We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

by Fintan O'Toole

In the tentative negotiations for the formation of EFTA, Ireland found itself in a group of four countries explicitly pleading that they would need very special arrangements because they were too underdeveloped to cope with the rigours of free trade. The other countries were Greece, Turkey and Iceland.

This cluster was not quite what Irish nationalists from Robert Emmet onwards had meant by their country ‘taking its place among the nations of the earth’

Ireland was not British – but it was not really anything else either.

There is a reason why American Westerns were vastly popular in Ireland – they probably seemed like social realism.

‘In the Irish economy, cattle is king.’

In a bitter paradox, Ireland was an agrarian economy that was actually not much good at producing food.

Raising beef on grassland required relatively few skills, so Irish farmers were poorly educated. ‘Rural science’ had been taught in primary schools until 1934, but it was dropped in order to devote more time to the teaching of the Irish language.

Because, in the 1930s, the Catholic bishops had rejected a proposal to establish 500 agricultural colleges. This was ‘an unnecessary extension of state control into education’

The US Marshall Plan had put up a million pounds to fund the creation of a National Institute of Agriculture.

66 The Catholic bishops and their lay allies opposed it on the grounds that it would not have a proper basis in religious doctrine.

The young growing up in rural Ireland were destined as a consequence to be part of the British world in a more direct sense, making their lives in Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and London.

Another was the tiny group of European countries that experienced a fall in population during the 1950s. It was an exclusive couple: Ireland and East Germany.

But Ireland already had walls and they were forcing people out. These imagined walls were those of protectionism – the moral protectionism of McQuaid’s repression and the economic protectionism of high tariff barriers instituted by the Fianna Fáil government when it came to power in 1932.

Protectionism was very much in fashion in the 1930s, and the idea of allowing Irish industries to establish themselves on the home market without competition from much bigger international (and especially British) firms was not innately illogical.

Its imports and exports fell by a combined 64 per cent.

First, as the complaints of the Institute of Industrial Research and Standards suggested, this was a cosy world with little incentive for innovation. Second, the idea of servicing the home market required consumers to do something they could not do: stay at home. Third, the great aim of protectionism was to break Ireland’s economic dependence on the old colonial master.

but because ordinary Irish people were very well aware that wages were higher in England, even in menial jobs.

But ‘in all cases, friends or sisters had written from England or talked during the holidays’ of decent wages and better treatment there.76 Rhetorically, tyranny and contempt were inflicted by the English on the Irish. In the subterranean reality of ordinary lives, England could be a place to escape tyranny and contempt in Ireland.

Even low-status jobs in England were better than what Ireland had to offer people who had no property or connections and only a basic primary education.

in another important respect – monetary policy – Ireland was part of a group that also included Burma, Iceland, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, and Libya. These were non-British Commonwealth countries that were nonetheless members of the Sterling Area.

Ireland had issued its own currency since 1927, but it was a kind of fiction: its exchange value was fixed by law at absolute parity with sterling.

This was one of the things we all knew and chose to ignore. We knew it in the most tangible way: British coins and notes circulated freely in Ireland.

This should have bothered a population bred on nationalism, but it didn’

Ireland’s future, as seen from the US, lay in helping to ‘fill the tables of western Europe with eggs, milk and bacon’

Tellingly, though, most of it was spent on agricultural projects – industrial development was not a priority.

In 1952, after the outbreak of the Korean War and the deepening of Cold War animosities, Ireland’s refusal to join NATO, on the grounds that it could not participate in a military alliance with Britain while that country continued to ‘occupy’ the six counties of Northern Ireland, made it entirely irrelevant to American interests.

Two years earlier, the Irish government had put a bizarre proposal to President Harry Truman: that Ireland and the United States would enter into a mutual defence pact. Unsurprisingly, the US did not see the advantages of Irish assistance against its enemies.

Its refusal to join NATO made it a spectator in the Cold War – no amount of anti-communist rhetoric (and there was plenty) could convince anyone that Ireland was so much as a useful pawn in the great game of superpower rivalry.

Even when Ireland did have some kind of international presence, it tended to use it merely to lament its own post-colonial condition.

‘If Ireland should decide to remain outside a free trade area she would be outside this mainstream of Western European development and her position in the world would become more isolated.’88 Given how isolated Ireland already was, this was quite a prospect.

The alternative to isolation, however, seemed to be devastation. Entering a free trade area with more developed economies would mean that Irish industries, deprived of the protection of high tariffs, would disappear.

‘The rigid application of those principles has left us terrible memories in Ireland.’

One road led to disaster, catastrophe and the impossibility of any future development. The other led to a kind of permanent quarantine as an ever more deeply disconnected outpost, that could only, as Bernard Shaw had predicted an isolationist Ireland would, ‘turn back and shrink into a little village community… and do nothing but wonder how much longer the turf will last in Donegal’

If the EFTA came into being in 1958, Ireland would accept all of its rules by 1988.

There was a kind of unspoken pact: people transformed themselves through emigration so that the state and society could stay the same.

The six countries that formed the Common Market had collectively grown their GNP by 42 per cent between 1949 and 1956. Britain grew by a more sluggish 21 per cent. Ireland had managed just 8 per cent.

Already, even before 1958, almost everyone except de Valera knew that the dream of frugal self-sufficiency was over.

US companies were interested primarily in access to the European market to which Ireland did not belong.

Yet the idea of American investment was potent. To open the Irish economy up so that British bosses could employ Irish workers was to admit defeat. To have American firms in small Irish towns would be to embrace a thrilling modernity and simultaneously to reconnect with the great Irish-American diaspora in whom so much hope – from tourist dollars to support for the national cause of ending partition – had been invested.

It did not seem to bother anyone that Ireland, which defined itself by its independence from Britain, could take its lead from Puerto Rico, which had been a literal dependency of the US since 1898.

The Irish plan for industrialization was the opposite of Stalin’s Five Year Plans. Instead of setting impossible goals and urging the workers to Stakhanovite efforts to reach them, it assumed that Irish confidence was so fragile that it needed the gentle encouragement of easy wins.

A self-sufficient, protected space was going to open itself up to economic globalization. Ireland would produce things for export. It would join in with European economic integration.

Irish globalization had long been about labour going to where the capital was; now it would be about capital coming to where Irish labour was.

Economics was only about money, after all – what really mattered were the old lodestars of the nationalistic constellation: a United Ireland, the revival of the Irish language and the maintenance of Ireland’s special place in the world as the exemplary Catholic nation.

I was to grow up in an economy protected from foreign competition and in a culture protected from moral danger.

The episode showed both that this language of efficiency and organization could be applied to Catholic Ireland but also that piety and progress could go hand in hand.

This was the great gamble of 1958: everything would change economically but everything would stay the same culturally. Suitably to a fiercely anti-communist country, the Irish future would disprove the Marxist claim that economic and technological change transforms ideologies and values.

In fact, the irate mob was not trying to stop the play. It was trying to get in to see it.

British intelligence had feared he might be a potential ‘Irish Quisling’ during the Second World War, when he was a guiding spirit of a small anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist party called Ailtirí na hAiséirgh (Architects of the Resurrection), seeking the establishment of a Gaelic and Christian totalitarian state.

For the rest of 1959, Sive was the thing that Irish people had to see.