CHAPTER FIVE: WAR AND EMERGENCY 1932-1943

CHAPTER FIVE

WAR AND EMERGENCY, 1932-1943

‘It hath pleased the Lord to grant us the papacy. Let us enjoy it.’ Pope Leo X ‘Before, we got nothing: now we got something. That’s the difference’ — a Louisiana Farmer on Huey Long — quoted in Harnett T. Kane, Louisiana Hayride.

I De Valera and Irish Jacobinism In the general election of February 1932 Fianna Fail won 72 seats in a Dail of 153. Its campaign had been backed by Saor Eire and the I.R.A., though not by Sinn Fein. It took power with the support of the Labour Party’s 7 T.D.s, who regarded it as a lesser evil than Cumann na nGaedhael.

The new government took over a state that had developed since 1922, constitutionally, in the direction of greater sovereignty; economically, towards an expansion of usable resources; but socially, to greater frustration among peasants and workers.

In this situation its appeal was broadly leftist: Cumann na nGaedhael objected to its ‘class war’ propaganda. But its definite policies were little more than demands for implementation of the old Sinn Fein policies that its predecessors had diluted. Fianna Fail proposed higher tariffs, a greater use of natural resources and a development of such resources where necessary, as with crops, forestry and fish. In so far as it developed these in an appeal more directly attractive to the workers, its promises took the form not of Socialism but of Distributism. This was a theory based on the Papal Encyclicals and popularized by the English Catholics, 101

; : G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. It advocated the distribution of property fairly equally about the population and the control of credit to prevent the consolidation of trusts. It was essentially a Catholic version of Jacobinism; the creed of small property owners in a mainly (albeit, developing) rural society. Such an ideal revived in more definite forms the hopes of many who had supported Cumann na nGaedhael, only to view its surrender to the establishment capitalists. It is not surprising then, that in personnel the Fianna Fail parliamentary party differed little from that of Cumann na nGaedhael, save in the average size of the holdings of their respective farmer.

T.D.s Between the N.C.O.s and the Commissioned Ranks of the ‘Army of Destiny’ there has always been a clear class division.

Fianna Fail has depended upon its men of no property to return to the Dail its propertied men. A further complication arises from the fact that, whilst there were always many Fianna Fail small farmer T.D.s, none was given a ministerial post until 1939. The party left practical direction of affairs to men who may have known and sympathized with the predicaments of workers and small farmers, but whose chosen callings left them unequivocally bourgeois. All this means merely that Fianna Fail’s power structure mirrored fairly accurately that of Irish society as a whole. It had no real intent of consciously changing the latter.

How near it would go in this depended on its leadership. Eamon de Valera was in unquestioned control. He is the third of Ireland’s charismatic leaders. Whereas O’Connell directed the rise of modern Irish Nationalism and Parnell the bourgeois revolution therein, de Valera is the protector of the resultant bourgeois Irish Catholic régime. But how far he sees himself as such is doubtful.

His aim appears more personal than social: the struggle of a man aiming to achieve and maintain personal leadership of a united nation. (Incidentally, after 1922 he has been in this as unsuccessful as O’Connell and Parnell were in their conscious aims. But he has been the agent of circumstances preventing any ideological development or social revolution in the twenty-six counties.)

His aims are entirely consistent with those of a politically shrewd professional man with little economic or social theory — which is what he is. His background is also a guide to his higher achievements, which are entirely in the sphere of linguistic Nationalism. He supervised the Departments of External Affairs, Defence, Justice and Education, either personally or through colleagues agreeable or subservient to him.

But his political instincts were shown in his appointments to the 102

ministries most immediately associated with material welfare. For these he picked men upon whom he could rely to give the people what they wanted. Vice-President of the Executive Council and Minister for Local Government was Sean T. O’Ceallaigh, a man with long experience of the Dublin Corporation and of its failures. The Minister for Lands and Fisheries was Patrick F. Ruttledge, who had drawn up as a Republican leader in 1922 an ambitious scheme of land division. Sean MacEntee became Minister for Finance; he is a Belfast Catholic and ex-Socialist who married into a very Catholic family (his brother-in-law is Cardinal Michael Browne); in 1932, he was still ready to tax the rich. Tariffs and tillage were given to dedicated men; Sean Lemass, an enterprising member of a Dublin petty bourgeois family, took Industry and Commerce; his friend, Dr James Ryan, took Agriculture. Fianna Fail showed itself assiduous in making minor changes.

Michael Hayes was superseded as Ceann Comhairle by the Fianna Fail leader, Frank Fahy. The Ministers set a good example by insisting on taking pay cuts though, as the reduced pay was made tax-free, the loss was less real than apparent. In what Dublin Opinion called ‘the flight from the top hat’ ministers renounced the wearing of formal clothes at public functions. But the last resolution was dented in August by Sean T. O’Ceallaigh’s donning such garb to visit King George V at Ottawa.

More significant was Fianna Fail’s stand on Ireland’s relationship with Britain as exemplified in the Oath to the King and in the payment of the land annuities. The government argued that the Treaty gave only the form for an oath that T.D.s might take, not an order that the oath be taken, and that therefore it could be eliminated without negotiation. As for payment of the annuities to Britain, its legality was held to be dependent only on the 1923 Land Act. The Anglo-Irish agreements enforcing them had never been ratified by the Dail as formal Treaties. However the government was prepared, in the interests of neighbourliness, to enter into negotiations on them and also on the money owed Ireland by the Union’s over-taxation and by British unilateral departure from the Gold Standard. But the land annuities eR Nee to £3,996,000 per annum.

They were one-third of the money drawn annually from Ireland by Britain, and the latter’s biggest single draw therefrom. The British Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, J. H. Thomas, was a finished type of metropolitan labour leader, being now an enthusiastic supporter of imperialism.

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First Thomas refused to negotiate. The Irish government withheld the half-yearly annuity payments in its own treasury. He then offered terms of mediation on an exclusively Commonwealth basis. After the fiasco of the Boundary Commission, no Irish Republican could have accepted this.

In July, Britain passed the Irish Free State (Special Duties) Act which taxed the food and animal imports from Ireland. It then offered a proposal for mediation subject to an immediate return to the status quo ante. Instead, the Saorstat passed the Emergency Imposition of Duties Act which gave the Executive Council the power, subject to formal ratification by the Dail, to tax imports for eight months at a time. It was generally recognized that these powers would be used mainly against British exports, as indeed they were. The ‘Economic War’ had begun. | In the new struggle, Ireland seemed outmatched. Not only was it fighting at a time of depression, but it sent 92% of its exports to the U.K. and received only 7% of the latter’s.

But Fianna Fail had begun before July to implement its high tariff policy. It had also prepared plans for economic self-sufficiency. The new fight meant merely the intensification of such schemes. This, added to the regime’s initial increases in social welfare benefits, ensured its majority. This was shown when de Valera, wishing to end his dependence upon the Labour Party, had the seventh Dail dissolved after less than a year. The general election of January 1933 gave Fianna Fail alone more votes than the less belligerent parties, Cumann na nGaedhael, National Centre (the heir to the Farmers’ Party) and Independents. As Labour supported the government on the foreign issue, its opponents were clearly in a minority. In action, Fianna Fail implemented most of its promises. Tariffs were imposed on a wide variety of goods to stimulate home production therein; between 1931 and 1939 the ad valorem tariff level rose from 9% to 35%, amongst the highest in the world. Bounties were given to tillage growers and the mainly small farmer producers of ‘farmyard’ products, though they were not given the graziers, who were most hit by the ‘War’. Lemass introduced price control to prevent inflation and offered free meat vouchers to the unemployed. He offered financial encouragement to entrepreneurs who wished to benefit from the tariffs, and placed limits on the ability of foreign entrepreneurs to so benefit. In certain special cases, he initiated state-sponsored bodies to carry out the entrepreneurial function. This was especially notable as regards the winning of turf and the production of cement, both to replace British 104

ee imports. Later there was created the Irish commercial airline, Aer Lingus. The Shannon Scheme was followed, from 1936, by a Liffey Scheme. MacEntee encouraged the repatriation of external assets. All this was associated with a policy of increased social benefits, more housing and the introduction of the rural labourer into the benefits of his urban equivalent. Cumann na nGaedhael policies on fishing and afforestation were somewhat accelerated. The one major sphere in which a decision was not taken was in banking; in 1934, the government set up a commission, mainly of bankers and conservative economists, to investigate this. In external affairs, de Valera more than maintained the diplomatic standards set up by O’Higgins and MacGilligan.

But even at this time the contradictions of practical populism were apparent. If the bourgeoisie expanded, so did the powers of the bureaucracy to protect the propertiless.

Again, despite Labour’s protests, land and sea transport continued scarcely changed in private hands. This had two results. Carriage of production was directed towards, or through, Dublin, and accordingly, the pressures to look to Britain for an export market were maintained. Similarly, Ireland’s merchant marine was allowed to decline until the Second World War revived attention to it. To these pressures were added the circumstances of world slump to handicap the search for alternative markets to Britain’s.

The small, tariff-fostered, industries did not want new markets: they were satisfied with the safe home one. But this was too small and too poor for any long-term hopes of expanded sales. In any case, ‘Self-Sufficiency’ was. impossible. Many of the new industries themselves depended on imports. Thus the bounties on exports remained aimed at the British market and the government remained anxious to reach an agreement before that market was lost.

And, at the same time, no attempt was made to differentiate between trade with the north-east and trade with the rest of the U.K. In this, the government was at one with its main opponents, who were from 1933 ‘the United Ireland Party’, but as a high tariff party it bore the onus of the duty of thinking out the implications of its policies on Irish unity, Instead, the reality of Anglo- Northern Irish trade ties were ignored.

