‘begging missions seeking British subsidies’ were seen as prompting ‘enlightened opinion’ in Northern Ireland to reconsider the value of the continued division of the island.36
But, as some contemporary critics pointed out, there was a fundamental contradiction in Lemass's approach to the North. This was evident in the first major statement he made on Northern Ireland when he participated in an Oxford Union debate on partition on 15 October 1959. The speech certainly impressed some in the British political elite with its support for ‘the growth of a practical system of co-operation between the two areas even in advance of any political arrangement’ and the argument that ‘quite apart from any views one may hold about the eventual reunification of Ireland, is it not commonsense that the two existing communities in our small island should seek every opportunity of working together in practical matters for their mutual and common good?’ He had also warned that ‘we cannot expect speedy results: the barriers of fear and suspicion in the minds of partitionists are too strong to be demolished quickly.’37 Yet he also made it clear that, although he believed the fundamental barriers to unity were internal ones, the British government could and should undo its historic responsibility for partition by declaring that it would like to see partition ended ‘by agreement among the Irish’. Pressure on the British to declare in favour of the Irish nationalist project could only undermine the real efforts that were made to foster practical schemes of cooperation with Stormont.
While Brookeborough was in power and insisting on the Republic's full constitutional recognition of Northern Ireland as a condition of any North–South cooperation, there could be little progress. Terence O'Neill initially maintained the same position but was under some pressure from the Conservative government to respond to Lemass's overtures.38 With even the former Secretary to the Northern Ireland cabinet, Sir Robert Gransden, saying in private that he thought the demand for constitutional recognition ‘completely unrealistic’,39 Lemass went some way to accommodate O'Neill. He used a Fianna Fail dinner in Tralee to make his most important speech on partition. In it he declared that he recognized that ‘the government and parliament there exist with the support of a majority in the Six County area’ and insisted that ‘the solution of the problem of partition is one to be found in Ireland by Irishmen.’40 Although he also referred to Northern Ireland as an ‘artificial area’, the speech represented a significant shift. As Robert Savage has noted, Lemass's recognition of the government and parliament of Northern Ireland ‘was a significant gesture to Unionists and an extraordinary statement for a Fianna Fail leader to make’.41
O'Neill gave a guarded welcome, describing the speech as ‘not without courage’, but cautioned that ‘As long as every gesture of friendship and every possible co-operation was subordinate to a long-term undermining of the constitutional position, so long would they have to moderate with a good deal of caution their wish for co-operation with their neigh-bours.’42 Lemass's response was to ask his ministers for proposals for an Irish agenda at civil service level on cross-border cooperation, thus putting aside the demand for a summit with all the difficulties that that could create for O'Neill.43 The implication of all this was what the Secretary to the Department of the Taoiseach called a ‘new departure’ in the policy on partition, which would have at its core two elements: ‘to disregard London as a factor in maintaining partition’ and ‘to concentrate on the Parliament and people in the Six Counties’.44 However, the likelihood of a positive response from O'Neill was undermined by a number of speeches Lemass made on a visit to the US less than a month later. In an address to the National Press Club in Washington, he called on the British government to issue a statement that it would welcome an opportunity to end partition ‘when Irishmen wanted to get rid of it’.45 Later, at the United Nations, he repeated the request and added that ‘he believed that the circumstances of partition were also under review in Britain.’46
So on the one hand Lemass pursued North–South cooperation, while on the other he challenged the legitimacy and permanence of the state with which he was proposing to cooperate. These conflicting strands of his position reflected the substantial resistance from the more nationalistic elements within Fianna Fail to ‘concessions’ to the Stormont regime. His Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, was a bastion of traditional anti-partitionism and, given his closeness to de Valera, a possible focus of resistance to any new direction on northern policy. It was Aiken who insisted on seeing the North as an imperialist vestige that Britain should look at in the context of its post-war decolonization process.47 Lemass's policy of discouraging the civil service and the Republic's radio and television services from referring to Northern Ireland as ‘The Six Counties’ was not popular with some of his colleagues,48 and his officials reported some political resistance from ministers to his proposals for North–South discussions at a civil service level.49 Too radical a shift on Northern Ireland policy could have had severe political repercussions within a minority Fianna Fáil government at a time when he was proposing a radical reversal of economic nationalism. The result was that when O'Neill decided to meet Lemass it was more in response to pressure from Harold Wilson than to any positive inducement from Dublin.
But if Lemass's northern policy only partially accommodated unionist concerns, it did even less for Stormont's minority. The Taoiseach regarded northern nationalism as being as conservative and sectarian as the regime it opposed. In a speech to students at Queen's University after he retired, Lemass attributed a part of the responsibility for the North's problems to the ‘narrow attitudes’ of the Nationalist Party,50 and in a subsequent interview he commented of northern nationalists that ‘for them the day partition ended would be the day they would get their foot on the throat of the Orangemen.’51 The sort of trips made by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the early 1950s to meet northern nationalists had been discontinued as the official anti-partition campaign had waned. By 1960 there had not been a visit to Northern Ireland by an official from External Affairs for over four years. Eddie McAteer complained that Dáil deputies had more contact with parliamentarians abroad than with nationalists in Stormont.52 The attempt to develop functional cooperation with Stormont discouraged visits that unionists might see as destabilizing, and a request from External Affairs for a resumption of visits ‘if only to show the Six-County people that we are still with them’ seems to have been ignored.53
What little interest Lemass had in northern nationalism seems to have focused on any signs of fresh thinking, particularly those associated with the formation of National Unity, a new grouping of younger nationalists critical of the Nationalist Party, in 1959. He used Erskine Childers, a Protestant and the son of one of the first republicans executed during the Civil War, as his most direct link with developments in the North. This in itself was revealing, as he regarded Childers as a lightweight and after inheriting him as Minister for Lands demoted him twice within the space of two years.54 Nevertheless, Childers's advice could only have encouraged the Taoiseach to continue with his focus on improving relations with Stormont while largely ignoring the concerns of the minority. After a visit to Belfast in March 1961 Childers wrote to Lemass of the ‘utter breakdown of the Nationalist Party’ and went on to give an analysis of the discrimination issue that was at stark variance with the traditional nationalist perspective:
