Death of an Irish State:An Alternative Interpretation of the Crisis of 1950s Ireland

ByChristopher Benedik

Advisor: Leora AuslanderPreceptor: Patrick J. Houlihan

Department of HistoryThe University of Chicago

April 2010

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I. Introduction

“Now they totter perilously close to the abyss of extinction,”

ends the titular section in the 1953 compendium of essays and

reports, The Vanishing Irish, referring to Irish people in Ireland.1

Edited and compiled by John O’Brien, a leading voice in the

Irish-American and American Catholic communities during the mid-

twentieth century, the book began by claiming, “the Irish will

virtually disappear as a nation and will be found only as an

enervated remnant in a land occupied by foreigners.”2 In

hindsight, we see that Ireland did not fall extinct, and the

Irish have not been reduced to a remnant in their own land.

Emigration from Ireland during the 1950s, which has been termed

an “exodus,” a “crisis,” or with understatement typical of the

nation’s psyche, “a situation,” did not lead to the “dying out”

that O’Brien predicted.

O’Brien was not alone in such predictions during the decade.

John Healy’s famed retrospective series in The Irish Times3, “No-One

Shouted Stop,” which would be reprinted as the book Death of an Irish

1 John A. O’Brien, “The Irish Enigma,” in The Vanishing Irish, ed. John A. O’Brien (London W.H. Allen, 1954), 45.2 O’Brien, “The Irish Enigma,”7.3 Then, and now, the paper of record in the country

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Town in 1968, wrote of rural Ireland’s decline4 during the

decade. Politicians were getting in on the act, too. Enda Delaney

tells of both Dublin Corporation and Dublin City Council passing

a resolution in November 1960, decrying emigration for

“endangering the very existence of the historic Irish nation.”5

This alarmism, as it were, is not even limited to

contemporary figures. Delaney himself claims that emigration

during the fifties questioned the viability of Ireland as an

independent state.6 J. J. Lee goes further, writing of Éamon De

Valera: “his monument was now to be found not in the cosy

homesteads7, but in the deserted homesteads, of the Irish

countryside.”8 These are but two examples; Dermot Keogh, writing

the introduction to The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s, a collection he

helped edit on the decade, calls the period one of “enforced

departure,” removing human agency from the equation and

4 A topic which will be discussed in depth below, as rural Ireland was centralto the national project5 Enda Delaney, “Emigration, Political Cultures and Post-War Irish Society,” In The Lemass Era, ed. Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 63.6 Delaney, “Emigration,” 50.7 A reference to the ideal of a rural, agrarian Ireland that De Valera championed and that will be discussed below8 J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 335.

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portraying the situation as one forced upon the Irish people by a

lack of “economic security”.9 Emigration during the fifties has

been, both then and now, spoken as a crisis, existential at

times, that faced Ireland.

Beyond emigration itself being termed a crisis, there was a

mental crisis in Ireland. Section II will show that, in terms of

the figures, emigration from Ireland during these years was not a

unique event, nor was it outside normal parameters of emigration

from the island in general. However, there was a preponderant

mentality in the Irish population that had not been seen before,

and has not been seen since. This mentality, which Seán Lemass

described as “clouds of despondency which hung so heavily over

the country,”10 should be thought of as central to our

understanding of Ireland in the fifties.

All of these depictions, whether contemporary or modern,

share two common themes. First, they make the justified claim

that emigration, at the time, was caused by largely economic

sources. A 1955 report to the Irish Government, by the Commission

9 Dermot Keogh, “Introduction: The Vanishing Irish,” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s, ed. Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan (Cork: Mercier Press, 2004), 12.10 Tom Garvin, Judging Lemass (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2009) 205.

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on Emigration and Other Population Problems, corroborates this

claim; the Commission found that emigrants sought “improved

material standards” and made the same claim that economic

concerns were the fundamental cause of emigration during the

period.11 Though the Commission was convened from 1948 to 1954,

economic conditions changed little until the implementation of

the Programme for Economic Development during the Lemass

Government, certainly not enough for this finding to lose

applicability to the later years of the decade.

The second theme, which this paper addresses, is that these

depictions conflate the high emigration during the decade with

the crisis mentality present in the Irish psyche at the time.12

Enda Delaney put it clearly: “the sense of malaise and

despondency associated with emigration in the 1950s.”13 He is, if

more explicit than most, representative. Almost all

historiography of the period directly links emigration and 11 Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, 1948-1954, Reports (Dublin: Government Publications Office, 1955) 134.12 To keep the historical events of emigration and the crisis mentality separate, I will endeavor to refer to emigration as that term, or the exodus and such non-ambiguous terms while referring to the necessarily more amorphousmentality and questioning as the crisis or other like terms.13 Enda Delaney, “The Vanishing Irish? The Exodus from Ireland in the 1950s,” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s, ed. Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan (Cork: Mercier Press, 2004), 81.

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despondency in such a way, and no alternate explanations for such

despondency have been put forward. This causal relationship that

holds emigration as the sole major factor in the crisis of the

1950s does not fully engage with, or explain, that crisis. Irish

history would be better served by a new conception of the 1950s,

where the mental crisis is considered separately from the fact of

emigration. I hope to show that they should rightly be considered

as related, yet with separate causes and separate ends.

The first basis of the argument here is comparative. While

emigration was certainly elevated during the 1950s, that

circumstance is not unique to the decade, yet the questions of

the viability of an Irish state or the eventual death of the

Irish nation emerged from the fifties alone. High emigration,

though not a constant, was a rather regular occurrence in the

history of Ireland, both pre- and post-independence; starting

from the 1840s and the Famine, emigration spiked in the 1880s,

the 1920s, and the 1980s at levels, both relative and absolute,

approaching or even going beyond the fifties, as will be

discussed in section II. As John Healy wrote: “emigration was a

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business, a way of life.”14 The comparisons serve to question the

coupling of emigration and crisis in the fifties. To put it as a

simple question: why did the non-unique situation of high

emigration, periods of which Ireland and the Irish had survived

in recent memory, lead to the unique response of questioning the

Irish state and nation?

Factors exogenous to emigration itself also played a major

role in the emergence of this despondency. Specific factors of

import will be the promises made and expectations of an

independent Irish state, the accepted role of the Irish

government and society, and the distance between the population

as a whole and the political elite of Ireland as seen from the

perspective of the former. Section III will cover the discourse

of independence and the effects of its promises going

unfulfilled. Section IV will then discuss the accepted role of

the Irish government, namely the fostering of the Irish language

and the drive for unification of the island, and with it

establish the views of the political elite of Ireland towards

emigration. It will show that the Irish political class did not

14 John Healy, The Death of an Irish Town (Cork: Mercier Press, 1968), 53.

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see the promotion of welfare or the management of the economy as

acceptable roles for the state to play. Instead, through rhetoric

and action, the goal of the state was the end of partition,

promotion of the Irish language, and, especially due to Éamon de

Valera, the promotion of a rural, antimaterialist, and idyllic

lifestyle. The events of the fifties showed the state unable to

fulfill this role.

With this idealized, antimaterialist society as the ideal,

emigration for economic reasons was a particular challenge for

the state to deal with. Irish political rhetoric acknowledged

that emigrants were seeking higher living standards, yet at the

same time political leaders were arguing that the Irish state

should not focus its efforts on promotion of higher living

standards, that the Irish people did not seek or need them, and

that those Irish who left in pursuit of such standards were

making a choice, and hurting their country by doing so. Sections

IV and V will discuss this rhetoric, and hopefully the conclusion

below sufficiently challenges it to remove some of the still-

extant stigma around emigrants.

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In terms of the structure of the argument, certain events

can serve as signifiers. While the processes that took place are

irreducible to single events or dates, it can help to

conceptualize periods beginning and ending at specific times. The

understanding of the Irish situation does lend itself to such

signposts that allow the separation of time into relatively

discrete periods, for ease of consideration. Certain dates will

be used throughout as such signifiers: the April 19, 1949

inception of the Republic of Ireland Act, as one example, severed

the last of Ireland’s formal ties with the United Kingdom and the

Commonwealth. Ireland was in every sense independent, and the

crisis would go to question the feasibility of an independent

state, so the date serves as an effective signpost.

Two such dates serve similar purposes for the rise of Seán

Lemass, who will play a large part in the political narrative

below. His 1955 Clery’s speech began to cast him as an advocate

for a more expansive government role in society, and his becoming

Taoiseach15 in June, 1959 marked the real turning point between the

time of crisis and despair under De Valera, and the beginnings of15 Prime Minister in the Westminster-style system adopted in the 1937 Constitution, the word itself is Old Irish for “Chieftain.”

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recovery and hope, discussed further below. While Ireland in the

eighties and even up to today will play comparative roles, our

main temporal area needs an end. Girvin and Murphy’s The Lemass

Era, they end in 1973, with Ireland’s ascension to the European

Economic Community16, and that point works here as well.

