Turning the tide
While the British “never had it so good” and the Germans experienced an “economic miracle,” Ireland remained an exception in western Europe in the 1950s. The people of Bonn, Bologna, Birmingham and Bordeaux enjoyed an improved lifestyle in the years following the most destructive war in history, and people in the Irish Republic looked on from the outside. The establishment of the European Economic Community, in 1957, provided a framework for a new rural and urban prosperity. Ireland had to wait until 1972 to join, not having taken the opportunity to do so at its creation.
That was the more surprising because Ireland had escaped the jackboot and occupation during World War Two; neutral Ireland emerged unscathed, with its industries and infrastructure in tact, such as they were. But instead of catching the crest of the new wave of prosperity, Ireland languished, for most of the decade, in mediocrity and chronic economic under-performance.
Many studies on Ireland in the 1950s explain this sorry state of affairs. The Vanishing Irish and Is Ireland Dying? are two such books. I used the title The Lost Decade in an edited book a few years ago. This denoted political and social stagnation, economic under-performance, and agricultural decline. But the title also conveyed that the decade was not foredoomed to decay, depression and under-performance — predetermined by historical forces outside the control of the Irish government.
A new book on any subject from Professor Tom Garvin brings with it high expectations — given his outstanding record with works such as The Evolution of Irish Politics; Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland; 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy and Preventing the Future.
Now emeritus professor of politics at UCD, he has spent a year at Boston College writing a new study on Ireland in the 1950s. While the book is every bit as lively as what has come before, there is a new and unwelcome departure in methodology: Professor Garvin combines personal reflections on growing up in Dublin in the 1950s with a study of the major national dailies and of select current affairs and religious magazines. Here resides the unwelcome departure.
Professor Garvin says, somewhat self-consciously, that this work is light on theory — a strong feature of all his earlier studies. Sam Huntington is quoted to provide a framework, but is that sufficient to hold the work together? His use of primary sources — again a characteristic of his scholarly work to date — is almost entirely absent. Notwithstanding “theory light” and “primary sources light,” Professor Garvin’s mastery of his material shines through in this lively and provocative text. The book is filled with insights and strong personal opinions. It is a challenging study, questioning the received wisdom on which other interpretations of the 1950s are based.
As ever, the tone is irreverent. Éamon de Valera — never the author’s favourite politician — is described as a ‘politician of genius’ who had put together a winning party with an appealing ideology that legitimised the needs and aspirations of the rural poor, while opening the way to the formation of new urban, industrial elites.
Professor Garvin characterises de Valera as Don Quixote to Seán Lemass’s Sancho Panza. While Lemass got the better of Dev, succeeding him in 1959, the turnover was late in the decade and the transfer of power, at that point, delayed the taking of the necessary decision to abandon protectionism in favour of a pro-EEC policy, which ‘Sancho Panza Lemass’ championed from 1961 onwards. Civil servants, exemplified by Dr Ken Whitaker, secretary of the department of finance, and Dr Patrick Lynch, are given credit for helping make the breakthrough.
Other parts of the civil service, particularly in the department of education, are portrayed as having retarded the development of education throughout the 1950s, making the Republic of Ireland a poor performer when compared to the social welfare states of Western Europe. Participation in second-level education had trebled since 1922, but that number “was dwarfed by British figures,” writes Professor Garvin. Myopia in education policy was one of the great failures of the Irish state during that decade.
In reviewing the reasons for political, economic and social stagnation in the 1950s, Professor Garvin deals extensively with the conservatism of the teaching religious orders and the anti-intellectualism of sectors of the Catholic Church. He also writes about counter-cultural trends on the rise in the visual arts, in theatre and in literature.
It is ironic that the conservative institutions — politicians, churchmen and women, civil servants and the professions, including bankers — that helped stultify growth, innovation and change in the 1950s, were, some more than others, the same ones that weakened the Irish state in the first decade of the 21st century. Bankers acted like croupiers in a world of casino capitalism, placing their bets blindly on sub-prime mortgage bundles. Money was loaned, in the millions, to dodgy developers in an act of national sabotage.
In the 1950s, none of the primary institutions of the state would have acted with such reckless abandon. How, why, and when did a state with such a strong ethos for fiscal righteousness abandon its most fundamental beliefs? What happened within government, the civil service, the banks and other financial institutions to permit the lurch to casino capitalism?
Professor Garvin’s book deals critically with a decade when Ireland under-performed and lagged behind Western Europe. Perhaps the seeds of the more recent collapse rest in a philosophy of government ‘light’ and regulation ‘non-existent’ that may be traced back to the 1960s. It has taken quite a turnaround for nostalgia to develop for the fiscal conservatism of the 1950s. But as we now know, the economic licence and fiscal libertinism of the 2000s is based on a philosophy of greed and irresponsibility. Place your bets … the house (the Irish tax payer) is guaranteed to lose every time.
Place your bets.
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