Discrimination is decreasing, although it still exists. We hear of the local authorities who show discrimination in the allocation of houses, but there are quite a number who are not guilty of this practice, about whom we hear nothing. Discrimination in industry varies enormously. Some of the new English and American industries permit no discrimination whatsoever; in some cases they have been suborned by local pressure. In the case of the older industries, a few are absolutely fair and square in their attitude. Others employ numbers according to the population in the district to make sure that no Catholic men ever become foremen. In fairness to managements in some industries, it would be the men themselves who would create the trouble and who exercise pressure through the shop stewards regardless of what the managers think.55
Within the Department of External Affairs there was little stomach for attempts by northern nationalists to raise the discrimination issue. Much of the material that had been used during the anti-partition campaign was out of date, but when McAteer approached the Department with material for a new pamphlet the response was dismissive. A senior official was scathing:
I must assume that the facts and figures it mentions are correct. But I ask myself what is the purpose of the pamphlet? There is no need to tell Irish Nationalists. They have been given the facts over and over again in previous anti-partition propaganda. If the pamphlet is directed at a non-Irish audience I very much doubt if it will get farther than their waste-paper baskets. I am afraid it is regrettable but true that very little, if any, interest in the problems of the Northern Ireland minority is taken outside Ireland.56
As the first stirrings of the civil rights movement emerged in Northern Ireland, Dublin was if anything even less concerned with the discrimination issue than was London. After the summit with O'Neill, Lemass's priority was the consolidation of new links with the northern regime in areas such as trade and tourism. It was made plain to McAteer that he should not look to Dublin but lead his party into a more constructive relationship with the northern state, and it was as a result of this pressure that the Nationalist Party at last agreed to become the official opposition at Stormont. The long-term significance of this approach was brutally spelt out by a Dublin official in response to demands from some in the Nationalist Party for support: ‘The alternative to taking any action at the present time must inevitably be that the gap between the Nationalists in the North and the people here will grow wider. This development will of course force the Nationalists to adopt policies which are fully in keeping with their status in the Six Counties.’57 The next few years would see the frustration of this southern desire for the minority to sort out its relationship with Stormont under its own steam, while those who had had deep reservations about the Lemass approach tried to use the northern crisis to overthrow the whole edifice of partition.
John Horgan has described the 1960s as ‘socially turbulent years’,58 and Kieran Allen has claimed that the Republic was significantly affected by the wave of political and cultural radicalization associated with the anti-Vietnam war movement and the student uprisings of 1968.59 While in any international framework of comparison this might seem an exaggeration, there is no question that, after the stagnation of the previous decade, the governments in the Republic faced an unprecedented range of traditional and new demands. Industrial militancy, while not a new phenomenon, did develop an intensity that led to the decade being labelled a period of ‘unparalleled turbulence in Irish industrial relations’.60 The multiplicity of trade unions made any national agreement negotiated between the ICTU and employers difficult to enforce at a time when many groups of workers were keen to use improved economic conditions to extract the maximum that the market could bear. A sectional concern with the defence of pay relativities was an important source of miltancy, and there was also considerable tension between groups of rank-and-file trade unionists and national leaderships regarded as too inclined to compromise with employers and the state.
The authoritarian streak in Fianna Fáil's relation to the unions, first evident during the Emergency, reappeared when in 1965 a breakaway union of telephonists began to picket telephone exchanges to support a demand for recognition. Lemass lambasted these ‘ananti-state activities’, and strikers were jailed for breaching a government injunction against picketing. When their comrades attempted to protest outside the Dáil, the government did not hesitate to use the Offences against the State Act to ban such activities. In 1966 a strike by fitters in the state Electricity Supply Board (ESB) was met by legislation outlawing strike action in the industry and providing for heavy fines against both unions and individual strikers. This produced a major confrontation in 1968, when the legislation was used to jail more than fifty strikers in a dispute over pay.61 The culmination of this period of unrestrained wage bargaining was the maintenance craftsmen's strike in early 1969, which lasted for six weeks and was a source of unprecedented bitterness not simply between workers and employers but between the strikers and other unions and the leaders of the ICTU.
Some on the Irish left interpreted this industrial militancy as a potential threat to capitalist rule.62 This inflated its political significance. Just as in Northern Ireland militant trade union consciousness was quite compatible with traditional political affiliations, a Gallup survey found that only 37 per cent of trade unionists supported Labour.63 However, there was some spillover from industrial militancy into politics. Specifically, there was a substantial increase in the size and self-confidence of the Irish Labour Party. As Emmet O'Connor has noted, William Norton, who resigned as leader in 1960, had come to personify ‘the achingly, conservative, clientelist style of Labour deputies’.64 The dispiriting experience of the second inter-party government had left Labour, after the 1957 election, with 9 per cent of the vote and twelve Dáil deputies. Its only secure electoral base was amongst agricultural labourers and other rural workers in small towns and villages in Munster and Leinster. It had only one seat in Dublin.65 Like Norton, most of its deputies were trade union officials whose main focus was on their union business and their constituencies. Conservative, Catholic and fiercely anti-intellectual, they showed little interest in or concern about the national profile of the party or the need to seek new bases of support.
Norton's successor, Brendan Corish, had a background that was typical of the rural and familial basis of much of the Labour support at the time. He had won his Wexford constituency in a by-election caused by the death of his father and during the 1950s had shown little sign of a desire to swim against the stream, declaring in 1953 ‘I am an Irishman second; I am a Catholic first’ and defending those involved in the Fethard-on-Sea boycott of Protestants in 1957.66 However, as Labour leader he displayed some capacity to transcend his background. He encouraged the party to adopt a go-it-alone electoral strategy, rejecting future participation in a coalition government. The shift in Labour's ideological image was done in a gingerly fashion, with Corish explaining that Labour's socialism was a ‘Christian’ variety, and it would be towards the end of the decade before he dared to proclaim that ‘the Seventies will be Socialist.’ Yet there was evidence that, in the Dublin area in particular, Labour was trying hard to attract socially conscious sections of the middle class and a new generation of intellectuals and radicals through a more leftist profile.