Two historical events17 will be examined in detail through

the crisis as major contributing factors. In the minds of the

Irish public, partly due to political promises surrounding

election campaigns, the Irish government was expected to take the

lead in reducing emigration.18 It follows that public trust in

the government’s ability to do so can radically change the

perception of the situation surrounding emigration, even with

little change in the actual policies promulgated. As such, the

emergence of new leaders in both of Ireland’s major parties,

Fianna Fáil (FF) and Fine Gael (FG), who were seen as less involved in the

independence battles and Civil War of the nineteen teens and

twenties, played a marked role in the shift from a crisis

16 Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy, “Whose Ireland? The Lemass Era,” In The Lemass Era, ed. Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 2.17 “Historical events” is used as in Sewell’s Logics of History, as a set of occurrences that change the social or cultural structures of a society.18 See Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 335 and Delaney, “Emigration,” 51.

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mentality to a more hopeful one. The same situation in terms of

economic factors or emigration statistics could, and did lead to

markedly different responses. Despair, as was prevalent during

the fifties under the governments of Costello and De Valera,

imparts a sense of “utter hopelessness, a sense that nothing can

be done,” as sociologist Debbie Gould wrote.19 During the

sixties, even though wholesale emigration reforms were not put

forward until 1968 by then-Minister for Labor Patrick Hillery,20

the leadership of Seán Lemass and James Dillon and the new

generations of ministers and politicians they shepherded in led

to a change in mentality, a shift from despair to hope.

Linked to this change in leadership was an even broader and

more general change in the conception of the role of the state of

Ireland. Under De Valera, who had led FF since the Civil War and

had authored much of the 1937 Constitution,21 the role of the

Irish state, and its government, was to revive the Irish language

19 Debbie Gould, Moving Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009),399. Gould was writing of the American AIDS activist movement, yet her analysis of hope or despair on emotional responses and motivation is both cogent and generalizable, and plays an important role in this conception.20 Delaney, “Emigration,” 57.21 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 202.

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into everyday use and to unite the South and the North22 into one

singe state.23 De Valera’s ideal society was “rural, simple, and

devoid of materialism,”24 Delaney wrote, and his government, as

will be seen in section IV, was seen to be more interested in

bringing such a society about than effectively providing for the

society it led. By the end of the decade, and his time in power,

De Valera, and much of the old guard he was seen as leader of,

was seen as out of touch, as ill-prepared to deal with the

problems that a modern, functional state should deal with.

Through Lemass’ time leading the government, however, a new

conception of the state emerged; the establishment of a national

healthcare system, a national television broadcaster in RTÉ, free

secondary education, and other characteristics of the welfare

state that had emerged in the rest of Europe as products of the

postwar consensus recast the Irish government as leading a modern

European state rather than a neutral, isolated, and idyllic

agrarian community. Much like the change in leadership, such

changes in the wholesale structures of state-society relations

22 That is, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland23 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 333.24 Delaney, “The Vanishing Irish,” 85.

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radically altered the mindset of the Irish towards their state,

their situation, and towards emigration and possible courses of

action.

These structural transformations led to an end of the crisis

mentality before any radical change in emigration or the economic

conditions of Ireland occurred. Girvin and Murphy make the

justified claim that Ireland didn’t escape from poverty until the

late 1980s,25 the end of the next period of high emigration. It

is this disjunction of economic and statistical indicators when

compared to social and cultural mentality that deserves further

expansion. Through the seventies and eighties technological

innovation and cultural change would alter the experience of

emigration, and of being an emigrant nation, leading, as Lee and

Foster have argued, to a certain comfort among the Irish as

émigrés, precluding another crisis of this sort.

After the treatment of the era and of certain threads

running through the times, a new picture should emerge of the

crisis surrounding emigration during the fifties. The Irish state

was questioned, yet the cultural and social structures that led

25 Girvin and Murphy, “Whose Ireland?,” 3.

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to the questioning changed and brought such doubts to an end,

even before the economic and emigration conditions that led to

the questioning remained unresolved. Emigration and government

responses to it helped to shape and portray the new conception of

an Irish state, and nation that emerged out of the decade, and

out of the era of Lemass and Jack Lynch26 that followed. The

changes wrought to Ireland, in terms of the ideal of the state

and the mentality of its people, give significance to the lost

decade that merely examining emigration and responses to it do

not.

II. Numbers

In 1951, the census closest to the 1949 establishment of the

Republic of Ireland, the population of the state stood at

2,960,593.27 The 26 counties that would become Ireland had

reached a peak population in 1841 of 6,529,00028, so at first

26 FF Taoiseach that directly followed Lemass with many of the same Ministers inthe cabinet and a continuation of many government programs.27 Central Statistics Office Ireland, Census, Census 1951 Volume 1 – Population, Area and Valuation (Cork: Central Statistics Office, 1952), Table 1,http://www.cso.ie/census/census_1951_volume_1.htm.28 John A. O’Brien, “The Vanishing Irish” in The Vanishing Irish, ed. John A. O’Brien (London W.H. Allen, 1954), 19.

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glance the alarmism of O’Brien and others does not appear

unwarranted. However, the majority of this sharp decline in

population happened during the 1840s and 50s, due to the Famine

and the poverty of Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth

century29 In fact, by the 1901 Census, the population of Ireland

was 3,221,823 people.30 These numbers challenge the existential

questioning going on during this time; Ireland had survived

single decade declines in population of 21.7 percent in the 1840s

and 10.4 % in the 1880s. Independence from the English was no

aggravating factor, either, as the “manifestly inadequate”

English government utterly failed to “contain the crisis” or aid

Ireland in those decades.31

In terms of the data strictly about emigration, a similar

pattern emerges, and the 1950s were not at all a unique moment.

The 1961 Census found that between 1951 and 1961, 408,766 Irish

emigrated, and Ireland had a net decrease in population of

29 In F.S.L Lyons’ Ireland Since the Famine, the development of most major industries of Ireland – linen, cattle, shipbuilding, begin to peak during the 1860s or 70s. The 1850s had little growth after the devastation of the 1840s and the end of the Famine, with the 1851 potato crop being the last wholesale failure.30 Census 1951 Volume 1, Table 1. To note, all Irish Censuses contain a general overview of data from previous censuses in their first volumes.31 F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Morison & Gibb, 1971), 4.

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142,252.32 While that number is significant, and larger than the

population of any Irish city bar Dublin, it does not account for

the panic that those thousands of emigrants left behind. From

1911-1926,33 there were 405,029 emigrants and a net population

decline of 167,696 people. The wars of the period saw deaths in

the thousand at highest, so most of that loss came from

emigration as well. Yet during those first years of an

independent Irish state, even one in the Commonwealth and under

the Crown, there were no questions of its viability, none of the

despair present surrounding emigration and population issues.

The eighteen eighties provides even more stunning figures

for emigration. Though the destruction of the Four Courts

building lost many of the archives, O’Brien cited a figure of

597,330 emigrants during the 1880s,34 which agrees with his claim

of a population decline in the area of 10 %, assuming that there

were no major fluctuations in natural population growth and

decline. While this loss of over 10 percent of the population of

32 Central Statistics Office Ireland, Census, Census 1961 Volume 1 – Population, Area and Valuation (Cork: Central Statistics Office, 1963), Table 1,http://www.cso.ie/census/census_1961_volume_1.htm.33 The War for Independence and Civil War prevented any Census between 1911 and 1926.34 O’Brien, “The Vanishing Irish,” 26.

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both the island and the area that would become Ireland, there

were no similar questions asked of the Irish nation. What was

said was a reiteration of the demand for independence, which

Lyons claims remained essentially the same to what Wolfe Tone

declared in 791: “to break the connection with England, the

never-failing source of all our political evils.”35 Implicit in

Tone’s demand is a promise that an independent Ireland would not

suffer the same evils, a sentiment common in Irish nationalist

rhetoric whose part in the crisis of the 1950s will be discussed

below.

The two periods of highest emigration before the fifties,

the 1920s and 1880s, were not characterized by the same crisis in

mentality, and are not written about in the same tone of a “lost

decade” or a time where people had “lost confidence in the

ability of their politicians, civil servants, and other members

of the ruling elite to create a society that might in the future

allow them to enjoy a decent standard of living36” as the 1950s

are.

35 Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, 3.36 Delaney, “The Vanishing Irish?,” 85.

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One aspect of emigration in the 1950s that will feature

later is the age distribution. From 1951 to 1961, 146,900 Irish

between the ages of 15 and 24 emigrated, along with 140,000 who

were between 24 and 35, while 76,800 emigrated who were between

35 and 54.37 Books such as Healy’s The Death of an Irish Town would

discuss this age distribution and add to the sensation of the

crisis by questioning the future if it was mostly the young that

left. Sadly, the data are simply not available to compare the

age-specific elements of emigration looking backwards; the Census

only contains age distribution data back to 1936, so it cannot be

proven whether or not this distribution in ages was abnormal.

However, a comparison to the 1980s does bear fruit here.

While the period was less severe that either the 1920s or 1950s,

206,053 Irish men and women left from 1981 to 1991.38 For this

period, there are also the data specific to age, and again the

1950s are found to be typical of periods of high emigration.