The (normally adverse) trade balance figures from 1929 to 1934 showed a continued worsening. It was to be estimated later that the Economic War represented a decline of 1/5th in the Irish rate of economic growth. Consumer prices began to rise from 1934, though the national income had begun to increase (for the first time since 1929) from the previous year. As far as can be 105

seen, unemployment was rising until 1936, though this effect comes, in part, from the widening of the range of benefits to cover the rural unemployed. But Britain was also hurt. The tariffs could not completely make up for the loss of the annuities. Britain’s necessary food imports had often to be augmented from outside the Sterling Area.

On January 3rd, 1935, an agreement established quotas for Britain and Ireland’s respective major exports: coal and cattle.

This was negotiated annually until replaced by the Trade Agreement of April 25th, 1938.

On the latter date, the other Anglo-Irish Agreements ended formally a period of constitutional change. In 1934 de Valera had abolished the oath after his Bill to this effect had been obstructed by the Seanad, which in 1936 he abolished with the Universities’ Dail representation. In 1932 his ministers’ insults had driven out the Saorstat’s Governor-General, James MacNeill, who had been replaced with an elderly party notability as ‘Seanaschal’ at a reduced salary and prominence. In 1936 he had the actual post abolished. He had formally ended the right of appeal to the British Privy Council in 1933 and gained the recognition of its loss from that Council in 1935. In December 1936 he had used the crisis of King Edward VIII’s abdication to declare that the Saorstat was in the British Commonwealth only insofar as it accepted the authority of the British Monarch in external relations. This change was not mentioned in the new (Republican style) Constitution of 1937. This uninspiring publication was passed by the Irish when they voted in the general election of July 1937. It was a throw-back in some ways. It provided for an elected President, instead of an appointed Governor-General or Seanaschal, for a ‘Taoiseach’ of a ‘Government’ instead of a ‘President of an Executive Council’, for a new, weaker Seanad on pseudo-vocational lines and a restored Referendum, which was made necessary for a constitutional change after 1941. It also enclosed a long section enshrining the social principles that were to bind the new state: in practice, these are too qualified to be fully effective. The word ‘Republic’ is never actually mentioned. This was in the hope of winning back the north-east. The new entity took the title ‘Eire’ for the whole island; in practice, the name stuck to the twenty-six counties. Fianna Fail’s policies were disliked increasingly by the other Republican groups. Sinn Fein had opposed Fianna Fail from the beginning. But, as a force, it was of steadily decreasing prestige.

By 1932, Stack was dead and Art O’Connor had retired to the law 106

practice that would obtain him a circuit judgeship. Other departures followed. In October 1934 Mary MacSwiney and Brian O’Higgins left the party when it allowed its members to accept the I.R.A. Civil War pensions offered by the government. In January 1936 Fr. O’Flanagan was expelled for broadcasting over Radio Eireann. From 1934 to 1949, the President of Sinn Fein was Mrs Margaret Buckley, a woman of considerable intelligence, prominent in the Women Workers’ Union, but without the national prestige of her predecessors. In December 1938 the rump ‘Government of the Irish Republic’ surrendered its powers formally to the Army Council of the I.R.A.

This body caused the Government more embarrassment. At first, it was prepared to be fairly quiescent, although openly militant. But in August 1932 a potentially Fascist body, the Army Comrades Association, was formed among Saorstat Army veterans, and grew with the feeling amongst bourgeoisie and gentry against the ‘Economic War’. The I.R.A. began to attack this physically. It did the same to meetings of the opposition parties, Cumann na nGaedhael and National Centre and to retailers of such British goods as Bass beer. These attacks forced these interests closer together. After the election of January 1933 which had defeated its allies so decisively, the A.C.A. became a formally Fascist National Guard with a blue shirt. Finally, in September 1933, the political bodies merged under the Presidency of the National Guard Leader, the dismissed Commissioner of the Garda Siochana, General Eoin O’Duffy. Republican-Blueshirt clashes reached new depths of viciousness. Fianna Fail was in a difficult position. Many of its supporters sympathized with the I.R.A. Yet this body was a threat to law and order by its existence as a private army, by its propaganda and by the crimes that many of its members were willing to commit for the cause. Accordingly, de Valera moved to divide the I.R.A. First, he offered pensions to its Civil War veterans, then he initiated an armed police (existing still as the plain clothes ‘Special Branch’) and, in November 1933 he started a militia, The two later moves were to attract many who might otherwise join I.R.A., or Blueshirts. About the latter body he could be less inhibited; he declared it an illegal organization.

In 1934, this policy began to show results. In April the leftwing of the I.R.A. formed a Popular Frontist body, The Republican Congress, to fight elections. This was promptly denounced by the Army Council, but maintained itself precariously. In September, O’Duffy resigned as leader of his ‘Fine Gael’ (which 107

means much the same as ‘Cumann na nGaedhael’), after disputes with the parliamentary politicians. He led a section on the Blueshirts to form a National Corporative Party. Cosgrave endeavoured to maintain the Opposition as: before. But the Coal-Cattle Agreements confused the Irish political divisions still further.

Blueshirts and I.R.A. became increasingly irrelevant. In May 1935 the latter’s headquarters were closed ‘for trying to hold an illegal sweepstake’, The next year, there were new I.R.A. murders. Then MacBride and MacSwiney joined in forming a new political party ‘Cumann Poblachta na hEireann’. Both this and the I.R.A. and its auxiliaries were banned in June, only one Fianna Fail T.D. dissenting. This was followed in October by Fine Gael’s disbanding its Blueshirt organization.

The growing distrust of military Republicanism was parallelled by growing distrust for the Fianna Fail policy. In the Dublin and Cork municipal elections of June 1936, the government candidates were defeated by sheer apathy. By July 1937, many of the nonvoters were aligned behind the Labour Party, whose new leader, William Norton, had been outmatching de Valera’s Republicanism. In the general election of this month, it gained seats in Dublin City. But its advance persuaded many Fine Gael supporters that their aims were in danger, while their party’s bad showing in this contest made them doubt its possibilities. The Anglo-Irish Agreements gave them reasons for conciliation with Fianna Fail.

Cosgrave recognized this by putting forward only 74 candidates, just 5 more than an overall Dail majority, in the election of June 1938. Thus Fianna Fail regained its dominance, and Labour Deputies were again limited to the countryside.

The agreements that ended the ‘Economic War’ and ensured the move of conservative opinion towards Fianna Fail were three in number: two political, one economic. In the political ones, ‘Eire’ won all its claims except the north-east. The U.K. abandoned its garrisons in the three treaty ports and its claim to use them in wartime. It made no objection to the new Irish constitution. It surrendered its claims to land annuities and minor payment for a lump £ 10,000,000. This settlement and the subsequent general election were the starting for a propaganda campaign for Irish unity. This was more productive in side effects than in its expected results. The Northern Ireland Government held a general election that reaffirmed its authority. Then, mighty in its righteousness, it banned all anti-partition meetings in its area.

In ‘Eire’ there was doubt about the campaign’s techniques.

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Louie Bennett, veteran of the I.W.W.U., formed an Irish Association with prominent Northern Irish figures, including Unionists. She hoped that mutual trust would lead to an end to partition but that even short of this, good relations might be established.

But the anti-partition campaign encouraged the revival of the I.R.A., banned no longer under the new Constitution, with the moral authority of the ‘Second Dail’ and the backing of many who were frustrated by existing political stagnation. MacBride and Twomey having been extinguished with Cumann Poblachta, control was held now by the Army’s new Chief of Staff, Sean Russell. He initiated a campaign of total war against the British, being prepared to ally with the Germans and stage terrorist coups in Britain for the purpose. The government rushed through an Offences Against the State Act in February 1939. In June 1939 the act was used to ban the I.R.A. But it remained active.

The economic agreement had longer term results. It restored Anglo-Irish trading to the 1932 position, subject to the Ottawa duties and to vested interests that had been developed by the Economic War. In Britain, such an interest was represented by the farmers, now supported by a system of deficiency payments. In ‘Eire’ such a one was the new tariff-backed industries. In the net result the agreement left ‘Eire’ with an actual credit balance in British trade. | The agreement benefited the graziers and large capitalists at the expense of the small farmers. In August 1938 a number of such men formed a political party to fight future elections: this was Clann na Talmhan, or ‘the sons of the soil’.

This party was closely imbued with the clericalist theories that had been developing since 1931 and which were not formalized in the new constitution. The clergy were getting restive: Fianna Fail’s policies had encouraged bourgeois (and bureaucratic) growth. In January 1939 de Valera threw a sop in the shape of a commission to look into the prospects for the Vocational Organization of society. Outside agriculture, it seems that the trade agreement encouraged an embryo slump; unemployment figures began to rise again.

There were, however, other reasons for such a development. The Banking Commission’s Report, published in August 1938, predicted it as a result of the government’s cheap money policies. Lemass’s difficulties in weathering all the needs of Irish defence revealed by the Munich crisis in October may also have had a deleterious effect. But the fact remains that many of the new small manufacturers were doubtfully competitive. And even the agree- 109

ment’s safeguards coud not wholly reassure such people. How far the possibilities of a slump went were never revealed. The beginning of the Second World War changed conditions.