Corish was heavily influenced by the new secretary of the party, Brendan Halligan.67 Halligan's key strategic idea was that Labour should force the two larger parties to coalesce by itself adopting a distinctive left-wing identity. Arguing that the two main parties had lost their raison d'être as the generation formed by 1916 and the Civil War faded from the scene, he identified a historic opportunity for the Labour Party to realign the political system along a more ‘normal’ left/right cleavage. Halligan was also at the centre of efforts to modernize the party. There was a serious effort to expand the number of branches: Labour in 1964 had only 248 branches, as compared with over 1,700 for Fianna Fáil and 600 for Fine Gael. By 1969 the party had 500 branches nationally and the number in Dublin had risen from twenty-nine to eighty-three.68 The party's traditional image as an appendage of the trade union movement was also undermined by the recruitment of a number of prominent intellectuals, such as the Trinity academics Justin Keating and David Thornley, and with the return to Ireland, after a high-profile diplomatic and academic career, of Conor Cruise O'Brien. By the time of the 1969 election only a fifth of Labour candidates were trade union officials, while the largest category was ‘professionals’ – in the 1961 election only one Labour candidate had been from this category.69
In the first two elections under Corish's leadership, Labour made steady progress, with 11.6 per cent of the national vote and sixteen seats in 1961 and 15.4 per cent and twenty-two seats in 1965. Corish and his young advisers became convinced that the rapidity of economic and social change in the Republic made a major breakthrough a real possibility. The 1969 ‘New Republic’ manifesto captured the mood of optimism:
The politics of the old Republic are over. The choice is no longer between two identical parties, divided only by the tragedy of history. The choice is now between the old Republic of bitterness, stagnation and failure, represented by the two Civil War parties, and the New Republic of opportunity, change and hope, represented by the Labour Party.70
Expectations were high, and there was talk of a possible Labour government. In fact, the result of the election was a shattering disappointment and marked the end of the go-it-alone policy. Labour's share of the vote increased to 17 per cent, but this reflected a substantial increase in the number of candidates from forty-four in 1965 to ninety-nine in 1969. Overall the party lost four seats, with gains in greater Dublin being overshadowed by disastrous results in traditional rural bastions.
Labour's optimism had had some basis, but its main defect lay in an overly unilinear view of the process of economic and social modernization in Ireland that ignored the continuing strength of rural and small-town Catholic traditionalism. Its activists blamed a ‘red smear’ campaign carried on by Fianna Fáil. There had certainly been such a campaign, with Labour being accused of wanting to introduce ‘Cuban socialism' in Ireland. Visions of Labour imposing collective farms on the small farmers of Kerry and other areas may well have lost some Labour TDs crucial votes. More significant would have been the Catholic Church's long-standing identification of ‘socialism’ with atheism and its associated immoralities. One Fianna Fáil candidate in Mayo, not content with the totally unfounded claim that Labour in power would legislate for abortion and divorce, added, ‘it would be great for the fellow who wanted a second wife every night.’71 But the problem with the ‘red smear’ argument was that many of the party's own rural TDs were also dismayed at the radical noises coming from Dublin and did all they could to dissociate themselves from the party's national campaign, fighting the election on purely local issues and their record of constituency service. In a society in transition Labour's new-found radicalism would have disconcerted many of its traditional supporters no matter what Fianna Fáil chose to allege about it.
While a radicalized Labour Party was vulnerable in many constituencies – according to the 1971 census only 52 per cent of the Republic's population lived in towns with a population of 1,500 or more – it did have a substantial potential base of support in Dublin. Conor Cruise O'Brien, as a cosmopolitan intellectual, a divorcé who had remarried, and a supporter of the Republic establishing diplomatic links with Cuba, was the epitome of Labour's threat to traditional Catholic values. Yet, standing for the first time in Dublin North-east, he came second to Charles Haughey, the leading Fianna Fail TD in the constituency.72 The imperviousness of a sizeable section of Dublin's electorate to a traditionalist message can be explained by a number of factors. Although government policy aimed at dispersing industrial development away from the east coast and the Dublin area in particular, in the early 1970s just under a half of the total manufacturing employment was still in the greater Dublin area.73 Economic expansion encouraged the self-confidence associated with union militancy, which strained Fianna Fáil's relation with sections of the working class to the benefit of Labour, and this was given concentrated expression in Dublin. It was also the case that a substantial amount of the new public sector employment, which expanded significantly in the 1960s, was located in Dublin. The decade saw the beginning of a long-term process of expansion of white-collar unionization and militancy in the public sector.
Expansion also lessened the pressure to emigrate and, as this had affected younger workers disproportionately, it increased the size of that section of the working class less prone than their parents to accept clerical direction.74 Although by international standards the Republic in the 1960s was still an intensely Catholic country, there was some evidence of change. A 1962 survey into the attitudes of Dublin Catholics towards religion and clerical authority carried out for the ultra-orthodox Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, revealed sharp differences between those who had completed secondary education and the rest. Whereas an extraordinary 88 per cent of the sample endorsed the proposition that the Church was the greatest source of good in the country, an almost equally massive 83 per cent of the educated group disagreed with it.75 In the early 1960s less than 20 per cent of schoolchildren went on to complete secondary education. By the end of the 1970s this had risen to just under 50 per cent.76 This rise in participation in secondary education and an associated expansion of higher education did much to produce what Tom Garvin has called the ‘post-Catholic and á la carte Catholic’ segment of the population.77
In the early 1960s Lemass and other members of the political elite displayed a continuing willingness to indulge clerical pressure. A proposal from the Director of the National Library for a book-sharing arrangement with Trinity College, aimed at avoiding duplication and cutting costs, was submitted by Lemass to McQuaid for his opinion and dropped as soon as McQuaid opposed it. Similarly, an attempt by the Minister for Education to extend nationally an experiment in comprehensive schools begun in the western and border counties was threatened with opposition by McQuaid until he was reassured that they would be denominational, non-coeducational and managed by the parish priest.78 But as the decade progressed there were some signs of a less deferential attitude. In part this reflected the more liberal environment encouraged by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, which had opened in Rome in October 1962. Vatican II, with its emphasis on improving relations with the Protestant Churches and on a more demotic Catholicism, served to highlight the conservative, not to say reactionary, position of the Irish hierarchy and of McQuaid in particular.