During the eighties, the population aged 20-24 fell 6.9 percent,

37 Gerry O’Hanlon, “Population Change in the 1950s: A Statistical Review,” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s, ed. Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan (Cork: Mercier Press, 2004), 76.38 Central Statistics Office Ireland, Census, Census 1991 Volume 1 – Population, Area and Valuation (Cork: Central Statistics Office, 1993), Table 1,http://www.cso.ie/census/census_1991_volume_1.htm.

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and the group from 25 to 29 fell 4.7 %, compared to a decline of

0.4 % in the total population.39 The young were leaving in large

numbers during the eighties, as in the fifties.

Though the history of the 1980s is still largely being

written, what texts we have share little of the discourse of

crisis and failure with similar histories of the fifties. RF

Foster writes of a 1979 interview where John Lydon, an Irish-

descended London punk better known as Johnny Rotten, told an

Irish interviewer that as a child of emigrants that it would

serve him and those like him no purpose to return to Ireland. 40

Unless Foster’s history was written to reflect the opposites of

the feelings of the time41, the manner-of-fact nature of his

dealings with emigration show a nation that did not question

itself and its state as it had just a generation before.

Even if the data of emigration, in terms of numbers and

ages, was not dissimilar between the fifties and eighties, the

39 Central Statistics Office Ireland, Census, Census 1991 Volume 2 – Ages and Marital Status (Cork: Central Statistics Office, 1993), Table 3,http://www.cso.ie/census/census_1991_volume_2.htm.40 R.F. Foster, Luck and The Irish (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 151. 41 Dr. Anne Dolan at Trinity College, Dublin, would comment to her classes that Irish historiography, in particular, often shares a tone and a focus withthe time being written about.

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experience was quite different. For one, the psychological

barriers surrounding emigration were far lower in the eighties;

air travel had become widely accessible, telephone service was

widespread. Technological innovations like these meant that

emigrants were not permanently separated from their old homes,

whether by presence or by communication. Support structures had

also been put in place for new emigrants: Breda Grey writes of

cultural structures and aid and support networks emerging in the

70s and 80s in the Irish community of London.42

The conclusion will return to emigration in the eighties to

contrast the expectations on and response of the Irish state to

what happened in the fifties. What has emerged from this point

now is that the circumstances regarding emigration that Ireland

was in during these times were similar enough to rule out an

explanation of the 1950s crisis limited to emigration. Though the

discourse of crisis during the 1950s often centered on emigration

and it has been treated as a product of emigration, an

examination of the data reveals that emigration is insufficient

42 Breda Grey, “The 1980s Irish Emigrant and ‘Multicultural’ London: From ‘Ethnicity’ to ‘Diaspora’,” in The Irish Diaspora, ed. By Andy Bielenberg (Harlow:Longman, 2000).

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cause for crisis mentality to emerge. Emigration as high or

higher than the fifties did not cause such mentality or despair

to come forth at other times.

This is not to say that emigration did not play a role in

shaping the crisis, just that it was not a sufficient condition

for it. Later sections will show how emigration played a role in

the structures and political situation that led to and then the

changes that ended the crisis of the fifties. Yet it is those

structures, and the political and cultural situations of the

time, that account for the panic, the despair, the existential

questions present in Ireland during the fifties. While they

surround and often center on emigration, in some cases

exclusively, they do not stem from it, as this section has shown.

The next section will present the first of these structures in

more detail: the latent presence of the promise of an independent

Ireland and the consequences when they failed to materialize.

III. The Promises of Independence

On April 19, 1949, a telegram was sent from London to

Dublin, sending President Sean O’Kelly “sincere good wishes” from

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George VI, his equal from that day forward. Taoiseach John

Costello had declared that Ireland was to be a republic and

withdraw from the Commonwealth, which was open only to Crown

Dominions at the time. Costello, leader of the First Inter-Party

government43, had fulfilled a long aim of coalition party Clann na

Poblachta44. Ireland was now fully independent of the British Crown

and of any British influence or power over the affairs of the

state and its people.

While a 1936 Act had limited the King to issuing diplomatic

credentials and signing treaties45 and the 1937 Constitution had

created the position of President of Ireland to act as head of

state in all internal affairs, the declaration, passed in 1948

and enacted four months later in April, ended even these symbolic

links to the British Empire and the Commonwealth, granting those

powers to the Presidency. Ireland was completely independent for

the first time in centuries, and the nation celebrated its

destiny coming fully under its own control.

43 In which James Dillon, who would lead Fine Gael in the 60s, was minister for agriculture and won his political fame as an economic and social reformer44 “Family of the Republic,” a republican and socialist party seeking to draw votes from the two major, Civil War legacy parties.45 Irish Statue Book, Executive Authority (External Relations) Act, 1937,http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1936/en/act/pub/0058/index.html.

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Expectations and promises surrounding independence had

created a sense in the Irish people of coming prosperity and an

end to emigration and poverty, and these expectations not being

met would go on to play a significant role in the emergence of a

crisis mentality within and about Ireland. Advocates of an

independent Ireland could, and did, blame the British presence on

the problems the Irish people faced, and the high rate of

emigration off of the island.46 Wolfe Tone, as above, called

England the source of all evils facing Ireland.47 Tone would only

rise in stature through the years, first as an icon of

O’Connell’s Young Ireland movement and he became seen to some as

the father of Irish Republicanism. Parnell continued this

rhetorical trend. Parnellite literature called the British

“tyrant oppressors” and claimed that the people of Ireland “have

been so long heartlessly exploited.”48

In 1913, Patrick Pearse, a then-prominent Republican who

would become President of the Provisional Government created in

the 1916 Easter Rising, said “Ireland has resources to feed five 46 Delaney, “Emigration,” 51. 47 Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, 3.48 An Irish Nationalist, Parnellism (Dublin: 1885), in Bristol Selected Pamphletscollection, http://www.jstor.org/stable/60243818.

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times her population: a free Ireland would make those resources

available,”49 a position that Delaney’s far-reaching studies

found typical of the time. Delaney wrote that the Republicans

and revolutionaries who would become the first political elite of

Ireland had internalized this ideal and these promises, as had

the Irish public.50 De Valera himself had made such claims; upon

his rise to power in 1932, the Irish Press, a newspaper that he co-

owned that amounted to a Fianna Fáil party organ, would laud the

FF economic programme as the way to avoid the Depression and

would argue for further separation from Britain and the British

economy as the way forwards.51 Even when governing what was then

Saorstát Éireann, the Irish Free State, de Valera was pledging that

independence would further Ireland’s aims politically and

economically.

These claims seem, at first glance, to be tied to 1922

rather than 1949. A brief aside into the formation of an

independent Ireland complicates that situation, and will justify

this framework of cultural expectations being considered 49 Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 184. 50 Delaney “Emigration,” 49-51. 51 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 177.

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synchronically rather than temporally.52 Tone spoke in favor of

an Irish republic, as did Pearse, and while de Valera spoke of

separation from Britain and led the Irish state bound by the

Anglo-Irish Treaty; he never stopped his fight against partition

and for a republic governing the whole of the island.

1922 did not fulfill all of the demands of Republicans, or

set the stage for their promises to be met in the same way that

the declaration of a republic had. The Irish Civil War was fought

over the Treaty, with de Valera leading the anti-Treaty side that

would become Fianna Fáil, claiming that remaining a Crown Dominion

was insufficient and would tie Ireland too closely with the

United Kingdom it had just left. In 1922, or just before April

1949, Ireland was not “independent” in the minds of many of its

people, including the party that had governed the young state for

the longest.

De Valera had not pushed for the declaration of a republic

when he was in office due to partition still being in place.53

52 William H. Sewell, Logics of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 182. Sewell claims that a synchronous treatment of cultural events thatshare antecedents, in this case the promises of an independent Ireland, as synchronous rather than separated in time, allows for a more complete treatment of the cultural and social situation.53 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 301.

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While the experience of World War II had made it painfully clear

that unification was practically impossible, as unionists would

not even consider unification in return for Irish help in the

war, declaring a republic out of the 26 southern counties was

still an important symbolic step. It strained what relations

there were with northern unionists by denying the British

Monarchy any role in the state.

Yet whether the promises made were of an independent Ireland

or an Irish Republic, they were made, and the reality in the

Irish minds, besides a few hardline nationalists, was that they

had achieved an independent Ireland, certainly by 1949 if not

before. What latent expectations the events of the 1920s had

brought forth did not go away; if anything, now that the civil

war was over, a new constitution had been enacted in 1937, and

the Irish government was in full control of its domestic and

international affairs, promises now had to be kept. Although the

expectations of Irish society did not emerge on one day, April 19

remains a useful abstraction, a point where elements from

different times yet the same causes can be considered to be

present, together. By now, even if some of them had been doing so

27

for years, the Irish had every reason to expect the promises made

to them about the potential of their country to be kept.

These promises, made by Tone and Parnell, Pearse and De

Valera alike, were not kept. They never could have been. What Lee

has called an “inevitably deflating experience”54 took place as

the government and people of Ireland found promises made

untenable, problems inscrutable, solutions impossible, even with

the British role greatly reduced, especially in terms of domestic

policy. This failure, when looked at in relation to the history

of new nations, is hardly surprising. As Geertz put it, Ireland,

like many states freeing themselves from colonial rule, went

through “the dawning realization that things are more complicated

than they look, that social, economic and political problems,

once thought to be mere reflexes of colonial rule, to disappear

when it disappeared, have less superficial roots.55 In the post-

war years, de Valera’s government was occupied with such

complicated problems. It was offering no new vision in the years

after World War II.56

54 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 173.55 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 235.56 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 298.