On September 3rd 1939 de Valera. proclaimed Irish neutrality in the World War. His decision was approved by the majority of ‘Eire’s’ inhabitants. They agreed with what was the principle of the British cause, but doubted the sincerity of Britain’s adherence to all its implications. After all, most of them had been taught to remember that Pearse and Connolly had declared the Germans to be their ‘gallant allies in Europe’. Few were really convinced that Nazi crimes were any more that rehashed British propaganda stories of 1914-1918. Above all, no government could have lasted allied to a state that maintained garrisons in six of its historic counties. But Irish neutrality did increase Unionist feeling in the northeast. In practice, admittedly, the Northern Irish took full advantage of de Valera’s early persuasion of Britain not to conscript them and much resentment of neutrality seems to have arisen from jealousy, rather than from loyalty to the allied cause. Nonetheless, resentment was stimulated; a few days after neutrality was proclaimed, there were new Protestant sectarian riots, though these, being unnecessary and prejudicial to Ulster conservatism, were damped down by the employers. Only a few politicians of ‘Eire’ recognized the situation, On the left, the Republican Socialist, George Gilmore, urged that the declaration of full (= extra- Commonwealth) Republican status be combined with full alliance against the Axis. On the right, James Dillon, son of the late leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, himself Deputy Leader of Fine Gael urged full alliance with the U.K., both to conciliate Northern Ireland and because of his belief in Britain and her institutions; as a result, he and his ally, Nugent, had to leave Fine Gael in February 1942. But Dillon retained his seat in the Dail as an Independent. The one T.D., who had serious leanings to Fascist policies, Patrick Belton, was expelled from Fine Gael in October 1940 and lost his seat in the first wartime general election in June 1943.

And Irish neutrality was essentially benevolent for the U.K.

The phrase ‘England’s difficulty: Ireland’s opportunity’ took a new meaning. ‘Eire’s’ exercise of the neutral’s freedom to trade meant in practice, its trading with Britain and not with blockaded Germany. Many Irishmen fought in the British forces or worked in British industry (though many did so from need of a job).

Some 97,800 British refugees went to Ireland and many British 110

and, later, American servicemen took their leave there.

All such services were paid for; other extensions of neutrality were unpaid. Allied aircraft flew from Northern Ireland bases across Donegal to the Atlantic. On occasional crash landings, their pilots were allowed to return to British territory whilst Germans stranded similarly were interned. The Allies got information from Irish weather stations. A rescue ship was moored at Killybegs, Co. Donegal, to help vessels in trouble. After a major airraid on Belfast in April 1941 fire engines were sent from Dublin to help the local fire brigades.

The policy of neutrality was probably the only one possible in the circumstances. Ireland was extraordinarily vulnerable, having a coastline of 1,600 miles, including some of Europe’s first harbours, and lacking in 1939 a navy, fighter planes, heavy artillery or bomb-proof shelters. At the same time, it was in close proximity to the one major belligerent with whom it had a material difference. Alliance with Germany (or perhaps, even less, benevolent neutrality) would have meant invasion by the allies. Alliance with Britain would have meant internal dissension, unless, perhaps, it had been accompanied by such a constitutional change as Gilmore advocated. Both possibilities appeared. Germany became very interested in ‘Eire’ as a possible base from which to invade Britain. It was not well placed to mount an all-out attack, so it preferred subversion.

Agents were sent to contact the I.R.A. either for help to enter Britain to spy or to inspire a revolt to overthrow de Valera in favour of an anti-British government. In August 1940 Russell, who had been out of Ireland when war broke out, was sent home in a U-boat to stir up such a rising. He died on the way.

Against this threat the government had amended its constitution so that it could proclaim a state of emergency that effectively wiped out the individual’s constitutional freedoms. Acts were passed to have suspected subversives interned or tried in special courts that could impose the death penalty without appeal. A political censorship was introduced. This legislation was administered by a group of Ministers, headed by de Valera’s friend, Frank Aiken (himself a former Chief of Staff of the I.R.A.), the popular Oscar Traynor, Minister for Defense, and the stolid Gerald Boland (Harry’s brother), Minister for Justice. They operated ruthlessly. No German agent escaped from ‘Eire’; only three approached success. On the other hand, Russell’s successor, Stephen Hayes, was ineffectual and ended by being suspected of being a government agent (a mystery never cleared satisfactorily).

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Soe Se SS SS I EO ee eT is Less certain were possibilities of British and (from 1941) American action against ‘Eire’ to seize its ports and end a rumoured centre of spies and an actual centre of opposition to Northern Irish conscription. Such action became decreasingly necessary as a naval base was developed at Londonderry. It would have necessitated the deployment of an Army of Occupation. Nonetheless, Churchill did give the matter consideration.

Against prospects of invasion, the government built up its armed forces from 30,000 to 175,000 men. Precautious were initiated against air raids. A home guard (Local Security Force) was started. There remained a great weakness in lack of heavy weapons, however. In May 1940 an all-party Defence Council was set up to advise the government. Fine Gael began to demand this body’s development into a National Government. De Valera refused; the pro-Fianna Fail Parnellite veteran, Henry Harrison, justified his stand by pointing out that such a government would amount to a Fianna Fail-Fine Gael coalition stimulating the formation of a purely left-wing opposition: this would split the country. More immediate and more permanent effects of the War appeared in the economic sphere. Production of foodstuffs was geared more than ever to the British market. This benefited the graziers more than the small farmers, Similarly the shortage of American cereals necessitated a compulsory tillage policy that favoured the farmer with a lot of good land.

As early as the Munich war scare, Lemass had increased his efforts to stimulate turf-burning and the electricity schemes based thereon. In September 1939 he became Minister for Supplies (a special war-time post) and, as such, organized the purchase of stocks of materials by both private and public firms. At the same time he organized the nucleus of a merchant fleet. MacEntee, his successor as Minister for Industry and Commerce, carried out the rationing of food (Lemass later rationed clothing), and the subsidization of the prices thereof. He also attempted to impose price control and did impose a measure of control on wages. Regional and County Commissioners were set up administer areas in case of emergency and voluntary parish councils sprang up to advise them. Yet discontent was inevitable. Despite its peat, Ireland depended upon Britain for coal and oil, both of which had to be rationed. All rations weighed heavily on the populace. The farmers were aggrieved by the shortage of cereals and its necessary corollaries. The trade unions (including both I.T.G.W.U. and 112

ee W.U.I.) were even more aggrieved by the wages pause, and by the subsequent Trade Union Act that was to disciple the trade unions against strikes arising against that pause.

Then, in 1942, both Republicans.and Socialists were contemptuous of a Central Bank Act, in which the government carried out the majority recommendations of the Banking Commission. Irish banking and currency remained subordinate to, and dependent on, the British system. New parties appeared. In February 1941 Coras na Poblachta (‘the Republican Council’) was formed of ex-I.R.A. leaders and disillusioned Fianna Fail-ites. More energetic was the Rightist Ailtiri na hAiseirighe (‘Brotherhood of the Rising’) which started in September 1942. But Labour and Clann na Talmhan made the most headway in the local elections of August 1942. Fine Gael gained little; though it had opposed the Trade Union Act, this had alienated much of its traditional support.

After the general election of June 1943 Clann na Talmhan and Labour Deputies totalled together the entire Fine Gael representation. Fianna Fail’s chief supporting interests of the 1930s were beginning to rebel. II The emancipated peasantry Cumann na nGaedhael had fulfilled the Irish bourgeois revolution. So Fianna Fail came to power as the fulfiller of the Irish peasant revolution. It was the small farmers, not the urban workers, who put de Valera in power first.

But they backed a programme that was not Socialist but Agrarian-Distributist. The ending of the supply of Irish rent to Britain was in the name of private landowning. The big estates were not to be nationalized but divided between small landowners or so as to make landowners from the landless. The development of tillage was aimed to benefit one group of landowners rather than another. Such principles embarrassed the bourgeoisie, rather than threatening it. For they maintained the principles of capitalism and strengthened it in the countryside.

But the immediate reactions of the various agricultural groups to Fianna Fail’s agricultural policy differed very considerably.

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That the ranchers would be against it was obvious. They benefited from their trade with England more than they lost by paying annuities thither. The dairy farmers were similarly doubtful. It was the small farmers and agricultural labourers who were the initial advocates of Fianna Fail.

At first, they were justified. Dr James Ryan, Minister for Agriculture, continuously from 1932 to 1947, himself a hobby owner of a small farm, initiated subsidies for wheat growing, and a minimum quota for home-grown wheat in home-made bread. In 1933 he gave rate relief on the first £10 payable on agricultural land and the next year developed this into a further system of small farm grants. For the agricultural labourers he extended the coverage of welfare benefits in 1933 and in 1936 established a somewhat bureaucratic system to guarantee them a minimum wage. In the meantime the successive Ministers for Lands, Patrick Ruttledge (1932-1933) and Senator Joseph Connolly (1933-1936) ended the limitations on the Land Commission’s resettlement powers to speed up the division of land among the landless.

But perhaps the most popular governmental policy was the ‘Economic War itself. Though in the long run the farmers had still to pay half the annuities, albeit to their own government, the smallest of them gained the entire remission thereof in the first year of their witholding. The exporters amongst them were given bounties on their produce that more than cancelled out the opposing British duties, while cattle, the ranchers’ chief export, was not so well protected. The latter fact reduced the price of beef: a further benefit to small farmers and labourers, few of whom had previously been able to afford this.

Naturally the ranchers opposed this policy. The position of the dairy farming class is more interesting. It retained the grant to its co-operatives (but they continued to decline). It shared in the benefits of the export bounties. But, at the same time, it tended to be worse hit than the less commercially-minded small farmers, by the general decline in agricultural prices especially for stock. This was accompanied from 1934 by a general rise in retail prices. Medium farmers were also hurt by the encouragement of wheatgrowing on the small farmers’ terms and (after 1936) by the necessity for paying labour a minimum wage. Many of them gave the Blueshirts their mass support. In 1937, they formed an Irish Farmers’ Federation; in 1938 a prominent figure in the I.F.F., Patrick Cogan, was elected to the Dail for Co. Wicklow.