Much of the change was an inevitable consequence of the radical turn in economic policy that was made at the end of the 1950s. The emphasis in Economic Development on the need for efficiency, competitiveness and quality raised major questions over the sustainability of the state's continued acquiescence in an educational system whose whole ethos was so heavily influenced by the non-material values of the Catholic Church. As late as 1962 the annual report of the Council of Education, the official advisory body representing teachers and the Catholic school authorities, was arguing that the principal objective of education was the religious and moral development of the child and that the aim of science teaching in secondary school ‘is cultural rather than practical’.79 It also dismissed the idea of universal secondary education as utopian. With the exception of a separate system of vocational schools providing technical education, secondary schools charged fees until the late 1960s. The result of this approach was evident in the stark contrast with Northern Ireland. While secondary school enrolments had doubled in the South between 1945 and 1963, there had been a more than fivefold increase in the North.80
Lemass and his Minister for Education, Patrick Hillery, initiated reform with the appointment of a small expert body, chaired by the economist Patrick Lynch, which produced the seminal Investment in Education report in 1965. Its chosen focuses – on the relation between the education system and the country's manpower requirements and the participation rates of different socio-economic groups – were an implicit challenge to the status quo and the Church's heavy investment in it. The state's increasing involvement in promoting change, which culminated in the introduction of free secondary education by Hillery's successor, Donogh O'Malley, in 1967, was one significant indication of the decline of the Church's hegemony in an area where its dominance had been hitherto uncontested.
Another such area was the censorship of books and films. Here the government's emphasis on Ireland's new openness to investment and trade and its desire to be a participant in the European project made it less willing to tolerate the widespread image of the Republic as existing in a backward, priest-ridden time warp. The strict censorship of films and books under legislation passed in the 1920s and concerned with anything ‘subversive of public morality’ and ‘indecent or obscene’ had been encountering increasing domestic criticism from the small Irish intelligentsia in the 1950s. The five-member Censorship of Publications Board had been reconstructed in 1957 in order to ensure a more liberal composition. However, the fact remained that previous decisions had resulted in many of the major literary works of the twentieth century being banned, including most of the best works of contemporary Irish writers.81 Brian Lenihan, who became Minister for Justice in 1964, liberalized film censorship by the simple expedient of licensing films for viewing by persons above a certain age, and, in 1967, introduced legislation that provided for the unbanning of books after twelve years. The result was the release of over 5,000 titles. While the liberalism of the Irish censors still had very narrow limits, and novels that would be major literary successes in Britain in the 1960s like The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien and The Dark by John McGahern continued to be banned, it was increasingly the censors and not the authors and publishers who were on the defensive.
A far more potent threat to traditional values than the appearance of Steinbeck or Sartre in bookshops in Dublin, Cork and Galway was the arrival of television. From the early 1950s it had been possible to receive programmes from Britain and Northern Ireland in the border counties and along the east coast. A report prepared for the government in 1956 had estimated that 7,000 homes in the Republic had televisions. It warned about the dangers of cultural pollution, given that British programmes were ‘governed by ideas that are wholly alien to the ordinary Irish home’. Particular exception was taken to the ‘frank’ treatment of sex and the emphasis on the royal family and the ‘British way of life’.82 A major motivation behind the setting up of an Irish television service in 1961 was therefore a traditionally nationalist and Catholic one. However, the strong opposition of Whitaker and the Department of Finance to a publicly funded service meant that the state broadcaster, RTE, was financed by advertising, and the dynamics of competition with the BBC and Ulster Television soon exerted more influence on production values than did moral protectionism.
By the end of 1962 there were 93,000 television licences in the state, and by 1970 the figure had soared to 438,000.83 The relative inexperience of staff and the cost of making programmes meant that there was a substantial reliance on imports from Britain and the US. Combined with the influence of British television along the east coast and despite the aims of those who set it up, Irish television became a powerful force for the Anglo-Americanization of Irish popular culture. It also encouraged a more critical public discourse and a new openness to discussion of such issues as contraception and divorce on programmes including the phenomenally successful Late Late Show. Following trends in Britain there was a less cautious and deferential style in the handling of current affairs. In both countries the decade saw the emergence of political satire and a more daring and mocking mood that spread out from television to the staid preserve of radio and the print media. Lemass, who had seen in television a potent means of propagating the gospel of modernizing nationalism, was soon disturbed by programmes that, as he saw it, focused too much on the defects and shortcomings of the Republic. He intervened privately and occasionally in public to try to curb unruly broadcasters, but with little effect. Increasingly it became clear to all but the most obdurately reactionary politicians and clergy that the rules by which they exercised power and authority were being remade and that the mere invocation of the value of traditional forms of life and thought would be insufficient to defend them.
Although television undoubtedly encouraged the long-term process of liberalization of Irish society, its capacity to bring almost instantaneous images of the flaring up of violence in Derry and Belfast in August 1969 into living rooms throughout the South provided a powerful impetus to a wave of territorial nationalism that seemed for a brief period to threaten the stability of the state. The northern eruption had all the more impact because of the effects it had on a governing party that was already showing signs of an unprecedented degree of internal division.
Lemass's approach to the leadership of party and government had differed starkly from that of de Valera. Whereas the latter had tended to deal with divisions through a process of avoidance or such extended discussion that unity was effected through boring dissidents into submission, Lemass's style was brusque and peremptory. The change of style was reflective of the much more radical and activist content of his government's programme of economic liberalization and modernization, which left less time to consider questions of party management at a time when some of Lemass's new departures were bound to cause internal conflict. The pursuit of a free trade agreement with Britain and the end of restrictions on foreign capital raised the hackles of the champions of protectionist economics in the party. The policy of détente with the Stormont regime was also deeply unsettling for those still loyal to the idea of it as an unjust Orange junta. Lemass's engagement with the leaders of Irish trade unionism annoyed sections of the party suspicious of what was perceived as an anti-rural and anti-farmer bias and produced the first cabinet resignation on a policy question in the party's history when his Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Smith, left the government in protest at its alleged capitulation to ‘trade union tyranny’.84
On top of radical policy reversals, Fianna Fáil had entered the process of transition to a party leadership no longer sanctified by its participation in the Irish Revolution of 1916–23. Lemass had begun the process of organizational renewal following the defeat in the 1954 election, bringing in a potential replacement cadre for the 1916 generation. Some of these, including George Colley and Eoin Ryan, were the sons of the founding members of Fianna Fáil, while others, such as Brian Lenihan and Charles Haughey, were sons of republicans who had taken the Free State side during the Civil War. Together with Neil Blaney and Kevin Boland, they had revitalized the tired and complacent Fianna Fail electoral machine. Haughey, Lenihan and the brilliant but undisciplined and alcoholic Donogh O'Malley were fervent supporters of Lemassian economics. This was probably sufficient in itself to arouse the suspicion and hostility of those, like Seán MacEntee and Frank Aiken, who had long harboured doubts about the compatibility of the Lemass project with traditional republican values. However, it was the flamboyant lifestyle of the group labelled the Camorra by James Dillon, the leader of Fine Gael, that caused most unease.85 As the prosperity associated with economic expansion manifested itself in building and redevelopment programmes, property values rocketed, as did the fortunes of those unscrupulous enough to use their insider knowledge to buy land that they knew was destined for development.