28

Costello had won the 1948 Dáil57 elections partly due to

attacking de Valera’s government for a relatively large rise in

emigration numbers,58 placing the issue in the public spotlight.

At the same time, April 19 had brought long-taught and long-held

beliefs to the fore of a republican Ireland’s ability to provide

and care for its own people. With both a new political framework

in place and a change in government away from De Valera, who was

already perceived as out of date and out of touch, the public was

primed for a reduction in emigration and a newly self-sufficient

state. Throughout the coming years, however, the promised and

expected decline of emigration would not come to pass, and the

newly-declared republic would find itself less able to provide

for its own than any time since the signing of the Anglo-Irish

Treaty.

Leaders, as Parnell and Pearse above, had led the Irish

people to believe that the problems their country was facing were

not of their own doing, and they were prevented from solving them

by outside intervention. As Costello spoke April 19, Ireland “for

the first time in [it’s] history…[stood] alone, mistress of 57 The lower house of the Oireachtas, the Irish Parliament.58 Delaney, “Emigration,” 51.

29

[it’s] own destiny,”59 Foreign Minister Seán MacBride said that

the Republic was “the final achievement of the national

aspirations of the people.” 60Such rhetoric drove home the point

that Ireland now stood alone. There was no exploiting power

robbing Ireland of the majority of its resources, as Pearse had

talked about. When economic indicators fell and emigrations rose

in the coming years, independent Ireland was to blame for the

first time.

IV. De Valera’s Ireland

While Éamon de Valera was seen as out of touch by the

fifties, he had been first President of the Executive Council of

the Free State and then Taoiseach of Ireland from 1932 until 1948,

and then twice more in the fifties, alternating with John

Costello. During his yeas in and around power, his impact on the

state that was Ireland at the time was unparalleled. He had

helped shape Ireland out of independence, had led the creation of

its constitution in 1937, and had led the state itself for nearly

20 years. In those years, he set the framework for one of the

59 Quoted in “Taoiseach Declares: ‘Unity Inevitable’,” The Irish Times, April 19, 1949. 60 Quoted in “President Signs Republic Bill,” The Irish Times, December 22,1948.

30

most important cultural structures going into the fifties. It was

largely his view of the role of government that was espoused and

promoted, and his ideals had shaped the idealized notion of the

state to a singular extent, for he had a singular power to

instill those ideas, what Lee refers to as “the cult of ‘The

Chief’”61.

In his seminal Judging Dev, Diarmaid Ferriter opens with a

1978 poem by Paul Duncan, “Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin.62”

The last stanza refers to de Valera, and captures the essence of

how the man was seen: “I see him now in the heat-haze of the day/

Blindly staking us down;/And, leveling an ancient rifle, he says

‘Stop/ Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin.”63 Clinging to the

wars of the past and the culture forged in them, de Valera cannot

see the new, modern Ireland that would emerge, driven largely by

Seán Lemass and Jack Lynch even while de Valera occupied the Áras.

The emergence of this new Ireland, where the poem’s titular

activity would be acceptable on the President’s lawn, will be

discussed below. The Ireland de Valera strove for and was 61 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 340.62 The official residence of the President of Ireland, an office De Valera occupied from June 1959 to June 1973.63 Paul Duncan, “Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin,” 1978.

31

fighting for would have accepted no such thing. In a general

sense it was Catholic, agrarian, rural, antimaterialist, Irish-

speaking, Irish sport playing, self-sufficient, fully

independent, island-spanning, and neutral. He fought for this

idea with determination throughout his career, believing that his

ideal state was the ideal state, that he was a representative of

the Irish nation. During the Dáil debate over the Anglo-Irish

Treaty, he said as much: “Whenever I wanted to know what the

Irish people wanted I had only to examine my own heart and it

told me straight off what the Irish people wanted.”64 In many

cases heard his heart led him wrong, yet sometimes he was right,

or his moral force and political leadership swayed public

opinion, making his heart be right.

One of those areas was the idealized role of agriculture,

this rural ideal. Edmund Murray, an Irish-American teaching at

University College Cork, contributed an essay to The Vanishing Irish

that presented this ideal as a fact: “The Republic is essentially

an agricultural country…without an interest in things rural and

64 Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, 447.

32

without encouragement to farming the nation just cannot

survive.”65This was the view of the Irish both within and outside

the state. John Healy wrote of farmers who emigrated yet would

fly back during these years to challenge the state seizing their

lands, swearing to come back and restock them,66 a fight that

they couldn’t afford and a pledge they would never fulfill. The

idea of living off the land was central to Irish identity and

their own conception of their purpose and the purpose of their

state.

One of the central aspects to de Valera’s ideal was its

peculiar insularity. Ireland was to speak Irish, embrace Gaelic

games, and hew to a neutral course. The transfer of this idea to

policy “closed Ireland off from developments in the outside

world and affected virtually every aspect of the society,

including culture, economic policy, and diplomacy,” writes Brian

Girvin.67 This closure had a significant effect on Irish life and

society. In a sense, Ireland was trying to become more and more

65 Edmund J. Murray, “The Key to the Problem,” in The Vanishing Irish, ed. John A. O’Brien (London W.H. Allen, 1954), 66.66 Healy, Irish Town 78-9.67 Brian Girvin, “Church, State and the Moral Community,” In The Lemass Era, ed. Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 125.

33

particularly suited to the specific needs of the Irish nation.

The Irish Catholic Church played a leading role in society.

Gaelic games were major social and recreational events. Such

characteristics differentiated Ireland from other English-

speaking states, and cast it as a uniquely-fitting home for the

Irish nation.

De Valera sought to create this home for members of the

Irish nation. He said in 1951 “work is available at home, and in

conditions infinitely better from the point of view of health and

morals…with living conditions far better than they find in

Britain.”68 Two aspects stand out: the claim to superiority in

terms of morals, and the claim of far better living conditions.

The discussion of morals is a clear reference to the Catholic

Church; the 1937 Constitution was de Valera’s effort at having

Ireland “”lead the world as a Catholic nation,”69 and promoting

Catholicism in Ireland was both a moral and a nationalist

obligation for him.

68 De Valera, quoted in Delaney, “The Vanishing Irish?,” 84.69 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 206. (It is unclear which parts of Lee here are a direct quote and which a paraphrase)

34

His claim of better living conditions is more difficult to

unpack. In terms of job availability, wages, social services, and

a safety net, the United Kingdom in 1951 had these things, while

Ireland did not. The way to understand his claim should be that

he refers to living conditions for members of the Irish nation:

the presence of the Irish language, the opportunity to help build

independent Ireland, etc, for a claim for better living

conditions in objective terms is problematic on merit. R.F.

Foster quotes de Valera: “I think it quite possible that a less

costly standard of living is desirable.”70

This belief that Ireland had better living conditions speaks

words. One reason De Valera did little to stem emigration was

that in his picture of Ireland, emigration was voluntary. There

was employment in Ireland, there were better conditions in

Ireland. Such beliefs were not limited to de Valera; both Delaney

and Lee have discussed the disparity between the Irish elite and

the majority of the population, and this elite view that

emigration was voluntary and the blame for it laid at the feet of

the emigrant.71 Even if these views were mere political rhetoric 70 Foster, Luck and the Irish, 1171 Delaney, “The Vanishing Irish,” 85.

35

instead of beliefs, such rhetoric helped create a sense that

emigrants were making a choice, to emigrate, and because of this

were at fault for the crisis.

V. Experiencing the Crisis

A few months after becoming Taoiseach Seán Lemass said, “the

most encouraging feature in the national situation at the present

time is the disappearance of the clouds of despondency which hung

so heavily over the country only a couple of short years ago.”72

The lifting of those clouds was due in no little part to the rise

of Lemass himself, as will be seen in section VI. This section,

however, will deal with Ireland as it was under those clouds. The

despondency in Ireland emerged from the conditions discussed in

sections III and IV. Promises were not being kept, and the

government was not capable at either fulfilling its duty to

create De Valera’s Irish state or serving the needs of the

people.

72 T. Garvin, Judging Lemass 205.

36

At the 1951 FF Ard Fheis73 Éamon de Valera opened his leader’s

speech with two subjects: reunification and promotion of the

Irish language. The headline74 of the Irish Times of November 7

read “National Duty is to End Partition,” and the first topic of

the article after his promises of unification was keeping Irish-

speaking populations intact. Directly to the right of this

section was a darkly humorous sidebar: discussing a motion on

reviving the Irish language, the chair “speaking in Irish, put

the motion to the meeting. A few hands went up in favor, and none

against; the minister then repeated the proposition in English

and everybody voted for it.”75 In contrast to significant

statements on reunification and the Irish language, when

discussing Ireland’s budget deficit, Minister for Finance

Macintyre had only this: “How we are going to solve that problem

(the deficit) I cannot tell you to-night.”76

73 Roughly equivalent to Britain’s annual Political Party Conventions – each major party has one yearly laying out their platform and their campaigns to come. Also, party business is attended to and changes to rules and representatives can be made.74 Page, Shapiro, and Dempsey discuss newspaper headlines as specifically shaping public opinion in their 1987 article “What Moves Public Opinion?” in The American Political Science Review, Vol. 81 #1.75 “Our National Duty is to End Partition,” The Irish Times, November 7, 1951.76 ibid.