More benevolent was Muintir na Tire (‘The People of the Land’) This was founded in May 1931 by Fr John Martin Hayes, 114

then curate of Castleiney, Co. Tipperary. He had been associated in the Grain-Growers Association, one of the bodies that had arisen out of the disintegrating carcase of the I.F.U. However, he realized that rural problems were -social as well as economic.

He noted that since 1925 the isolated farmer had had no representative body between himself and his County Council. Accordingly he created Muintir na Tire, with aims social, educative, economic and recreational — in that order.

Basically, Muintir na Tire is an organization of all peasants, both propertied and propertyless, to work out rural problems by mutual aid. From 1937 it has developed as an organization of parish guilds to include all dwellers of the relevant units.

These guilds have a remarkable number of achievements to their credit. They include the planting of trees, the electrification of villages, the organization of sewerage, the sponsoring of industries and, most famous, the building of halls.

But, like the government itself, Muintir na Tire has been content to work within the Irish power structure. Fr Hayes was careful to keep it non-political. Its theory is drawn from the Papal social Encyclicals. The question of the division of property or the transcendence of its rights even within the parish is ignored. Class differences are minimized. And it has refused to oppose the bureaucracy by demanding greater powers and juridicial basis for its guilds. Indeed, when the wartime parish councils demanded such things, it allied with the government against them. It is dependent on the goodwill of the Catholic clergy (although non-sectarian), and it has thus been suppressed in the Dublin archdiocese. Its dependence on American aid handicapped its growth during the Second World War. By 1949 guilds existed in 220 parishes out of 950 (in the Republic of Ireland). And as Fr Jerome Toner, an admirer of the movement, pointed out in 1953 ‘Muintir na Tire has not progressed appreciably in the counties where the people and the land are poorest’. If Muintir na Tire itself had little effect in the small farm areas, its weltanschauung was encouraged to develop therein by circumstance. The small farmer’s position was not changed fundamentally for the better. The government avoided dealing with the problems of marketing and of transport. It appointed, to deal with the problem of credit, a commission that discovered that all that was wrong was that there was too much. The subsidies were mere palliatives; indeed, the encouragement of tillage benefited in practice the farmer with good land, and plenty of it. After 1935 the position of the cattle exporter in the agricultural economy was 115

stronger than in 1929. Above all the chief small farm products, pigs and poultry (especially the first), began to decline. Between 1931 and 1960 not only were the numbers of pig-farmers declining, but the proportion of small pig-farmers within the total fell from 20% to 12%. Reasons for this included the problems stated already. But they were now augmented by the 1930 pig subsidy policy of Northern Ireland and increased price for maize under ‘Economic War’ conditions. What was more the system of control, set up by the Executive Council to counter that, tended, by arbitrary limitations on the supply of pigs in a still free enterprise economy, to make things still worse. Between 1936 and 1946 small farmers emigrated at the rate of 4,270 per annum.

But at the same time the labourers gained their wage whilst the larger farmers were hurt by the ‘Economic War’. These facts emphasized the natural tendency of the agricultural property-owners to ally, once the annuities problem had been solved.

Political fact reinforced social fact. After 1932 the Labour Party made little appeal to small farmers. The I.R.A. and its associates were similarly unable to revive the dynamic of Saor Eire.

Those small farmers who became dissatisfied with the two chief political parties looked for leadership to their bigger brethren who had more time to give it. The latter offered co-operation through Muintir na Tire. In 1933 they changed the old Unionist United Irishwomen’s Association to the Irish Countrywomen’s Association.

More important was the small farmer’s contemporary dependence on his parish priest for social theory. What he received came straight from St Peter’s.

The immediate cause for formulating this viewpoint into specifically political action was the 1938 Trade Agreement, the resultant ending of the small farmers’ bounties and the threat of competition with British farmyard products, now protected by the system of deficiency payments.

On the 15th August 1938 representatives of the small farmers of twelve counties met at Athenry, Co. Galway, and founded ‘Clann na Talmhan’, the ‘Family of the Land’, or the Peasants’ Party. It drew its support from the disillusioned farmers of all groupings. Its programme demanded the national provision of rural amenities, schemes of afforestation, drainage, land reclamation and rural industries, the derating of the poor law valuation on agricultural land in respect of acreage and employees, and the end of the Land Commission’s powers over tenanted land, subject to good husbandry. In the national sphere, it demanded credit reform against British control thereof, certain increases in welfare 116

benefits, a fully vocational Seanad and the proclamation of the Republic. Fianna Fail’s policy in agriculture had failed to end discontent.

Its fisheries policy, operated at first by Ruttledge and, from 1933, by Ryan, was even more negative. In 1939 it provided for future reform of freshwater fisheries and in 1941 it created an Irish Maritime Institute. The administration’s forestry policy was more dynamic.

Whereas between 1922 and 1932 30,000 acres were acquired for tree planting, in the next ten years the acreage was 107,000. Even so in 1939 Ireland’s proportion of forestry land was still the lowest in Europe. The outbreak of the Second World War began a period in which the farmers’ dissatisfaction was heightened. This did not result from any actual decline in their material well-being. Between 1939 and 1944 their share of the national income rose from 27.8% to 35.3.%. But this was less than the farmers’ 50% share of the national product. The discrepancy was brought to the notice of the farmers, as the government appealed to them (and successfully) for increases in production. That body’s own offers to the farmers included its creation in 1939 of an advisory and feeble Farmers’ Council, made up of representatives of County Agricultural Committees and Farmers’ organizations. It also ended tardily the quota system of pigs supplied to bacon factories (1940) and, in the same year as the latter, a grants scheme for farm improvements.

Between the groups of farmers there remained differences. The only export outlet left to Ireland was the British market. Its capacity for foodstuffs was limited by British government policy. Its one fairly certain demand was for store cattle for breeding. These were the speciality of the ranchers: not of the dairy farmers who suffered accordingly. The store cattle trade was hurt by the ending of American cereal supplies under the U.S.A. neutrality regulation against trading with countries in the ‘security zone’ around Europe. The Irish government responded to this by a policy of compulsory tillage subject to confiscation of land untilled and later fining or imprisonment. This benefited the farmer with large areas of fertile land.

It became a burden on the small farmer. He suffered also from the now total lack of American maize and the rise in the price of barley to feed his pigs. His products of poultry and potatoes remained unsubsidized. To these crises the small farmer or medium farmer might re- 117

spond in one of two ways. Many of his kind moved to the towns or to England. So did many rural labourers, attracted by the £1.10s. superiority of British to Irish weekly agricultural wages.

By 1942 a rural labour shortage existed.

For many farmers, the alternative was political, Clann na Talmhan waxed vigoriusly. In June 1940 its Chairman, Michael Donnellan, held his deposit at a bye-election in West Co. Galway.

In August 1942 it won seats on the councils of various western counties. It opened negotiations with Patrick Cogan’s National Agricultural Party, the political wing of the Irish Farmer’s Federation. On March 15th 1943 the two bodies fused, though at the expense of the I.F.F.’s large farmer element, headed by Patrick Belton. The united body took the name Clann na Talmhan and added to its original programme demands for state economics and (to win the urban vote) rent reform. In the ensuing general election it won fourteen seats, all from rural constituencies.

III

The workers and their organizations The urban workers were won to Fianna Fail less by its promises than by its achievements, In February 1932 Cumann na nGaedhael and its allies (such as Byrne) gained the plurality of the votes in the urban areas. However by the general election of the next year Fianna Fail was established as the party of the urban working class. It is a position that this capitalist force has never completely lost. Part of the reason was the ‘Economic War’. For the wage-earner this was necessary to oppose British imperialism which was preventing the spread of Irish capitalism and hence employment. He benefited also from the fall in the price of beef, while the inflationary effect of tariffs was nullified by Lemass’s price control.

But Fianna Fail initiated schemes that were aimed more directly to benefit him. Most notable of these was MacEntee’s first Budget; it increased unemployment relief and gave grants to supply council houses and to give milk to needy children. All of this was subsidized from the new tariffs, from increased income tax and corporation profits tax and from a new. surtax. Sean T. O’ Ceallaigh as Minister for Local Government and his able under- 118

secretary, Dr Francis Ward, used MacEntee’s revenue to initiate a massive house-building drive. The coverage of old age pensions was extended. A bill was initiated to abolish property qualifications for local government electors, but was opposed by the Seanad. These policies were maintained in the eighth Dail. The Seanad’s opposition to local democracy was overborne. From 1933 to 1936 the structure of National Health Insurance was streamlined. In 1935 a scheme of pensions was begun for widows and orphans.

The public housing schemes grew apace; between 1932 and 1942 80,167 new houses were built compared with 26,384 in the preceding ten years. This building was backed by Planning Acts in 1934 and 1939. In the later year Public Assistance was reformed.