Haughey, who had entered the Dáil as TD for Dublin North-east in 1957 and been appointed Minister for Justice at the age of thirty in 1961, was at the centre of rumours and allegations about what an opponent would later call ‘low standards in high places’. Although the son-in-law of Lemass, his rapid promotion was a reflection of his undoubted abilities. Peter Berry, the formidable Secretary of the Department of Justice, declared him the best minister he had ever served.86 But it was his connections with the worlds of business and property development, and his increasingly ostentatious lifestyle, that drew the most gossip. Haughey had bought his first racehorse in 1962 and by the end of the decade owned a number of them as well as a farm and one of the Blasket Islands off the Kerry coast, which became his holiday retreat. In 1969 he bought Abbeville in Kinsealy, County Dublin, an eighteenth-century mansion that had served as the summer home of several Lord-Lieutenants of Ireland, and with it a 250-acre estate.87 Some senior members of Fianna Fáil shared Gerry Boland's view that Haughey ‘would yet drag down the Party in the mire’.88 Others such as Frank Aiken saw Haughey as the epitome of the ‘materialistic’ and ‘de-nationalizing’ effects of Lemass's leadership and wanted a successor who was truer to traditional republican values and not associated with what a survey of the decade referred to as ‘an unsavoury get-rich-quick cabal… [with] the sleek Mercedes and mohair suits’.89
Lemass was subsequently criticized by MacEntee and other Fianna Fáil veterans for failing to provide for a smooth succession.90 This criticism tended to ignore the degree to which the post-1966 divisions in the party had their origins in inevitable tensions generated by the policy departures of the late 1950s. Fianna Fáil's traditional depiction of itself as a national movement rather than as a mere political organization had as its corollary a strong emphasis on maintaining an outward show of disciplined unity, and many in the party found the idea of a succession race deeply unsettling. But if there had to be a contest, there was at least a reassuring absence of any conflict of ideas. No candidate issued a statement of principles or publicly identified himself with any policy positions. Of the two original front-runners, Haughey and George Colley, the Irish Times commented that while Haughey was ‘the modern man, essentially pragmatic and business-minded’, Colley was a ‘chip off the traditionalist block’.91 The central attraction of Colley to the party elders who supported him was that he was seen as hostile to what was perceived as Haughey's ruthless materialism. In fact, on central economic policy issues and on Northern Ireland there was no recorded difference of opinion between the two. Despite this, Lemass's original attempt to get either Dr Patrick Hillery or Jack Lynch interested in the succession may have reflected his fear that a Haughey/Colley contest would allow those traditionalists defeated in such key areas as free trade and Northern Ireland to stage a comeback.
Although Lynch had originally resisted Lemass's overtures, the decision of Neil Blaney to intervene in the contest brought further, and this time successful, pressure from the Taoiseach. A TD for the border constituency of Donegal, Blaney had little time for policies of rapprochement with Stormont, and Lemass was aghast when he became a candidate. Jack Lynch had entered the Dáil as a TD for Cork in 1948 at the age of thirty-one and had been appointed Minister for Education by de Valera when Fianna Fail returned to power in 1957. Under Lemass he had been centrally associated with the new directions in economic policy, first as Minister for Industry and Commerce and from 1965 as Minister for Finance, where he had developed a very good personal relationship with T. K. Whitaker. He was a strong supporter of Lemass's overtures to O'Neill but lacked the protective shield of a revolutionary pedigree, although this was compensated for to some degree by his record of prowess in Gaelic games, where he had the unique achievement of winning six senior All-Ireland hurling championships in succession.92 Promoted by Lemass as a unity candidate, Lynch was accepted on those terms by both Blaney and Haughey, who withdrew from the contest, and he easily defeated Colley by fifty-nine votes to nineteen in the election by the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party on 9 November 1966.
Lynch's initial reluctance to stand led the other candidates for the leadership to view him as a caretaker until the party got a leader more in tune with its traditions. Lynch's low-key style, a strong desire for consensus and his apparent lack of strong views on most issues led to the early years of his government being characterized by conservatism, lack of control over the cabinet and the loss of the momentum of the Lemass years. Symptomatic was the Taca episode. Taca (Irish for ‘support’) was a party organization created in 1966 with the object of raising money from the business community. Lemass had been involved in his own discreet fund-raising efforts in his later years, setting up a committee with John Reihill of the coal-importing family as chairman.93 However, Taca, of which Haughey and Blaney were the foremost supporters, was a more brazen affair. Supporters were invited to join by making an annual payment of £100 per year towards the party's electoral fund, while the interest was used to fund dinners at which members of Taca could mix with cabinet ministers.94
Taca was seen by critics of Fianna Fáil as proof of the corruption of its founding principles, with Máirín de Búrca of Sinn Féin claiming that ‘the selfless idealism of Easter Week has become the self-seeking degeneracy of Taca.’ 95 Within the party Colley, who had not given up his leadership ambitions, openly criticized Taca and demanded that the party return to its original tradition of seeking ‘justice for all sections of the community but with special concern for the small man, the small farmer, the urban working man and the clerk’.96 The Taca episode may well have contributed to the depth of the government's defeat in the October 1968 referendum on a proposal to replace proportional representation with a simple majority system. That this was the first time since 1932 that the party had failed to get more than 40 per cent in a national poll and that many TDs and Senators had not campaigned for the change gave rise to much speculation about the future of Lynch's leadership.97
Fianna Fáil's victory in the 1969 election did much to shore up Lynch, in the short term at least. He won in partnership with Haughey, whom he had made director of elections. Choosing to deal with his most formidable potential leadership opponent by a strategy of generous accommodation, he had made him Minister for Finance and tolerated Taca until internal criticism led to its being phased out in 1968. The 1969 campaign combined Haughey and Blaney's brutal anti-communist assault on Labour with Lynch's low-key but effective series of visits to convents to deliver the same message. The campaign was noteworthy as the first in which a leader's telegenic qualities had an effect. For whatever reservations some of his colleagues and the party grass-roots had about Lynch's lack of decisiveness, his soft-spoken, ‘honest Jack’ image on television was successful with the electorate.98 Relations between Lynch and Haughey were warm during the campaign, but within months of victory developments in Northern Ireland would open up a chasm between them.