37

The Ard Fheiseanna of 1952 and 1954, to use two further

examples, continued to highlight de Valera’s focus on language to

the nation. In 1952, the Irish Times headline from his speech was

“Taoiseach Concerned About Language Movement,”77 and in 1954 it

was “Near Revival of Irish in a Generation.”78 Nearly every year

throughout a decade wrought with economic stagnation, emigration,

and fear, de Valera used his single most important address as

party leader to discuss Irish unification or the Irish language

as priorities, with little talk of economic development or

solutions to emigration or other issues.79

A second look at de Valera’s opinion on emigration is

illuminating. In a 1951 public debate, he argued, expressing a

view common to much of the Irish political class, that “there is

no doubt that many of those who emigrate could find employment at

home at as good, or better, wages.”80 This was simply untrue:

unemployment was over seven percent and rising.81 The Irish who

77 The Irish Times, November 6, 1952. 78 The Irish Times, October 13, 1954.79 A search of the Irish Times Digital Archive found no articles on De Valera’s speech at any Ard Fheis during the fifties discussing economic matters or emigration in any detail.80 Delaney, “The Vanishing Irish,” 85.81 B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics 6th Edition (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 175.

38

stayed in Ireland felt that their families and friends and

neighbors were forced out, as the historiography is unanimous on

(recall the introduction), yet de Valera and other leaders were

preaching that emigration was somehow the fault of the emigrant,

was a choice made out of weakness rather than a forced movement.

The Irish government could not be expected to deal with this

problem when its leader did not even acknowledge its existence.

Fianna Fail was not the only party to focus on the national

question above more practical concerns, however. Fine Gael did much

the same. In 1951, Taoiseach Costello’s Ard Fheis speech led to a

headline “Taoiseach’s Aim: Friendly United Ireland,” and the only

economic issue he discussed according to the Irish Times was a

condemnation of strike actions82 in a year where unemployment

would average 7.5 percent.83 In 1957, at the height of the

crisis, the headline from the FG leader’s speech was familiar:

“Taoiseach Outlines Plan for Ending of Partition.” The speech

itself discussed this plan, and outlined the FG platform in the

upcoming general election, with an apology for having called the

election itself: “It is beyond controversy that, at this time and82 The Irish Times, February 7, 1951.83 Mitchell, Statistics, 175.

39

in the difficult financial and economic conditions now existing,

a general election must be gravely damaging to the national

interest.”84

The Taoiseach was telling the Irish people that the economic

situation was sufficiently dire for the temporary and predictable

instability of an election to cause it serious harm. He claimed

that the dissolution was “forced upon us,” at a time when “such

political maneuvering could be described as... sabotage.”85 The

government could not even control its own political fortunes,

and, at a speech announcing a general election that would hurt an

already weak economy, focused on the issue of partition once

again.

Irish political discourse was, through the decade, both

telling the Irish people about the dire circumstances and

economic problems of the nation, yet focusing on solutions to

nationalist questions rather than economic policies. Governments

were warning of problems, often dire, and subsequently failing to

present or enact solutions. Even when solutions were put in front

of them, inaction was the rule. Ireland was one of the countries 84 The Irish Times, February 7, 1957.85 ibid.

40

promised Marshall Plan aid in the post-war years, yet successive

governments, of either party, did not advocate for development

projects or engage the US-led European Productivity Agency in any

way.86

In his memoir 44, Peter Sheridan recalled his childhood in

the fifties, wrote of how he believed, even when young, that the

government was against the workingman.87 It’s possible that this

sentiment was localized to his family, but a child of seven or

eight would hardly understand the distinction between various

governments.88 In at least one Dublin house the government, no

matter who constituted it, was against the workingman by nature.

John Healy, in The Death of an Irish Town, told of a similar

derision for the government in this time. The book, written in

196889, told of the gradual decline of Healy’s native

Charlestown, County Mayo during the decade. Charlestown, during

86 Peter Murray, “Ireland and the Productivity Drive of Post-War Europe,” In The Lemass Era, ed. Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 68-9.87 Peter Sheridan, 44: A Dublin Memoir (London: MacMillan, 1999), 80.88 What we would think of as an administration or cabinet.89 See William Sewell’s Logics of History, specifically chapter 6’s discussion on synchronicity. The use of Healy’s 1968 book in a study of the atmosphere of the fifties owes much to this.

41

the Cumman90 days, had a TD91 of its own,92 but lost it as the

town declined and was absorbed into the North and South Mayo

constituencies. He wrote of politicians from the constituencies

coming through Charlestown and seeing its gradual decline: “…who

pass through every so often and see another house closed, another

holding abandoned, and are secretly thankful that the proportion

is working out right and that the balance of political power,

voter-wise, is not changing that much.”93

Healy was no child as Peter Sheridan was; he wrote this for

his series “No-One Shouted Stop” in the Irish Times, which would

eventually become The Death of an Irish Town. He was a “crusading

journalist,” “synonymous with honesty and bluntness,”94 and he

charged, in hindsight, that the political class simply did not

care about emigration, about the problems facing Ireland,

particularly the rural west. Healy, who spoke for much of

Ireland, especially its west, until his 1991 death, had seen that

90 Cumman na nGael was the original Pro-Treaty Party and formed the Government during the Civil War. It was succeeded by Fine Gael.91 Teachta Dála, a Deputy to the Dáil. Used equivalently to the British “MP’.92 Healy, Irish Town, 28.93 Healy, Irish Town, 34.94 Grace Neville, “John Healy’s ‘Nineteen Acres’: Mayo, America, and History from Below,” New Hibernia Review 8 (2004), 122, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557961.

42

political power was more important than solutions, than policy.

This idea of the rural west of Ireland failing had particular

salience: it was the rural ideal de Valera had pushed, and that

the government in the fifties was seen to not care for.

Politicians themselves agreed with Sheridan or Healy at

times about their peers. General Richard Mulcahy, the former War

of Independence military leader and then-FG leader, told Ireland

that its problems were “of its own making,” caused by “neglect,

ignorance, lack of foresight, lack of responsibility, and lack of

moral courage,” among politicians.95 One of the leaders in the

fight for an independent Ireland was saying that Ireland was

responsible for its own problems, and its politicians, of whom he

was one, were not up to the task of solving them.

During the years of the “clouds of despondency,” political

discourse in Ireland was a major contributing factor to the

perceptions of crisis. Politicians told of Ireland’s problems,

from a floundering economy to high emigration, yet no solutions

were forthcoming. John Healy called it “the inactivity…of self-

95 “Many Irish Troubles Due to Neglect and Lack of Moral Courage,” The Irish Times,February 18, 1953.

43

government, the locust years.”96 Political discourse in terms of

solutions or policies more often focused on partition, on

language, yet even here, where governments sought progress,

little was to be had. The Irish language was not reemerging and

partition was still reality. The successive governments of

Ireland at this time were neither dealing with the economic and

social problems Ireland was facing nor with the national

questions they claimed to wish to answer.

Another damning assessment of the Irish political class of

the time was delivered in June 1959. De Valera, on the day of the

presidential election, had organized a referendum on changing the

electoral system. De Valera won the presidential election yet

lost in his effort to reform Irish elections. It was a display

that famed populist politician and former minister in de Valera’s

cabinet Noel Browne called “one of the most frightening,

shocking, and damning condemnations of our activities here.”97

The Irish electorate doubted politicians as a class and their

ability to enact meaningful change. Disdain for the political

96 Healy, Irish Town, 50.97 Quoted in Garvin, Judging Lemass 209.

44

class was such that an anti-referendum campaign poster98 showed a

banner with FF for Fianna Fail morphing into two swastikas; people

were breaking Nazi taboos as a cheap political insult.

In stark contrast to this political and economic stagnation,

Western Europe was emerging from the war years and into the time

of postwar consensus and economic development. The United Kingdom

had established universal secondary education in 1944, with the

Butler Act, where Ireland would not have free second-level

education until 1969. On healthcare, while the United Kingdom has

established the NHS and France Securité Sociale, Noël Browne’s attempt

in 1951 to guarantee healthcare to pregnant women and children

resulted in his resignation and the fall of the government, due

in large part to opposition by the Catholic hierarchy.99 Such

progress by other countries, the UK especially, did not go

unnoticed. Irish politician, academic, and future Taoiseach,

Garret FitzGerald, had this to say in 1957: “The expansion of the

98 Reprinted in Garvin 240-241.99 Eamonn McKee, “Church-State Relations and the Development of Irish Health Policy: The Mother-and-Child Scheme, 1944-53,” Irish Historical Studies 25 (1986), 194, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30008527.