MacEntee supplied the money for these schemes by taxing the rich. In 1934 Sean Lemass introduced workmen’s compensation (although this merely implemented the proposals of a Cumann na nGaedhael-appointed Commission). From 1936 to 1939 he passed a series of Acts regulating working conditions and hours (including paid holidays). But the latter Acts were often honoured by employers less in the observance than in the breach. This was especially true of employers in the new protected industries. The 1936 Conditions of Employment Act was also unpopular amongst women workers by what was felt to be an excessive measure of protection for them in certain trades. Despite price controls the cost of living rose steadily after 1933. Until 1935 unemployment seemed to rise, encouraged by. rural depression amongst the larger farmers, augmented by reduced possibilities of emigration. And not only did many of the new factories pay low wages, but state unemployment relief schemes often paid as little as a guinea a week. Between 1932 and 1939 the Irish national real income rose more slowly than that of Britain. Nor was Fianna Fail a Socialist party. The general election of January 1933 was precipitated by a dispute with its Labour Party supporters over Lemass’s refusal to nationalize the railways. But as yet all potential left-wing alternatives were divided and subdued. Immediately on assuming office de Valera withdrew the ban on the I.R.A. and its associate organizations. The revived groups maintained a social quiescence, carrying on military manoeuvres unsupported by economic demands. From August 1932 their members took part in attacks on Cumann na nGaedhael and on importers of such British goods as Bass beer. In March 1933 the 119

Army Council restated its policy in a form vague and at times naive though still superior to those of Fianna Fail and Cumann na nGaedhael. No steps were taken to expand this. An Phoblacht carried on a flirtation with the principles of Social Credit. The I.R.A. continued to act as over-zealous support for Fianna Fail.

On April 10th 1934 George Gilmore and others of the left-wing of the I.R.A. tried to provide more positive Republicanism by forming a Republican Congress to organize a movement to achieve the full realization of Fianna Fail’s original policies. The majority of the Army Council, led by MacBride and Twomey, acted against Congress within a fortnight, expelling its leaders, O’Donnell and Michael Price. On the other hand, the Irish Labour Party and Sinn Fein both rejected association within the new body. In the end, the only political body supporting Congress was the Communist Party of Ireland that young James Larkin and the Northern Irishman, Sean Murray, had revived out of the Workers’ Revolutionary Groups in June 1933.

At its first conference in September 1934 Congress split. On the one hand, Gilmore, O’Donnell and Frank Ryan (ex-editor of ‘An Phoblacht) with the C.P.1., offered a policy restating the demand for an independent Irish Republic. Against this, Price and the Connolly family proposed that this be given a formal class emphasis by demanding a Workers’ Republic, such as might better appeal to the north-east. The former were successful. The latter seceded and later joined the Labour Party. Congress was now merely the C.P.I.

writ large but simultaneously it was a rival of the I.R.A. It was thus attacked by both the latter body and the clericals. It existed for two years, more in shadow than in substance, before disappearing entirely. Ryan led a force of two hundred men for the Spanish Republic against Franco, was captured and died in 1944, a prisoner of the Nazis. O’Donnell has continued his career as a literary Republican. Gilmore after an abortive electoral campaign in 1937, has lived mainly in retirement for many years.

The disappearance of Congress, the simultaneous banning of the I.R.A., on top of the new allegiance of Price and the Connollys, helped revive the Labour Party. From March 1932 it had been led by young William Norton. Unlike Johnson or O’Connell; he was a consummate political opportunist, with few clear principles. He became leader when his party held the lowest number of seats: seven. Dublin City was alienated: the west had been renounced, Norton determined as far as was possible to reverse the policies that had created this situation. He had already determined to play the Republican card. As Chairman of the Labour Party in 120

rr November 1931 he engineered the expulsion of two T.D.s, Morissey and Anthony, for supporting Cosgrave’s last coercion laws.

Now he welcomed Price into the party and had its constitution amended in 1936 to demand a ‘Worker’s Republic’. At the same time, no analysis was allowed to back the concept, which concealed a policy little changed from that of T.J. O’Connell.

Labour’s outstanding problem was now Larkin. His readmittance to the party was an impossibility as yet; a majority of its T.D.s were I.T. and G.W.U. members. But Larkin was himself starting to take a more moderate attitude; he did not himself join the new C.P.I. in June 1933 and in the local elections later that year his own candidates were differentiated from the Communists. In 1937 he was returned to the I.T.U.C. as delegate from the Dublin Trades Council, but his opponents were still able to block the admission to the farmers of the W.U.I.

While the Labour Party grew in its apparent radicalism, the I.T.U.C. benefited from the expansion of industry. Between 1932 and 1941 trade union membership rose from 117,000 to 126,000. ‘Workers’ Republicanism’ and increased trade unionism united in the general election of July 1937. For the first time for ten years Labour won seats in Dublin City, Larkin returned to the Dail also; now he was not a bankrupt.

But the party offered little beyond this ‘Workers Republic’ and an increasing adherence to the theory of Social Credit. Fianna Fail speakers began to warn against the dangers of Communism.

In May 1938 the Opposition united to defeat the government over its refusal to establish a Civil Service Arbitration Tribunal. De Valera went to the country again and presented himself as the victor of the ‘Economic War’. Cosgrave offered only token resistance. Labour and Larkin lost their Dublin seats. In 1940 after an appeal by O’Connell and I.N.T.O., encouraged by the Catholic hierarchy, the party withdrew its demand for a ‘Workers’ Republic’.

By this time, the Emergency was giving the Labour movement new causes for action. The housing programme had to be reduced.

Inflation was accelerated. Starvation reappeared. Emigration increased encouraged by the foreign war boom.

Since 1939 MacEntee had been Minister for Industry and Commerce. As such, he carried out measures of food rationing and price control, of which neither had much effect. In May 1940 he initiated a Standstill Order on Wages.

Larkin led the subsequent fight against this. In the I.T.U.C. his prestige rose vis-a-vis that of O’Brien. The latter began to have to 121

resort to openly dictatorial methods to maintain the W.U.I.’s isolation. Trade union membership continued to rise.

In 1941 MacEntee turned to discipline the trade unions. He introduced a Bill which limited the right of negotiation to licensed bodies and set up a tribunal that could grant the sole negotiating power in firms to trade unions representing a majority of the workers therein. Again, Larkin headed the opposition to this.

O’Brien was also active, but he was less committed. This was partly because of his old feud; partly because he saw possibilities in the Bill of ending the position in Ireland of British-backed unions with one of which (the A.T.G.W.U.) he had been feuding since 1934, The Bill was passed. Active opposition to it collapsed.

Of the political parties, Fianna Fail alone supported the Act: but it had the Oireachtas majority. Fine Gael, trying to live down its past fascism, had opposed the wages pause and now attacked the Trade Union Bill. But it feared for its respectable supporters and denounced the proposals because they ‘anticipated the Report of the Vocational Organization Committee’. Thus it got the worst of both worlds. The Labour Party’s opposition to the Act appeared more credible. In reality it needed such a cause. Despite its ex-leader Johnson’s. brilliant demolition of Distributism, it was little removed ideologically from that position. Beneath a revolutionary phraseology, Labour’s Constructive Programme For An Organised Nation as revised in 1941 annoys by its vagueness. It urges nationalization of credit (inspired by the policies of New Zealand’s Labour Government) and of transport. The only definite proposal for nationalization of an industry relates to flour-milling. Otherwise there are traditional Republican policies of reform in afforestation, fisheries, social welfare and housing: land drainage: guaranteed high wages and agricultural prices and vague changes in local government taxation and education.

Yet its opposition to the Trade Union Act encouraged support for it to increase. Many former Fianna Fail voters turned towards it. Overtures were made to the Larkins and, through them, to members of the C.P.I. which had died again in the twenty-six counties in 1941. The defeat of the I.R.A.’s renewed campaign gave the Labour Party the backing of many disillusioned Republican fighters. But others formed their own parties —Coras na Poblachta (1941) and Aijiltiri na hAiseirighe (1942).

Pressed by the growth of the Labour Party, MacEntee, Minister for Local Government from 1941, organized with Ward a number of necessary welfare reforms. Free food (1941) and fuel (1942) 122

supplies were assured the poorest. A special ‘wet-time’ insurance scheme was established for seasonal unemployment in the builders’ trade (1942). The wages pause was ended for the worse-paid employees (1942). Unemployment benefits were increased (although the unemployed themselves were more strictly regimented). National Health Insurance was again streamlined. At the same time (1942) Lemass further regulated shop-workers’ conditions of employment. But the trade unions were militant. The cost of living rose steadily. A further advantage was given Labour. Sean T. O’Ceallaigh (Minister for Finance from 1939) passed in 1942 a Central Bank Act. This created a Central Bank with, as proposed by the Banking Commission, only potential authority. Labour’s credit policy became more popular. In the local elections of August 1942 (the first under a democratic franchise) the party made gains all over ‘Eire’ and became the largest group on Dublin Corporation.

Almost immediately it lost a lot of support. It expelled Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, a prominent member of its Administrative Council, who had expressed public dissatisfaction with the party’s continued reluctance to admit the elder Larkin to full membership. But in 1943 the cost of living showed the highest increase and’ rose above its equivalent in any European country, most of all the U.K. At the general election in June the Labour Party put up 71 candidates. Just enough to support a government. Only 17 were successful. But they included the Larkins, despite the I.T.G.W.U.

and a Fianna Fail-based Communist scare. Labour was now stronger in Dail Eireann than at any time since the fifth Dail (of 1927), the last one from which de Valera had abstained.

IV Gentry, bourgeoisie and blueshirts Fianna Fail’s success lay in the fact that it reconciled its small farmer and (later) employee support to an essentially bourgeois leadership and programme. Most of its economic programme was in line completely with the aims of the National Agricultural and Industrial Development Association that had been formed in 1930 by the various Industrial Development Associations. A ‘Buy Irish’ 123

Campaign was initiated, tariffs were raised, a Control of Manufacturers Act was passed to limit foreign-backed manufacturing companies. In 1933 a Trade Loans Act gave loans on easy terms to new entrepreneurs for five years and an Industrial Credit Corporation was set up as a more permanent source of home investment cash. This was all; the 1933 general election was fought to free the government from pressures to nationalize transport; in 1934, rather than put up an Irish independent Irish credit system, it set up a Commission to consider the matter.