Soon after the outbreak of major disorder in Derry and Belfast in August 1969, a senior Irish official recalled a journalist's caustic comment that ‘our mass media and general public opinion only discovered the Six Counties on October 5 1968.’99 There is little evidence that the political and administrative class was much better prepared. In retirement Lemass had become a member of the Dáil Committee on the Constitution, which he had initiated when still Taoiseach. Its report in 1967 was characterized by a realism that some Fianna Fáil fundamentalists found disturbing. It argued that, so far from looking provisional, partition had ‘hardened to a degree which only the vaguest of optimists can think of as temporary’,100 and suggested that Article 3 of the Constitution, which laid legal claim to Northern Ireland, should be reformulated in less ‘polemical’ terms as an aspiration. Although Lynch sympathized with this approach, the strength of opposition within party and government dictated that nothing was done. When T.K. Whitaker, in his final year as Secretary to the Department of Finance, wrote to Charles Haughey, his minister, arguing the advantages of a recasting of Articles 2 and 3 in improving relations with unionists, Haughey's response was vehemently republican, emphasizing that there was no moral objection to the use of force but only a practical one.101
For those like Lynch and Whitaker who wished to maintain Lemass's approach and for whom unity would come through North–South rapprochement assisted by some gentle prodding from London, the civil rights movement was a new, unpredictable and not entirely welcome development. Lemass was initially dismissive, claiming that ‘two or three wet days will finish things’.102 While the British state, however reluctantly, was substantially increasing its involvement in Northern Ireland, the Irish government's approach was somnambulistic. As O'Neill's administration buckled in the spring of 1969, the Irish cabinet had its only discussion of Northern Ireland before the disastrous events of August. Frank Aiken was sent to New York to speak to the Secretary-General of the United Nations but, as he explained to the British Ambassador in Dublin, the purpose of the UN initiative was a temperature-lowering exercise on both sides of the border.103
As northern temperatures stubbornly continued to rise, those who had favoured a moderate line could only watch with increasing dismay. Whitaker, who had moved from Finance to become Governor of the Central Bank, continued to impress on his former minister the need for moderation and responsibility. Echoing the views of those on the right of unionism, he cautioned that Dublin should avoid playing into the hands of the ‘extremists who are manipulating the civil rights movement and who wish to stir up trouble and disorder’. His hope that the Irish government could appeal to the civil rights movement for a period of restraint with an end to all street protests was ignored, as was his advice that it should ‘do nothing to inflame the situation further, but aim to impress and encourage the moderates on both sides’.104
On 13 August, the day after an Apprentice Boys parade had ignited ‘The Battle of the Bogside’, Lynch attempted to get cabinet approval for an address to the nation that he proposed to make on RTE that evening. A substantial section of his government, led by Haughey, Blaney and Kevin Boland, the Minister for Local Government, regarded the draft as too mild and forced a major revision. In his broadcast Lynch, claiming that the Stormont government was no longer in control, opposed the introduction of British troops and called for the introduction of a UN peacekeeping force. With equal futility he requested the British government to enter into negotiations on the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. He announced that the Irish Army was to open field hospitals for victims along the border and, in lines that would encourage nationalist hopes of more direct intervention and loyalist paranoia, he declared: ‘The Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse.’105 Both Blaney and Boland favoured sending Irish troops across the border into Derry and Newry, but the majority of their colleagues recoiled in horror from this lunatic counsel, precipitating Boland's unpublicized temporary resignation from the government. The Planning Board of the Irish Defence Forces stated that the army had ‘no capability of embarking on a unilateral military operation of any kind’ and that all it could do was provide military training for northern nationalists in the Republic and supply arms, ammunition and equipment to nationalist elements within Northern Ireland.106 Even this was recognized to have the danger of assisting ‘subversive organisations’: ‘care would have to be taken to ensure that training would not be given or weapons supplied to organisations whose motives would not be in the best interests of the state.’107 But if the invasion option was rejected, Lynch appears to have been powerless to prevent some of his ministers from sponsoring what became a serious attempt to subvert partition by forming an alliance with those northern republicans who were to become the nucleus of the Provisional IRA.
Haughey was to play a central and, to many who had observed his previous political career, surprising role in what became known as the Arms Crisis. While Blaney and Boland's visceral anti-partitionism was not in question, many had doubts about Haughey's, seeing in his involvement little more than an opportunistic use of the North in a bid to topple and replace Lynch. His public utterances had hitherto displayed no more than the conventional republicanism to be expected from any prominent member of Fianna Fáil. When he was appointed Minister for Justice in 1961, he had pinpointed the crushing of the IRA as his main objective and had reactivated the Special Criminal Court to achieve it.108 He had, as Minister for Agriculture after the first O'Neill–Lemass summit, met with Harry West, his northern counterpart, and been a powerful advocate of the advantages of the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement.109 However, his private response to Whitaker's revisionist ideas on the North suggests there was more to his role than opportunism. The British Ambassador, who met him in October 1969, came away convinced of his ‘passion for unity’ after Haughey told him that there was nothing he would not sacrifice for unity, including the position of the Catholic Church and Irish neutrality.110 His father and mother came from Swatragh in County Tyrone, and both had been active in the republican movement during the War of Independence.111 Three decades after the crisis Haughey would refer to his family being ‘deeply embedded in the Northern Ireland situation’.112 In fact, his connections were with a part of Northern Ireland, mid Tyrone, which had a strongly republican tradition. It was for this area that the dissident IRA man Liam Kelly was returned to Stormont in the 1950s. Insofar as his northern connections influenced Haughey, they were unlikely to have encouraged moderation. His father had fought on the pro-Treaty side during the Civil War – something for which Frank Aiken had never forgiven him – and this influenced Aiken's apparent detestation of his son.113 This ‘Free-Stater’ stain on his pedigree may have encouraged a compensatory lurch into an alliance with Blaney and Boland. For Haughey, the events of August 1969 produced a powerful confluence of ideological affinity and political ambition.