45

British economy since the beginning of the present decade…

disrupted the unhappy stability of Irish life.”100

While little formal work has been done on how the Irish

compared themselves to other societies in these years, they

certainly knew of such foreign developments. Robert Savage, a

historian of Irish film and television, has argued that one of

the main impetuses for the creation of RTÉ was social and

political pressure to provide an “Irish” alternative to BBC

broadcasts from a Belfast transmitter.101 This Belfast transmitter

reached Dublin: the first chapter of Savage’s 44 is of his

family, who lived on Dublin’s northside, watching the BBC

broadcast at the New Year. Irish independence was supposed to

bring new prosperity, new development, yet Ireland was falling

further behind countries, especially the UK, which were just

escaping the ravages of war. Ireland, it seemed, did not want

insularity, to chart its own course as de Valera and his

generation had advocated. They wanted economic development, a

100 Garret Fitzgerald, “Irish Economic Problems,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 46 (1957): 271, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30098899.101 Robert Savage, “Introducing Television in the age of Seán Lemass,” In The Lemass Era, ed. Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy (Dublin: University College DublinPress, 2005), 195.

46

modern state, and material comforts more than they wanted this

ideal Ireland that their politicians kept focusing on.

Emigration did play a large part in this narrative. Even if

it was not the source of the despondency, it was a major

contributing factor. Though its causes, like slow economic

development and high unemployment, led to other factors as well,

and directly caused concern themselves, emigration was the most

obvious and most visible representation of this state of affairs.

When “children have to emigrate…in order to be sure of a

reasonable livelihood,”102 as Lemass’ Minister for Finance T.K.

Whitaker characterized the conception of both rural and urban

populations, people had to confront and come to terms with the

failures of independent Ireland. When their government offered no

solutions to these failures or even acknowledgment of them, no

conception of the end of such a state of affairs presents itself.

The shared ideal of a better future in such a situation was a

distant abstraction, at best, with no visible mechanism to get

there.

102 T.K. Whitaker, Minister for Finance, in his Economic Development, quoted in Delaney, “Emigration,” 61.

47

Many of the causes and conditions were interrelated, playing

off of each other. One example of this is the tale of the

Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems. Formed in

1948, the commission eventually released its report in 1955. Its

conclusions were not surprising and its policy recommendations

tepid103, yet its effects were felt beyond its scope. Most

importantly, the committee called for a full census in 1951.104

This forced every Irish household to confront the idea of

emigration; here was a government, in a situation precarious

enough to hesitate calling elections, spending time, resources,

and political will to perform a special census that it deemed

necessary to understand the scope of the population problem.

The commission had effects felt beyond this census and its

report. First off, it was another example of governmental

inaction. Every household in Ireland had been disturbed for this

commission, its progress and report frequented the newspapers,

and yet, according to the Irish Times, the reports “might as well

103 It concluded that the chief cause of emigration was economic pressures, a desire for material improvement, and in certain cases, increased education opportunities. It had little effect on government policy, according to Delaney’s “Emigration, Political Culture, and Post-War Irish Society.”104 Delaney, “Emigration,” 54.

48

have been banned by the censorship board for al the respect that

the government had paid to them.”105

The report of the commission represented a tacit

acknowledgement that the promises of independence, as discussed

in section III, had not come true. Ireland was unable to provide

material support for its own population, much less the expansion

and growth that republicans had promised. The Irish Times even

argued that setting up this commission was a recognition that

self-government had failed in large part.106 While this seems

today like an exaggeration, in many ways self-government had done

so. It had not made good on the promises its advocates had made,

it did not answer the concerns of the people, and it apparently

could not govern effectively, stem the tide of emigration, or

improve the Irish lot.

Emigration and the economic and social situation in the

fifties were not only challenging the government of Ireland, but

the nation and state as well. In section IV, we laid out the

goals of de Valera and the Irish state in this time: a rural,

agrarian lifestyle, promotion of the Irish language, and a state 105 Quoted in Delaney, “Emigration,” 55.106 ibid.

49

and society in Ireland particular to what was understood as the

Irish nation. Out of these, the agrarian society was the widest

spread and the most important. From Pearse on, Irish republicans

and politicians talked about the potential of the land and those

who lived on it. So did the papers. Both the Irish Times and the Irish

Independent – the other major paper, more nationalist in outlook

than the Times – editorialized that Ireland’s future was

agrarian.107

The agrarian society, however, was dying during these years.

Small farmers and small towns could not survive. John Healy wrote

of his senior class at Lowpark National School, which graduated

in 1944. Out of 23 boys, three remained in Charlestown. Two had

moved to Westmeath, a larger town and four to Dublin. Four had

gone to England, all to London, and six to America, with the rest

going to Canada or Australia.108 This was typical, as people moved

to cities for employment or emigrated abroad. The same reductions

happened to farm holdings, driven in part by the necessity of

larger holdings and in part by this exodus. To quote Healy again:

“Will it (Charlestown, in this case) survive on one prosperous 107 T. Garvin, Judging Lemass 190.108 Healy did not count himself, and one classmate was deceased.

50

farmhouse in Coonmeen where once there were nine families? On

eight ‘economically viable’ holdings in Glann where there were

45?”109 Successful farming continued in Ireland, and still does,

yet agrarian society was already fading during the fifties, when

it was supposed to be a national cause.

The Irish had been told that their future was as an

agricultural nation, yet such a nation was proving itself

unviable in front of them. Farmers and townspeople, especially

from rural Ireland, were forced to leave. Men and women who

believed they were Irish and should live in Ireland – “a home

they feel they have never left,” a Tipperary parish priest wrote

of them110 - were being forced to go. This scene was so common

that the emotions surrounding it became the refrain of The Death of

an Irish Town: “We don’t get mad anymore.”111 Healy, famed for his

anger, his passion, had been driven to resignation, as had his

contemporaries.

During the decade, Ireland had been driven to resignation as

well. Again, Healy exemplified this: “the people…have grown 109 Healy, Irish Town, 84.110 John M. Hayes, “Stemming the Fight From the Land,” in The Vanishing Irish, ed. John A. O’Brien (London W.H. Allen, 1954), 132.111 Healy, Irish Town, 1. (First Appearance)

51

cynical to the point where they just do not expect anything any

more,” he wrote when discussing attitudes towards politics.112 It

was not only Healy feeling like this. The May 13, 1953 edition of

“An Irishman’s Diary,” the long-running popular Irish Times column,

had this to say: “I very much doubt if they (the political class)

have the remotest notion of the reactions of the common man to

the most urgent problems of our contemporary national economy.”113

The political class fostered cynicism, hopelessness, largely out

of their perceived ignorance of or blindness towards the problems

obvious to the common population.

Healy also spoke about the Celtic ideal: “we have

destalinised the Celtic mist-ery,”114 referring to the decline of

any “official Ireland”115 that political rhetoric spoke of, the

image of Ireland from section IV. Rural Ireland was shrinking

during the fifties, not growing. The Irish language had not taken

hold.116 Most damningly of all, Ireland was being proven to be

112 Healy, Irish Town, 74.113 “An Irishman’s Diary,” The Irish Times, May 13, 1953.114 Healy, Irish Town, 76.115 ibid.116 The 1961 Census established that 25.4 percent of the population self-identified as speaking Irish. Today, 41.9% of the population similarly self-identify as such, yet only 3% speak the language as their main language, and Irish has been protected and promoted heavily since the fifties and sixties.

52

unable to support its own people, whatever promises its leaders

and nationalists had made. The cause of the Irish state and

government had done little to create this Ireland of Celtic mist

or care for Ireland as it actually was.

As section II discussed, the Irish had left in such numbers

before, even in the same manner of “enforced departure” as Keogh

put it. Yet in the fifties, the Irish were being forced out and

were told that it was their own fault. They saw their friends and

neighbors and families forced out by economic necessity while

their leaders, often the very men they had fought under for

independence and the Civil War, told them that it was by choice,

and offered them no solutions to either emigration itself or to

its economic roots. At the same time the Irish were being told

that this same emigration was a threat to the very existence of

their state.

This threat was presented absent any method to combat it.

Such a situation, with no viable options and no visualization of

a better future leads directly to malaise, to disillusionment and

hopelessness. The despondency that Lemass talked about, that

these eminent historians have written about, was one caused by

53

the despair.117 Emigration itself did not cause it, a lack of hope

for the future did. For the Irish were told that Ireland itself

was in question, and their leaders were seen as manifestly unable

to deal with it.

VI. Hope

Ireland would change. By the end of the 1960s, the country

was on the Third Economic Programme. The beginnings of a postwar-

consensus-style welfare state had emerged: state pensions, a

dole, a national health scheme. By the end of the decade,

unemployment had dropped to 6.4 percent.118 Yet the despondency,

the mentality central to the crisis would abate before

unemployment would. The emergence of what has been called

“modern” Ireland did not solve the crisis, it followed it.

The historiography is unclear on exactly when Ireland began

to recover. Certain writers argue it was 1957, when Lemass became

Tánaiste119and Minister for Industry and Commerce. Others 1958, when

117 This conclusion, where the presence or absence of hope for the future radically changes the experience of a troubling situation owes much to Debbie Gould’s work in her Moving Politics.118 Mitchell, Statistics, 175.119 Deputy Prime Minister

54

the First Economic Programme began in earnest, or in 1959, when

de Valera was elected President and Lemass took over as Taoiseach.