But, as yet Fianna Fail represented only a minority of the Irish capitalists. Its support was limited to a small group of non-Dublin businessmen and of manufacturers and aspiring manufacturers, centred on the N.A.I.D.A. MacEntee’s first budget alienated potential business allies. Many new manufacturers remained loyal to Cumann na nGaedhael; William Dwyer’s Sunbeam Knitwear of Cork had been developed under the tariffs of the 1920s. The Cereals Act of 1932 imposed a wheat tariff and a quota for flour, both of which annoyed the millers. Tariffs and their increase in the ‘Economic War’ prevented any immediate alliance between the government and the Anglo-Irish trading complex.

With the latter were associated the graziers and dairy farmers, both of which were at once dependent on the British market and hurt by the decline of world agricultural prices. It was in June 1932 that the Independent farmer T.D., Brooke Brazier, declared ‘The livestock industry is a total failure’. For such as these, the ‘Economic War’, unaccompanied by agricultural de-rating or (for the cattle exporters) by adequate export bounties, was an unmitigated disaster. Whereas between 1929 and 1931 total Irish agricultural income had declined by £10,000,000 (20% approx.), between 1931 and 1933 it declined by £13,000,000 (or about 33.3%), mainly amongst the larger and medium farmers. To top their worries came Ruttledge’s Land Bill with its increase in the re-distributive powers of the Land Commission against the estates. The working-out of such causes for unrest could be influenced by the political parties. As Fianna Fail pursued its policies to an unknown conclusion, their opponents looked to Cumann na nGaedhael or even to a new party.

Cumann na nGaedhael was not suited to opposition. It had ended its period of power by inducing a red scare. The first act of the new administration was to release the ‘reds’. The new Minister for Defense, Frank Aiken, was known to have close connections with the I.R.A. Many suspected de Valera himself of being the poten- 124

tial Irish Lenin: others saw him merely as a Kerensky. Cosgrave’s personal experience of de Valera did not impel him to calm such fears. Occasionally I.R.A. or just Fianna Fail members would attend Cumann na nGaedhael meetings to interrupt the speakers.

On the other hand, many such speakers seemed to take joy in abusing the people that had rejected them; Senator Oliver St. John Gogarty devoted a long (and, for him, surprisingly boring) : speech to discovering and denouncing ‘the plain Irishman’; Patrick Hogan declared that ‘the question was: were the Irish people fit for the Treaty?’ Tempers were further frayed by the outbreak of ‘Economic War’. On August 11th Dr Thomas F. O’Higgins, a somewhat flawed version of his younger brother, founded a (Saorstat) Army Comrades Association. Officially a friendly body of veterans, it had : much in common with the German Stahlhelm. While proclaiming its lack of politics, its programme declared it also to be Anti- Communist and defending the (Dominion-status) Constitution.

The Fianna Fail newspaper, the Jrish Press, took full advantage of this body’s ambiguities. Republicans caused disturbances at more Cumann na nGaedhael meetings. Army Comrades began to act as stewards therein, and on a number of occasions, merely added to the chaos. By October O’Higgins was declaring ‘no country in the world needs order knocked into it as much as Ireland’. The next month An Phoblacht declared its intention of denying free speech to ‘traitors’. By now the groups of ‘traitors’ had been reinforced. From August many Farmers Defence Leagues had been formed out of the larger farmers, opposing the ‘War’ and urging non-payment of annuities. Their backers included Belton and Heffernan; their spokesman in the Dail was a new Independent T.D., Frank MacDermot, a man of both considerable personal honour and great political naivety. On October 6th, he and the various remaining Farmer T.D.s formed a National Farmers and Ratepayers League. In January it gained a new recruit, James Dillon, son of John Dillon, the U.I.L. leader. It now changed its name to the ational Centre Party. In the subsequent general election, the National Centre Party offered vague proposals for ending the ‘War’ on ‘honourable’ terms. Cumann na nGaedhael offered to suspend the payment of annuities for two years and to renounce entirely half their payment, but it would not compromise its low tariff policy. Meetings of both parties were attacked by Republicans and defended by members of the A.C.A. 125

The defeat of the anti-‘War’ parties encouraged increased bitterness amongst their supporters. On February 10th the genuinely non-political membership of the A.C.A. withdrew from it. The next day, the Association announced that it would have its own uniform: a light blue shirt. It declared this at a meeting where the Fascist salute was given openly.

In April and May the County Councils of Dublin, Kilkenny South Tipperary and Carlow all refused to strike new rates in protest against the ‘Economic War’. Writs of ‘Mandamus’ forced them so to do. In February General Eoin O’Duffy had been dismissed as Commissioner of the Garda Siochana as the result of Fianna Fail backbench pressure. He was offered an alternative position as Controller of Prices but declined it and retired to private life with a pension. On July 20th 1933 he was recalled to become President of the A.C.A. which now took the ominous title of the National Guard, He embarked on a speaking tour of the Saorstat. In one speech he announced a list (never published) of 150 Communists.

Elsewhere he denounced parliamentarism and the party system.

The government created a new, armed, police force, “The Broy Harrriers’ (after O’Duffy’s successor, Colonel Eamon Broy); it is now the (political) special branch. It banned a National Guard procession in Dublin: then it banned the body itself. That revived under its former name. All this had continued alongside a running fight between Republican and Labour elements and their opponents. To the latter, O’Duffy appeared as a possible saviour. On September Ist Cumann na nGaedhael joined National Centre and A.C.A. to form a United Ireland Party (Fine Gael). O’Duffy became President of the new body and the Blueshirts became the Young Ireland Association: the new party’s youth movement. Cosgrave accepted the post of Vice-President and Chairman of the Party in Dail Eireann; MacDermot and Dillon were also Vice-Presidents. The new party had an openly Fascist programme; besides family allowances and a Housing Board, it demanded Labour Brigades for the unemployed, the replacement of all local assemblies by appointed Commissioners, the end of Proportional Representation and the establishment of vocational corporations with statutory powers to control the nation’s ‘economic life’. It declared its primary aim to be the reunification of Ireland as a Dominion in opposition to Fianna Fail’s essential ‘Republicanism’. But this proposal appears somewhat farcical when it is realized that Fine Gael’s first President was a leading bogeyman for Ulster Unionists.

126

Only a few right-wing T.D.s remained aloof from Fine Gael.

The old Unionists, Good the Businessman, and the former Nationalist M.P., Alfie Byrne (Lord Mayor of Dublin) stayed benevolently neutral, as did the Independent Labour Deputy, Anthony, (but Morrissey had become a member). The only one of a component party that refused to enter the new group was a National Centre T.D., the elderly eccentric, W. R. Kent. What was more none of those politically closest to Kevin O’Higgins sat on Fine Gael’s first National Executive. Outside the Oireachtas, the United Ireland party was supported by the larger farmers and many businessmen; unofficial pressure was exerted on employees of such to make them wear the blue shirt. By March 1934 its organized wearers were said to number 103,000. Of this, the hard core had sprung from the loins of those who had helped smash the rural workers’ organizations in the previous decade.

However, it was, naturally, weak amongst the small farmers and organized workers, and was unable to outdo the Republicans’ Nationalism. Fascism succeeds because it alone can save imperialism from revolution. In Ireland Fianna Fail was still able to do this with little trouble compared to the Fascist states. Ireland was underdeveloped economically.

Against Fine Gael was the government and its associates, the Labour Party and the I.R.A. In December de Valera had the Young Ireland Association banned and O’Duffy arrested. Neither action had any long-term effect. O'Duffy was released under Habeas Corpus, and the blueshirt organization took the title “The League of Youth’. More worrying for Fine Gael was the activity of the Republicans, both I.R.A. and Fianna Fail supporters. From October 1933 Republican-Blueshirt clashes began to end fatally. And, on average, the blueshirts came off worst in such encounters.

Matters were exacerbated by Fine Gael’s President. O’Duffy refused to pick a seat for himself in Dail Eireann, preferring to travel around the country holding meetings to increase support.

This enabled Fianna Fail to depict him as a political coward, frightened to test himself before the electorate. In any case, his persona was not that of a charismatic political leader.

In July 1934 local election results showed that after ten months the tide had yet to turn in his favour. This rebuff encouraged his mistrust for representative institutions. But it encouraged, too, mistrust for him amongst his followers.

At the beginning of 1934, British duties on Irish cattle had reached new heights. Consumer prices began to rise while agricul- 127

tural prices continued to drop. Anti-government militancy among larger farmers increased accordingly. More annuities were withheld and telephone wires cut and roads blocked against baliffs. In the south of Ireland assaults on Fianna Fail supporters became more common. In September O’Duffy announced his support for these agitations. However, the constitutional politicians of his party, weary of apparently pointless fighting, opposed this. On September 21st he resigned, taking with him a number of blueshirts and, later, Patrick Belton. Cosgrave became President of Fine Gael, and the blueshirt leadership was placed in the hands of Commandant Edward Cronin. However, the Second Fine Gael Ard Fheis in February 1935 avoided such matters.

In January 1935 the Coal-Cattle Agreement prepared the reduction of much of the immediate bitterness between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. Meatmeal factories and tanneries helped ease the ranchers. At the same time the former was becoming alienated from the I.R.A. These factors helped weaken the appeal of O’Duffy’s greenshirted National Corporate Party which was formed in June 1935.