Exploiting the febrile atmosphere of mid August, he and his allies seized temporary control of the government's response to northern events. As Minister for Finance he was given the responsibility by the cabinet for a relief fund of £100,000 for victims of the unrest. He was, along with Blaney, part of a new cabinet subcommittee given the task of liaising with northern nationalists to promote ‘a united cohesive force of anti-unionists and anti-partitionists’.114 Over the next few months he and Blaney would establish links, both directly and through a network of Irish military intelligence officers and other government employees seconded to work in Northern Ireland, with some of the most militant elements of northern nationalism.
In response to the August events, a special section had been created in the Government Information Bureau aimed at improving liaison with nationalist opinion in Northern Ireland and putting the Irish case internationally. George Colley was given charge of this operation, which was largely staffed by public relations officers seconded from bodies such as Bord Bainne, the Irish Milk Marketing Board. Some of those employed would play key roles in linking Haughey and Blaney with those traditional republicans in Derry and Belfast who were most vociferous in their criticisms of Cathal Goulding, Chief of Staff of the IRA, for leaving Catholics undefended. Part of the £100,000 that Haughey assigned to the Northern Relief Fund thus found its way into the financing of a new virulently anti-partitionist and anti-Goulding newspaper, The Voice of the North, which began publication in October. It was edited by Seamus Brady, a former speech-writer for Blaney, who was until September 1969 an employee of the Government Information Bureau. His successor as editor was Hugh Kennedy, an employee of Bord Bainne, who had become Press Officer of the Central Citizens' Defence Committee in Belfast in the immediate aftermath of the August violence.115 Both men and Captain James Kelly, an Irish Army intelligence officer, were active in promising northern republicans support as long as they cut their links with the ‘communists’ who controlled the IRA.
In August prominent Northern politicians, including Paddy Devlin of the NILP and Paddy Kennedy of Gerry Fitt's Republican Labour Party, arrived in Dublin to demand that, if the government would not send troops, it should at least provide Catholics with the weapons to defend themselves.116 Captain Kelly visited Fitt's home in early September to hear the politician exclaim: ‘It's not next month we need arms. It's now’.117 Lynch refused to meet Devlin and his colleagues; Haughey and Blaney did, and both were determined to obtain arms for the North. The purpose of these weapons was made clear in Captain Kelly's report to his superior, Colonel Michael Hefferon, the Director of Irish Army Intelligence, on 23 August: ‘It would seem to be now necessary to harness all opinion in the state in a concerted drive towards achieving the aim of reunification. Unfortunately, this would mean accepting the possibility of armed action of some sort as the ultimate solution.’118
There were failed attempts to buy weapons in London, in which Haughey's brother Padraig was involved, and in the US. Eventually Captain Kelly was able to make an arrangement with a German arms dealer, and 500 pistols and approximately 180,000 rounds of ammunition were set to be flown from Vienna to Dublin on 21 April 1970.119 It was Haughey's failure to arrange clearance for the arms at Dublin Airport, when his former Secretary at the Department of Justice, Peter Berry, made it clear the guns would be seized by the Irish Special Branch, that precipitated the Irish state's most serious crisis since its formation. By this time the dangers inherent in the Blaney–Haughey line were increasingly apparent. In early February 1970 delegations of northern nationalists had come south to meet Lynch and other ministers about their fears of imminent loyalist attacks. The Chief of Staff was instructed to ‘prepare and train the Army for incursions into Northern Ireland if and when such a course becomes necessary’. Arrangements were to be made for arms, ammunition and respirators to be ready for distribution to Catholics in the North who had to defend themselves.120 In April, after Blaney told the Chief of Staff that attacks on the minority were imminent and that the British security forces would be withdrawn, 500 rifles, 80,000 rounds of ammunition and 3,000 respirators were moved north to be near the border with Northern Ireland. Irish military intelligence subsequently discovered that Blaney's story had no foundation, and the weapons were returned to their original stores. By this time Captain Kelly's superiors were alarmed at his activities. In October, Garda Special Branch had observed a meeting in Bailieborough, County Cavan, which Kelly had arranged with the assistance of £500 from Haughey's Distress Fund. It was attended by leading IRA figures.121 Military intelligence observed that Kelly failed to keep in regular contact with Dublin and was ‘openly consorting with illegal groups’. His ‘emotional reaction’ to events in the North meant that he was now judged to be incapable ‘of that cool behaviour so necessary in an Intelligence Officer’.122
Although Lynch was informed of the plot by Berry, he attempted to contain its reverberations by accepting denials of involvement from both Blaney and Haughey. It was only when news about the failed importation was leaked to the Fine Gael leader, Liam Cosgrave, that Lynch was forced to act. On 5 May he demanded the resignation of the two ministers, and, when they refused, he sacked them. He had already forced the resignation of his weak and incompetent Minister for Justice, Micheál Ó Moráin. Boland resigned in protest at the firings, and so in one day Lynch had lost three senior ministers. Blaney and Haughey were subsequently arrested and charged with an attempt to import guns illegally into the state. The charges against Blaney were dismissed in a Dublin district court, but Haughey, along with Captain Kelly, a Belgian-born businessman and a Belfast republican, was brought to trial at the High Court. They were all eventually acquitted in October, the jury possibly finding it difficult to accept that the arms importation did not have at least covert government sanction.