Whatever the exact date, the gradual emergence of Lemass as the

new leader of Ireland brought with it a new perspective, and,

even more importantly, a vitality and competence on basic issues

that was perceived absent in previous governments.

Lemass brought with him a new generation of politicians and

ministers: two future Taoisigh, Jack Lynch and Charlie Haughey,

future President Patrick Hillery, T.K. Whitaker and Donogh

O’Malley, to name the most prominent. In 1959, FG also had a

leadership change and a new group emerged, under James Dillon and

future Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave. Labour, the third party, had

Brendan Corish rise to leadership in 1960.120 Four men from this

group would follow Lemass as Taoiseach, and this generation would

have one of their own in power until the FitzGerald government in

1982. It was a “new generation of politicians, unhampered by the

shibboleths that had constrained the de Valera generation.”121

On October 11, 1955, during the Second Inter-Party

Government, Seán Lemass gave a speech to the FF delegation on 120 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 389.121 Foster, Luck and the Irish, 8.

55

Dublin’s city council at Clery’s Restaurant. This performance,

still known as the Clery’s Speech featured on next day’s front

pages, and cemented Lemass’ reputation as both a modernizing

force and FF’s leader-in-waiting. He proposed a massive, five-

year program of government spending to create 20,000 jobs per

year. After years of de Valera focusing on the language, on

partition, an FF leader said “The primary aim of Fianna Fail is

to increase the nation’s wealth and to improve the living

standards of our people. These aims override other

considerations.”122 This was a radical departure from the policy

of either de Valera or Costello. The lede of the same article,

“Fianna Fail rejected the view that the sole object of Government

policy should be to keep public expenditure at the lowest

possible level,”123 by discussing an active rejection, made it

clear how this was a challenge to the accepted view of the role

of the government.

At Clery’s Lemass also made it abundantly clear that he did

not share the same opinion of emigration that his political peers

122 Quoted in “Fianna Fail Announces Full Employment Plan,” The Irish Times, October 12, 1955.123 ibid.

56

had and would express. He instead tied emigration directly to

economic concerns: “our standards must approximate to British

standards, or our people will go.”124 At this time, Lemass and FF

were out of power. He could not enact any of his policies yet.

What he could do was establish his credentials as a reformer, his

commitment to economic development, and his understanding of

emigration as an economic necessity rather than a disapproved-of

choice.

In the 1957 general election, de Valera and FF were returned

to power, in part due to dissatisfaction with the inability of

the coalition government to deal with emigration.125 Lemass was

again made Tánaiste and Minister for Industry and Commerce. In

the 1959 Presidential election, de Valera was elevated to the

Presidency and Lemass was made leader of FF and Taoiseach. De

Valera’s cabinet had served relatively unchanged since the

thirties, so in 1959, Lemass “presided over the first

generational change in Irish government since independence.”126 He

elevated Jack Lynch, a 42-year-old former hurling star, to his

124 Quoted in Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 386.125 Delaney, “Emigration,” 51.126 Garvin, Judging Lemass 214.

57

old portfolio of Industry and Commerce. 36-year-old Patrick

Hillery, who would eventually shepherd through emigration reform

at the end of the decade, took over the Ministry for Education in

Lemass’ first cabinet, and Donogh O’Malley, who would institute

free second-level education, was 38 when he was brought into the

cabinet.

With the FF victory in the general and presidential

elections, Fine Gael and Labour both brought in new leadership as

well. In 1959, FG elevated James Dillon, the reform-minded former

Minister for Agriculture and political star of the first and

second Inter-Party Governments. With him came Liam Cosgrave, who

had presided over the Irish entry into the United Nations. The

Labour Party made social democrat and coalition Minister for

Social Welfare Brendan Corish their new leader in 1960.

All three of Ireland’s major political parties had new

leadership, all of whom were reform- and results-minded, rather

than committed to the “ancient rifles”127 of independence and the

civil war as de Valera’s generation was seen to have been.

Lemass, from the Clery’s speech on, was an avowed proponent of

127 Paul Duncan, “Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin,” 1973.

58

government intervention on the economy. Dillon and Cosgrave were

both friendly to social democratic tendencies in Fine Gael and had

histories of practical, and successful, reforms. Corish went

further, advocating for a socialist Ireland. For the first time,

the political leaders of Ireland were speaking of welfare, of

economic development, of governmental action before polemics of

language or republicanism.

Lemass began his work immediately, enacting recommendations

from T.K. Whitaker’s white paper Economic Development as government

policy in what is now called the First Economic Programme. He

deemphasized an adversarial relationship with Northern Ireland:

the British ambassador found him “anxious to get away from the

barren political controversies of the past.”128 While Ireland

remained nationalist, this focus on economic improvement and

development must have been welcome after governments visibly more

concerned with the Irish language or with unification than with

matters of practical welfare.

Whitaker contributed to this new discourse as well, most

notably in Economic Development. As Lee has characterized his

128 Garvin, Judging Lemass 216.

59

attitude in that paper, “He accepted that the basic causes of

emigration were economic…He did not attribute emigration to

‘obscure’ psychological factors, thus exonerating the policy-

maker from any responsibility for solving it.”129 The fact that

Lee found accepting the idea that economic and emigration are

interrelated of note is telling: that such an utterance carried

so much weight reveals more about the broken nature of political

discourse before it. Yet such an utterance did carry weight.

Irish politicians were finally accepting responsibility and with

it the obligation to act. “The buck had finally stopped.”130

VII. The New Irish State

The Fianna Fail campaign for the 1961 general election was

representative of the mood of the country and of politics. FF

campaigned on the slogan “Let Lemass Lead On,” with positive

connotations of movement and progress cast onto Lemass himself.

Such a slogan can be read as an implicit rejection of the old

stalwarts of politics, from then-President de Valera to the

129 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 385.130 Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 386. Note the direct comparison to Harry Truman. The fact of taking responsibility is the important consideration here, more than any of Whitaker’s specific policy aims.

60

conservative and anti-statist Fine Gael campaign. The campaign

posters themselves are symbol of modernity,131 employing photo

manipulation and typesetting and design techniques more in line

with avant-garde design than the Irish political culture of

handbills, caricatures, and posters obviously typeset by hand

with no mind for layout. Lemass was presenting, successfully,132

an image of modernity for himself and for Ireland.

Other tropes of modernity came into place in the sixties.

RTÉ, the national broadcaster, began television broadcasting in

1961. Modeled after the BBC’s “public service” orientation and

funded by the same sort of license scheme, RTÉ was established as

an independent broadcaster, with few governmental checks on

content. It would become an “agent in the transformation” of

Ireland and both a sign of and an asset in Ireland’s drive for

modernization.

The Irish state airline, whether operating as Aerlínte Éireann

or Aer Lingus,133 began transatlantic flights from Shannon to

131 They are found in a photograph in Girvin, 272-3.132 If election results are anything to go by, at least. Fianna Fail lost 8 seats and held their majority of the Dáil. 6 of those 8 seats lost were to either Labour or Noel Browne’s Progressive Democrats, two left-leaning partiescampaigning for public sector expansion.133 The name was changed on January 1, 1960.

61

Idlewild Airport134 in New York City in 1958, and purchased three

Boeing 720s, smaller versions of the famed 707 in 1960, expanding

to include Boston as well as New York. Ireland was coming out of

its self-imposed isolation, and placing another sign of its

modernity while doing so.

Beyond the political decision of a formerly

isolationist state expanding its airline, the expansion of flight

to and from Ireland changed the experience of emigration. Leaving

Ireland was less final, less of a loss when returns were easy and

promised, rather than the situation as it had been, where no

return visit was ever expected. Emigration lost a certain degree

of power and some of the negative associations it carried when it

was no longer a cause of permanent separation.

As section V showed above, the role the Irish government had

been claiming for itself was fundamentally different than many

other state’s governments during the fifties. It was a government

and a state focused on nationalist aims: language, unification,

being, as seen in section IV, the only suitable home for the

Irish. During the years afterwards, a new conception of the role

134 Now known as JFK.

62

of government emerged that paralleled the aims of the “postwar

consensus” in much of the rest of Western Europe. This new role

for the government would change the way that the state and

citizens interacted, and in doing, so, change the expectations on

the state. Since its role would no longer be that of a unique

homeland for one people, their emigration would not be a

challenge to it’s raison d’être.

Section VI briefly discussed Patrick Hillery and Donogh

O’Malley as two of the new faces that Seán Lemass brought into

the Government. While Hillery would later be known for his

emigration reform package as Minister for Labour and would

eventually be elected President, his first rise to the forefront

was on education reform. In May 1963, he announced the creation

of a state-run system of post-primary schools and a state-

monitored curriculum leading up to the Intermediate Certificate

Examination135.136 The reforms, though established slowly and in

limited locations at first, took hold, and the examinations

system has survived to this day.

135 Now known as the Junior Certificate or Junior Cert.136 John Walsh, “The Politics of Educational Expansion,” In The Lemass Era, ed. Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 154.