However, by combining Republicanism with its Fascism it managed to alienate most potential supporters impartially. After eighteen months of stagnation it became a volunteer force, 700 strong, on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War. Belton organized a Christian Front that involved members of all parties in supplying aid to the Brigade. But on its return in 1937 the alliance between - O’Duffy and Belton ended in a sordid squabble over the latter’s handling of the money raised. Belton returned to Fine Gael and was later returned to the Dail as one of its T.D.s. In 1940 he was expelled from it again, on a procedural matter; in 1943 he failed to hold his seat as Independent; he died in 1945. O’Duffy had died the previous year, after offering, apparently, to raise a Brigade to help the Nazis on the Russian front in the Second World War. The Fascist tendencies remaining in Fine Gael were diverted by Cosgrave to the foreign sphere. The party condemned de Valera’s support for the League of Nations’ sanctions against Italy in October 1935, though in this he alienated MacDermot. Later, he urged early recognition of the Franco government in Spain. But by then he had been strengthened by his ally, Byrne’s, victory in the Dublin Corporation elections and he had disbanded the League of Youth. Cronin tried to join O’Duffy in Spain, but had his offer of help refused. In the Second World War he fought in the British 128

Army. He died in London in 1946.

But by 1936 Fine Gael was becoming increasingly irrelevant to Irish capitalism. Fianna Fail was satisfied with the achievements of its first years in power. Such cruel necessities as the ‘Economic War’ were already being composed. The only firm nationalized by the administration was the foreign-owned sugar company. To stem the export of capital, MacEntee’s 1936 budget restored the average level of income tax below that of Britain. The regime’s final acceptance of full capitalist logic came with the trade agreement of 1938. This was designed to hurt the new tariff-fostered industries as little as possible. In fact, it did not give much to them that they would not have received without the ‘Economic War’. The new private entrepreneur was an addition to the numbers of small businessmen and was as uncompetitive as they were. The employee-security legislation of Lemass and the loopholes in the Control of Manufactures’ Acts helped further to maintain these people’s subordinate position. In 1947, extern holdings in Ireland amounted to £176,000,000 — nearly half the value of Ireland’s external assets. Thus, despite the policy of ‘Self-Sufficiency’, between 1926 and 1951 the non-agricultural labour force percentage of employers and self-employed declined from 22% to 10%.

In any case, the principles of self-sufficiency had not been worked out scientifically. Its great private beneficiaries were the boot and shoe producers, paper-makers and engineers. Only the first were genuinely self-sufficient. More generally, whereas in 1928 the total value of exports had amounted to 77% that of imports, in 1938 they amounted to 59% thereof. In 1943 Lemass himself pointed out that the size of imports as a percentage of home production plus imports for use had trebled between 1929 and 1936, Between 1939 and 1946 only the clothing and footwear industries grew slightly; engineering stood still; other industries, cut off from exports, declined.

But ‘Self-Sufficiency’ did justify the inability of Irish capitalism to deal adequately with Irish shipping. Cross-Channel dues remained lower than the dues for other passages. In 1939 it was estimated that there was less shipping on the Irish Register than there was Irish-owned shipping in the port of Dublin alone in 1900. Only in 1941, at a time of grave national need, was a stateowned Irish Shipping Company set up: and then it was an auxiliary rather than a substitute for private interests.

If ‘Eire’ remained dependent on Britain for overseas trade, Irish investors remained dependent on the British stockmarket. Here 129

again such government interference as there was (and this was mainly limited to the I.C.C.) was aimed to supplement rather than to replace foreign external investment. In May 1940 the British Fabian, John Hawkins, estimated that total Irish investments abroad amounted to £300,000,000, that bank assets held in Ireland were less than three fifths of the assets held outside Ireland and that Irish-held investments in foreign government stocks were eleven and a half times the value of investments in Irish government stocks. By then the government had taken two steps beyond the I.C.C.

in extending its control over credit. The more notable was the Banking Commission of which the majority’s findings (1938) were summed up by the practical Paddy the Cope: ‘Any Jew miser could have told them how in five minutes’. More immediately significant was Lemass’s insurance legislation (1936 and 1938) which organized the registration of foreign insurance companies and the control and then the temporary nationalization of internal ones, and which provided conditions for a later expansion of the former’s activities. The war saw a final act of financial control. The Central Bank Act (1942) put into effective operation the demands of the Banking Commission. The Central Bank took over the note-issuing powers of the Currency Commission and was given powers to control (the hereby-licensed) banks through possession of their deposits. But the latter powers were held in reserve. In any case the continuing and effective foreign investment powers of other business institutions and of the government and the continuing issuing (in effect) of British currency, combined to make them only marginally effective.

Even the graziers had their earlier grievances reduced after the Trade Agreement. Though de-rating was shelved, the government grants tended increasingly to fall impartially upon all farmers.

The Land Commission’s divisive powers were limited by red tape in practice. With the Emergency, the one agricultural commodity imported in large quantities by the U.K. was store cattle (though for one year (1940-41) their imports were restricted). On the other hand, compulsory tillage was far more burdensome for the small farmer than for the large farmer who had plenty of usually good land that he could use without worrying too much about the fertilizer shortage. It is, then, scarcely surprising that Thomas Johnson estimated, in 1943, that after eleven years of Fianna Fail power 0.5% of the population of ‘Eire’ owned 50% of its capital. Nor need we won- 130

der that the much more conservative Felim O’Briain, O.F.M., could estimate later that in 1943 also 0.5% of the population received 8.0% of the national income and 16% received 33% thereof. This social conservatism was reflected in the denominational divisions of society. The 1946 Census reported that whereas non- Catholic urban families represented 8% of all urban families, they represented still 22% of the professional-manager-employer class.

In these circumstances, Fine Gael’s decline was natural. In 1938 it stood aside to let Fianna Fail deal with the menace from a growing Labour Party. When in 1943 it again fought a general election in force, it did so on a programme of a ‘National Government’. It was defeated decisively.

But the final sign of the transfer of bourgeois allegiance to Fianna Fail was to come in February 1948. William Dwyer, of Sunbeam Wolsey, was an unsuccessful Fine Gael Candidate in June 1943, From 1944 to 1946, he was an Independent Business T.D. before resigning, the better to look after his company. After the election of 1948 he telegrammed de Valera ‘I hope and pray that you can form a government... You are the one leader in Ireland that can see us through the present crisis’. Fianna Fail was now quite respectable. Vv The bureaucracy In 1932, the civil service was overborn. Its views had coincided generally with those of Cumann na nGaedhael and its supporters.

What was more, the new government’s economy drive reduced the salaries of higher as well as lower civil servants. Faced with these facts many of the remaining veterans of the Union regime resigned their offices. The clash between Ministers and bureaucrats was seen most vividly in the Department of Local Government. Here in practice the civil servants had directed policy since the founding of the Saorstat. However, the new Minister, Sean T. O’Ceallaigh, had ideas of his own. From 1932 to 1935 he forced the democratization of Irish local government. He also experimented unsuccessfully in relaxing the. stringency of the centralized local Appoint- 131

Ey Oe eS : : | | : ments Board. Against both these the civil service fought a running battle. Finally in December 1936 E. P. McCarron, Permanent Secretary to the Department was eased out of his post.

In fact, the struggle had been in form only. O’Ceallaigh’s local appointments policy involved merely giving the choice of three names rather than one to the local council concerned. He made no attempt to set up any system of councils more local than those of the county. He suspended authorities and postponed local elections more blatantly than his Cumann na nGaedhael predecessors.

And his housing schemes, being unsupported by any theory of loyality, tended to isolate their individual beneficiaries, leaving them thus prey for the bureaucrat.

The policy of Fianna Fail, being that of a pragmatic, reformist administration aiming to benefit the workers without strengthening them, necessitated the growth of the civil service in power and in size. From 1932 to 1937 its members rose by 3,000 and government expenditure by 25%. In 1935 alone, the members of statutory rules and orders exceeded the total of the years 1922-1932.

From 1935 to 1955 the civil service numbers rose by 50%.

Further, between 1932 and 1943, the numbers of state-sponsored bodies proliferated. They were created to direct all sorts of matters, mainly economic, though within the capitalist framework.

The included Bord na Mona (the Turf Board), The Sugar Company (the one expropriation of a private business and that a foreign one) and the Cement Company (all were formed in 1934), Aer Lingus (the Civil Aviation Company, 1936) Bord Failte (The Tourist Board: 1939) and (under the stress of the emergency) the Irish Shipping Company (1941). There were also the tiny Monarchana Acoil na hEireann (Industrial Alcohol Co.: 1938) and Mianrai Teoranta (to exploit the few Irish minerals, 1940). Such bodies encouraged a further move of the entrepreneurial Irish towards the state service. They offered power and rewards comparable to no private businessman’s outside the great Anglo-Irish trading firms. The Emergency further strengthened the state bureaucratic authority. O’Ceallaigh left the Department of Local Government for that of Finance. His successor (1939-1941), Patrick Ruttledge, was less formidable. He was persuaded to remove the local council’s powers, apart from patronage and rating, giving them to County Managers appointed by the government. This formalized and extended the Cumann na nGaedhael practice as regards administration of the boroughs. It occured one year before the first county elections on the democratic franchise. At parish level he 132

and his successor, MacEntee, stood resolutely against any extension or formalization of the powers of the new parish councils.

At the same time the measures of the military Emergency effectively ended the rule of law. And in 1942 the government was given extra-parliamentary powers to levy or suspend taxes. These increased ministerial rather than bureaucratic powers, but such increased powers tends to mean in practice that more power must be delegated to the civil service.