Although Lynch has been subject to criticism for not moving against the conspirators earlier, his defenders would suggest that he had played a subtle game, allowing Blaney and Haughey sufficient rope with which to hang themselves. His achievement, given the precariousness of his position, has been well summed up by Garret FitzGerald:
His handling of the Arms Crisis was very difficult for him: he was dealing with people who had deeper roots in the party than he had. His success in overcoming that difficulty and stabilising the Government and in mar-ginalising those who had adventurous ideas about the North was of crucial importance to the stability of the state and of the island as a whole.123
On his acquittal Haughey demanded Lynch's resignation, but the Taoiseach was able to use party members' overwhelming desire to maintain unity and stay in government against the much weaker mobilizing capacity of anti-partitionism. Such was the power of the imperative of party over ‘national’ unity that both Blaney and Haughey voted with the government against an Opposition motion of no confidence.124 Not since 1940 and de Valera's rejection of the British offer of unity in exchange for an end to neutrality had the primacy of twenty-six-county nationalism been so apparent. Public sympathy for the Catholic victims of northern violence was still strong, but it did not extend to support for those who appeared ready to contemplate direct involvement in arming one side in a potential sectarian civil war. An opinion poll carried out just after Haughey's dismissal showed that 72 per cent of the electorate supported Lynch's decision, while a staggering 89 per cent of those who had voted for Fianna Fail in the last election still supported him as their preferred choice as Taoiseach.125
Haughey avoided any public confrontation with Lynch's stand on the North after August 1969, as the Taoiseach relied increasingly on the advice he was getting from T.K. Whitaker and also from senior officials in External Affairs. In a letter to Lynch, Whitaker referred disparagingly to the ‘teenage hooliganism and anarchy’ in Derry and Belfast during the worst of the August violence and warned against the ‘terrible temptation to be opportunist – to cash in on political emotionalism – at a time like this’.126 It was Whitaker who provided most of the text of a speech given by Lynch at Tralee on 20 September that firmly restated the most positive aspects of Lemass's conciliatory approach to Northern Ireland, emphasizing that the policy of seeking unity through agreement was of its nature a long-term one.127
This approach was also apparent in a major assessment of the Irish state's Northern Ireland policy produced by the Department of External Affairs in November 1969. It emphasized that the government's basic approach should remain that of seeking reunification ‘by peaceful means through co-operation and consent between Irishmen. The use of force should be dismissed publicly as frequently as may appear necessary’. The fact that the Republic was a ‘confessional society’ was recognized as an obstacle to unity. As a consequence, reforms to take account of the concerns of northern Protestants on such issues as divorce and birth-control and also in education and the role of the Irish language should be considered. Lemass's legacy of functional cooperation with Stormont needed to be maintained and enhanced despite ‘such temporary cooling of relations as has happened recently’. Most significant of all for the subsequent development of Anglo-Irish relations, it advocated the ‘maximum discreet contact with Whitehall’ at both official and ministerial level. 128
By early 1970, as tensions in the North abated, Patrick Hillery, Minister for External Affairs, was being secretly briefed at the Foreign Office in Whitehall that ‘a lot of steam had gone out of the situation’ and that the only troublemakers were ‘professional agitators’ with little popular support.129 Even when the Ballymurphy riots in April challenged this Panglossian view, Eamonn Gallagher, the most senior Irish official liaising directly with northern nationalists, was unsympathetic to those involved, fearing that new disturbances in Ulster might help the Tories in the forthcoming British general election.130 At a time when the British were impressing on Dublin the capacity of the army to ensure that Catholics anywhere in Northern Ireland were safe from the threat of another pogrom, and with the B Specials disbanded and the RUC disarmed, Blaney and Boland's open championing of the possible use of force to bring about unity appeared increasingly extremist. Lynch's moderation would remain unchallenged until the introduction of internment and Bloody Sunday unleashed another wave of irredentist emotion.
The emergence of the Provisional IRA and its offensive in the North did much to tarnish the image of an ‘oppressed people’ awaiting salvation from the South. Fear of contagion from violence ‘up there’ became widespread. Lynch's new Minister for Justice, Desmond O'Malley, soon demonstrated a zeal to repress any subversive spillovers from the North. In December 1970 he announced that the government was considering the introduction of internment to deal with ‘a secret armed conspiracy’ that allegedly planned kidnappings, armed robberies and murders – all activities in which the Provisional IRA was soon to be involved. In May 1971 the Offences against the State Act was activated to create a ‘special criminal court’ of three judges sitting without a jury, and in November a further amendment to the Act allowed the indictment of those suspected of membership of an illegal organization on the word of a senior police officer.131 The response of ‘honest Jack’ to the IRA threat appears to have done him no significant electoral damage, for in the 1973 election Fianna Fáil actually increased its share of the poll, but lost the election because a pre-election pact between Labour and Fine Gael meant an improvement in vote transfers between their supporters, which led to the combined opposition returning more TDs.
In his address to Fianna Fáil's Ard-Fheis in January 1970, Jack Lynch provided a convincing and passionate rebuttal of Blaney's claim in a famous tirade at Letterkenny in December 1969 that Fianna Fáil had never taken a decision to rule out the use of force to bring about unity. Echoing Lemass's Tralee speech of 1963, he informed the delegates that ‘like it or not, we have to acknowledge that two-thirds of the one and a half million people who make up the population of the six counties wish to be associated with the United Kingdom.’ The ‘plain truth’ was that the southern state did not have the capacity to impose a solution by force, and, even if it had, ‘would we want to adopt the role of an occupying conqueror over the million or so six county citizens who at present support partition?’132
Around the same time Lynch had met three leading northern nationalists, including Paddy Doherty, who was playing a key role in running the Bogside behind the barricades, and Seán Keenan, the founder of the Provisionals in Derry. Lynch not only refused Keenan's request for weapons but made it clear that ‘if we were given a gift of Northern Ireland tomorrow we could not accept it.’ This was primarily because the Republic could not afford to support the level of social services enjoyed by the province's citizens and at the same time bring up standards in the South to the same level. The three left convinced that ‘that man has no interest in getting involved in Northern Ireland.’133
Lynch had defeated the republican hawks within the party because their activities were perceived to threaten the security of the southern state. While Boland, who left Fianna Fáil to found a pure republican party, and Blaney, who was expelled, would remain marginalized as one-issue politicians, Haughey stayed in the party, sure of the support of its traditionalist wing, but by now well educated in the limited power of anti-partitionism in southern politics. Anti-partitionism would remain a largely unquestioned element of the national consensus and a powerful component of the internal political culture of Fianna Fáil. Yet, throughout the 1970s, opinion polls would not rank it high on the list of voters' priorities. The violence and intractability of the northern conflict ensured that unity remained a low-intensity aspiration. Haughey would be able to use the ‘whiff of cordite’ associated with the Arms Crisis as a valuable resource in his ultimate displacement of Lynch, but it was the failure of the latter's economic policies, not his Northern Ireland policy, that would prove decisive.