63

Three years later, in 1966, Donogh O’Malley was made

Minister for Education. Like Hillery, he was a reformer, who felt

that the state could play an effective role in education. In a

1966 speech, Lemass pledged that the government would “give

precedence to education in the allocation of public

expenditure,”137 a fundamental change from governments of the

past, which had left education largely up to the Catholic Church.

In September of that same year O’Malley went even further,

announcing that the state would introduce free education until

that Intermediate Certificate. He cited that around 17,000 pupils

left school with no-primary education, and pledged that no pupil

will be deprived of education “by reason of the fact that the

parents cannot afford to pay for it.”138

The Irish government had gone from leaving much of education

up to Church organizations or other private structures to

guaranteeing students a right to secondary education independent

of wealth in a few short years. While Lemass cited economic

concerns as part of the reason for expansion of state involvement

in education during his speech, O’Malley cast it in moral terms. 137 Walsh, “Educational Expansion,” 160.138 Walsh, “Educational Expansion,” 161.

64

In his words, the results of the previous system were “a dark

stain on the national conscience.”139 Members of the government

were claiming that the state had obligations to secure such

rights by condemning its past neglect of them as moral failings.

These reforms would expand secondary school enrollment by almost

21,000 pupils from 1958-68, and would double university

enrollment in the country.140

Education was not the only area in which the Irish state

guaranteed certain rights to a larger extent in the past.

Throughout the sixties, the 1947 Health Act was amended multiple

times as services expanded. The 1970 Health Act took the fullest

step, guaranteeing access to health services for all, and free

services for those meeting certain requirements regarding means

and ability to “without undue hardship to arrange general

practitioner medical and surgical services,”141 The Irish state,

by the end of the sixties, guaranteed such rights where it had

not before, and actively protected them for the first time.

139 ibid.140 Foster, Luck and the Irish, 14.141 Irish Statue Book, Health Act (1970), Part IV, Chapter I.http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1970/en/act/pub/0001/index.html.

65

Beyond taking a more active role in creating a welfare

state, the Irish government in these years also marked its

transition in other ways. It deemphasized nationalist actions and

dealt less with idealistic nationalist goals. We use its

treatment of Northern Ireland as an example. Michael Kennedy put

it glibly when talking about changes in regards to the North made

by Lemass: “the most important [change] being that he dealt in

realities.”142 In particular, the reality was that the division of

the island of Ireland was “willed by the majority in the

North,”143

One of the first changes, and one of the most important

symbolically, was to officially refer to the area as “Northern

Ireland” rather than “the North”144 or “the Six Counties.”145 While

this change meant little in practical terms, it was a clear

symbol that the government was dealing with the reality of

partition rather than continuing to claim that Northern Ireland

was merely occupied territory of their own country. It also

142 Michael Kennedy, “Northern Ireland and Cross-Border Co-Operation,” In The Lemass Era, ed. Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy (Dublin: University College DublinPress, 2005), 99.143 T. Garvin, Judging Lemass, 216.144 Although to this day road signs in Dublin direct drivers to “The NORTH”.145 Kennedy, “Northern Ireland,” 100.

66

helped thaw what had been a rhetorically heated debate, allowing

for a 1965 meeting between Lemass and Terence O’Neill, Prime

Minister of Northern Ireland.

What this meeting led to was cooperation in “non-political

fields.” The two government heads discussed trade liberalization,

health and education exchanges, and common infrastructure

developments, among other things.146 This achieved two things for

Lemass and the Irish government. First, it helped normalize and

stabilize relations with Northern Ireland, which would allow for

economic growth and market expansion. Secondly, discussing of

such matters as health and education reaffirmed the Irish

government’s newly promised obligation to protect these rights.

Working to ensure that citizens of Northern Irish who self-

identified as Irish147 received as near as practicable the same

rights as all citizens of Ireland did was a clear signal that the

state’s new orientation placed this obligation above nationalist

ideals. The “Irish” state was no more, replaced by a state that

146 Kennedy, “Northern Ireland,” 116.147 And who, it should be noted, the Irish government considered its citizens,which it still does. The Good Friday Agreement codified this, allowing for Northern Irish citizens to hold an Irish passport, sit the Irish Leaving Cert Exams, among other things.

67

would choose ensuring the welfare of its citizens over the ideal

of a united Ireland.

This was the new role of the Irish state: safeguarding the

welfare of those it claimed responsibility for even when such

claims contradicted its past aims. Health, education, welfare

had replaced language and land. In a sense, de Valera’s ideal of

a uniquely “”Irish” state in language and form was no more,

replaced by a state that better protected the needs of Irish

people. This new role for government, for the state, also

answered questions left from independence. When Pearse talked of

Ireland’s abundant resources, he hoped to use them to ensure the

welfare of the Irish. The government was now ensuring that

welfare in a way that past governments had never done; instead

they tried to create the state they had dreamt of rather than

improve the one they had.

VIII. Conclusion

68

As section II laid out, the 1980s were another period of

high emigration in Ireland. According to the 1991 Census, 206,053

people emigrated from Ireland from 1981 to 1991.148

While the fifties did have higher emigration, this was the decade

with the second highest number of emigrants since World War II.

Coming after the 1970s, when Ireland saw it’s first net increase

in population since before the Famine, this period shared much

with the fifties demographically and in terms of economic

conditions. Unemployment was rising and the government under

Charlie Haughey “gave no indication that the economic crisis…

would be tackled.”149

The large elements of the traditional narrative of the

crisis of the 1950s were present in the eighties as well: high

emigration, rising unemployment, and a lack of trust in the

government’s ability to tackle the issue. Yet, seemingly

strangely, no such crisis came to be. In Ireland today there is

no mention of the eighties as a time of crisis150, nor does the

emerging historiography treat the eighties as a time of 148 Central Statistics Office, Census 1991, Volume 1, Table 1.149 Foster, Luck and the Irish, 80.150 From personal experience, when I spent my junior year abroad studying in Dublin.

69

despondency or despair. Times were difficult, to be certain, yet

there was no narrative of the state’s failure or of a threat to

Irish life as the fifties brought.

Firstly, this was because the existential questions were

settled. Ireland itself was not threatened by a crisis, it would

not vanish as had been postulated. The fifties had proven so, and

institutional and popular memories could remember darker days

that the nation had weathered. Also, emigration was not a

challenge to the role of the state as it had been. The Irish

government’s role was to guarantee certain rights and welfare,

and emigration was not a repudiation of the government’s duty as

it was when that government sought to create a state and society

uniquely suited for the Irish. This illustrates the subtle but

important switch that had been made from a government concerned

with living up to national ideals to one caring for the nation as

it existed.151

Second, a major element of the crisis of the fifties was

missing: disillusionment with politics as a whole. The government

151 I say subtle as all governments seek to protect and promote the welfare ofthe nation. The difference is more of doing so by trying to craft an idealizedstate, a perfect home for the nation, or directly and more capably providing for its welfare in the state as it was.

70

of Charlie Haughey that had ushered in the economic situation was

made up of men seen as “clownish,” and “Nixon-like,”152 and the

Taoiseach himself famously claimed, in January, that “as a

community we are beyond our means,”153 The opposition, however,

was led by FG’s Garret FitzGerald and Labour’s Dick Spring, who,

upon winning election in 1982, brought “once more an air of a

brave new world.”154

While a full treatment of the eighties has not yet emerged,

and may not do so until sufficient time has passed, the decade

suffices here as a comparison. The demographic and economic

concerns were similar to the fifties. While emigration and

unemployment were slightly lower, public debt was higher. An

unpopular government was seen as lacking answers for the three

years they held power during the period. Yet there was no crisis.

With the role of the state settled and unchallenged and no doubts

left about the viability of Irish self-government, no similar

despondency emerged.

152 ibid.153 “Haughey Promises Any New Legislation Will Not Be Anti-Union,” The Irish Times,January 10, 1980.154 Foster, Luck and the Irish, 86.

71

An examination of the demographics was insufficient to

explain the crisis in Ireland during the fifties, as was a study

of solely economic concerns. Other major threads running through

the decade, such as the unfulfilled promises of an Irish

republic, distrust in the political elite, and questions about

the proper role of the Irish state, were necessary to a complete

discussion of this “lost decade.” It was when these problems were

solved, when the Irish public could trust their leaders and rely

on the presence of their government, that the “clouds of

despondency”155 that Seán Lemass spoke of cleared.

This understanding obviously challenges the traditional

Irish narrative around emigration. However, that common

understanding is one that blames emigrants for their forced

departures. When eminences such as Éamon de Valera and John

Healy, so different otherwise, both spoke ill of emigrants, told

them of obligations to their nation they had abandoned, they

built that narrative. The crisis had been made to be the fault of

those leaving, when it was not. The emigrant family leaving the

only home they knew out of a need for better conditions did not

155 T. Garvin, Judging Lemass, 205.

72

cause such despondency. The fear in those who stayed behind was

instead coming from the hopelessness that nothing could be done

about it, and that fear only left when new leaders, and a new

place for the Irish state, proved that something could indeed be

done.

73

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