VI The Catholic Church and distributism The 1930s saw the spheres of influence of bourgeois and bureaucrat increase: that of the Church remain the same. Fianna Fail’s victory was a defeat for the Catholic hierarchy as much as for its allies. Unlike them, the nature of its defeat forced it into the position where it had to work to maintain its place in the triumvirate.

Absolutely, its position was-unchanged, From 1932 to 1948 (with a brief interval from 1939 to 1940, when de Valera himself held the post) Tomas O’Deirg (or Thomas Derrig) was Minister for Education. The new minister was the ex-Headmaster of Ballina Technical School, who had been sacked for refusing to take the oath to the Saorstat. He was now appointed to maintain the support of the teachers. In this he was unsuccessful; the advice of the I.N.T.O. was ignored on most matters. The teachers received pay cuts in 1932, which were never adequately restored. O’Deirg attacked the women teachers first (1934) by banning their marriage and four years later by enforcing on them a retiring age earlier than that for men. In general educational policy, O’Deirg has three achievements to his credit. He increased the grant to technical schools. In 1934 he introduced a transport subsidy for the carriage of Protestant children to their denominational national schools (though this strengthened religious sectarianism). In 1937, he introduced a free schoolbooks scheme for needy children. He made an attempt to create circumstances for a new improvement in teaching in a School Attendance Bill in 1942 (though his real reason may have been to reduce the numbers educated in British schools). The decisive Clause of this Bill was declared unconstitutional by the Su- 133

preme Court because it interfered with the parental right to edu- Cate. Apart from these actions, O’Deirg’s education policy amounted to little more than pious aspiration. With the support of a Departmental Committee (1936) he refused to extend the national school-leaving age to 16 years, though this reform was put into effect by several local councils. It was under his regime also that the state of primary school buildings became a major public scandal. Hawkins estimates that in 1937 2,400 school buildings were either obsolete, verminous or otherwise defective. In December 1941 T. J. O'Connell declared in the Seanad: ‘In the majority of schools in rural Ireland, the sanitary conditions are unsuitable and dangerous to health’. This emphasized the inability of the system to educate the 14-16 year-olds. The basic cause for its arose from the need of the school managers to pay one third of the cost of all school repair or renewal. O’Deirg was unwilling to change this system, So were the managers themselves; they feared a loss of their power. The Minister also rejected demands for an advisory Council of Education to strengthen parental power formally without hurting clerical authority (which would, indeed, have bolstered the latter). It must be said that in education as in other matters Fianna Fail reflected popular opinion. The well-established power of the school managers was backed by the national poverty that created a necessity to fight for survival not conducive to educational enthusiasm. Even so when in 1935 Dr Kinnane, the Bishop of Waterford, directed the sacking of a national teacher, Frank Edwards, for membership of the Republican Congress, there was greater reaction than there would have been thirty years later.

The authority of the censorship was most notable at this period.

In 1933 Shaw’s Black Girl in Search of God was banned because its woodcuts showed the girl as being naked. In 1942 Dr Halliday Sutherland’s Laws of Life was banned, despite its possession of the imprimatur of the Archbishop of Westminster. Later in the year there was banned the reportage of the language of The Tailor and Anstey that showed that what one could hear anywhere without moral harm counted as obscene reading.

But this activity was caused less directly by the clergy than by bigoted laity, headed by the Fianna Fail leader, Professor Magennis. Admittedly these people did act in the name of Christianity and with clerical blessing. Even so the Church itself could act with less fanaticism than its supporters. In 1942 Maynooth seminary bought a painting that the Dublin Corporation had hesitated 134

about buying lest it be ‘blasphemous’.

The outstanding revelation of Catholic power in Ireland appeared in the 1937 Constitution. The non-denominationalism of the Saorstat Constitution was here replaced by a definite Christianity that gave a ‘special position’ to the Catholic Church. Of more importance was its definite prohibition of divorce.

But how little that meant was shown in the fact that the Courts of Law, when examining it the better to delineate clearly the area covered by ‘faith and morals’, were careful not to be guided only by clerical opinion. In 1942 Judge George Gavan Duffy laid down (Schlegel v. Corcoran and Cross) that any genuinely-held religious belief might be maintained even to inconvenience (legally) another person. Hunt’s case (1943) resulted in legal recognition of civil marriages. In the School Attendance Bill case, the Supreme Court declared that the parental right to educate their children was not limited to deciding the latter’s religion.

The essentially lay nature of this power encouraged reaction to it in sees where clerical control had been comparatively lax. This change was perhaps most notable in Dublin, where on November 6th 1940 Dr John Charles McQuaid became Archbishop. He moved to establish his personal authority throughout his diocese.

He has excluded from it the full organization of Muintir na Tire (though he has allowed an auxiliary guild thereof to be set up there). He has endeavoured to encourage the separation of Dublin charities on sectarian lines. He enforced strictly limitations on the right of Catholics to attend the Anglo-Irish Dublin University which he considered to be a major centre of Protestant influence over Irish Catholic youth. He has controlled firmly questions of church architecture and culture. He has streamlined the administration of the Catholic charities in the Archdiocese. Despite genuine shyness, he has (like his contemporary prelates) participated wherever possible in Advisory Commissions on government policy and in advising on such social unrests as strikes.

But such authority could only be developed on the basis of a definite justifying social theory. Such was Distributism, based on the platitudes of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum as developed in the 1920s in Britain by Belloc and Chesterton and at Maynooth by Dr Peter Coffey. Its basic idea was, in the pure sense, reactionary.

Whereas Socialism accepts the consolidation of capital, Distributism opposes it wherever possible in the name of the small owner-employer. Where such an ideal is not possible, the productive unit should be run by a co-operative. Credit must be controlled by the state to prevent private capital accumulation. The dynamic for 135

this is the spirit of employer-worker co-operation inspired by the Catholic Church. The question of power is nowhere mentioned.

In 1931 this rather woolly theory received stimulus from Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno. In this, the Corporate State appeared as the ideal method for enforcing the national class harmony under which distributism might work. In Ireland the principles of the new Corporatism (or ‘Vocationalism’) included also the Council of Education, a system of parish councils (both of which meant in the immediate situation, augmented clerical power) and children’s allowances to protect the family, Abroad, the theory meant general support for the Mediterranean dictators, though the strength of the corollary to this, anti-Communism, varied between left and right. Because of clerical determination the ideology is the most developed form of Populism that has yet appeared. As such it developed extremities. Right-wing ‘Vocationalism’ appeared as the fascism of the blueshirts, and later organizations, including the Irish-Ireland, Ailtiri na hAiseirighe, It tended to lay greater stress on the state than on the smaller units, demanded the constitutionalizing of Vocational Organizations, the ending of ‘divisive’ Proportional Representation and bewailed the party system. Its most extreme proponent was Fr Denis Fahey, who combined it with anti-Semitism; his books had the Imprimatur of the Bishop of Cork, Dr Daniel Cohalan, and Dr Jeremiah Kinnane, Bishop of Waterford, and later Archbishop of Cashel. The left-wing Vocationalists tended to anticipate the practices of modern Social Democracy, although they were rather more libertarian in that they always emphasized the importance of the small unit. Fr Hayes (admirer both of the British Labour Party and of Mussolini) is an example (he was actually another of Kinnane’s protégés).

This wing included such theoreticians as Fr Edward Coyne, who praised Corporate society (as opposed to the Corporate State).

Among these Dr John Dignan, Bishop of Clonfert, proposed in October 1944 a social welfare scheme run on Vocationalist lines, but otherwise anticipating modern European practice and, even today, well ahead of Irish policy.

Vocationalism could appear as an expansion of Sinn Fein; most notably in its mistrust of the banks. But its very definite social ideas appealed naturally less to the propertyless than to men of small property, the classes from which the Church draws the bulk of its novitiates. Denominational and Catholic bodies supported Vocationalism. Of the press, the Catholic magazines, the Irish Independent and, after Moran’s death, the Leader. But most Voca- 136

tionalist theory appeared in a new monthly magazine, Hibernia, founded in 1937. . The vocationalist parties were Fine Gael (even when purged of its blueshirt crudities) and, especially, Clann na Talmhan. Labour was, naturally, less enthusiastic. But in 1934 it declared its Christian principles. One of its T.D.s, Michael Keyes, was prominent in the Christian Front and it later published a pamphlet eulogizing Salazar. Its more general policy was to press only for those aspects of Distributism (such as social credit control, children’s allowances and Dignan’s Social Welfare Scheme) that were compatible with working class interests.

Fianna Fail was also unenthusiastic. De Valera could praise betimes Italy and Portugal; he introduced a parody of vocationalism into the electoral procedure for his new Seanad; he regretted that it was not nearer the ideal. But he opposed consistently the vocationalist demands. Parish councils were not encouraged until the Emergency; children’s allowances were not initiated; a Council of Education was refused. In foreign affairs, he supported the League of Nations’ sanctions against Italy and refused to recognize Franco as ruler of Spain until 1939. But in the January of that year the appearance of the small farmer Clann na Talmhan stimulated him into more positive action. He set up a committee to investigate Vocational Representation. This committee reported in August 1944 when the pioneer of Corporatism, Mussolini, was discredited completely and his theories were being called in question more than before. Its majority report was unsigned by any of its labour representatives. Fianna Fail was able to dismiss it contemptuously. For the contradiction in Vocationalism was this: its main support lay in the small property-owners, but the social welfare schemes necessary to win the propertyless could not work without either Socialist revolution or the great expansion of Government spending and bureaucracy that has been noted. In addition, the small farmers disliked the bourgeoisie and were exploited by them through the market and credit system. Such real class differences could not be overcome merely by Vocationalism. Nonetheless, the ideas therein and the pressures behind them would play a decisive part in the years after 1943.

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