We must rediscover the ideals of our founding fathers and roll back the influence of centralising forces, writes NUALA O'CONNOR
MUCH OF my summer in 2009 was spent travelling around Ireland with a film crew. We were shooting The Limits of Liberty, a three-part documentary history series for RTÉ written and presented by historian Diarmaid Ferriter.
Conceived during the dizzy boom years of 2006 and 2007, the great issues and events of Irish history which made up the subject matter of the series seemed then the preserve of specialists and archivists. But by the time of the financial and banking crisis in 2009, the words “lifestyle”, “makeover” and even “reality” had reattached themselves to their old meanings. Bad for the fantasy industry; good for us.
In 2009, Ireland mirrored in some ways the Ireland that the first governments of the newly independent State confronted. In 1923, as now, there was a real danger that Ireland would decline into the condition we now refer to as “failed state”. One of the accepted criteria for failed-state status is the “inability to provide reasonable public services”.
In September 2008 this fate had narrowly been avoided. The issue of culpability is still the stuff of daily chat shows and phone-ins.
In 1923, the question was: “Is Ireland fit for self-government?” The ferocious determination of the revolutionary leaders of the new State to prove that it was drove government policy for decades after independence. Arguably, this perceived necessity to prove ourselves self-reliant in all spheres of national life – finance, industry, education, welfare, culture – had profound implications for the country’s future as a modern western democracy.
Why? Because it would close the country down to outside influences. “Ourselves Alone” was the motto, and by implication, whatever it took to maintain the illusion of self-sufficiency would be applied across the board.
In 2009, whether the Irish State was fit for purpose had re-emerged as a serious question, not posed by our former colonial masters but by the international community. When the decision to guarantee the Irish banks was taken by Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan on the fateful night of September 29th, 2008, he immediately made two phone calls. The first was to Christine Lagarde, French finance minister and head of the EU council of finance ministers, and the second to Jean-Claude Juncker in Luxembourg, the head of the euro zone group of finance ministers.
In an atmosphere very like that in the early 1920s, the country held its breath and hoped – in this case, that our partners in sovereignty would approve. Then, as now, the questions were: “How are we going to live/survive?” and “Who will provide?”
In making The Limits of Liberty, we had set out to produce a series of three films which would essentially be "bottom-up history". By this we meant including perspectives and accounts often overlooked, sourced from State papers, archives, memoirs, literature, and especially from the testimonies of those who had lived through the events described.
In this way we hoped to give the viewer a sense of Irish history as it was experienced: what it was like to have lived then, to jog memories, shed light, and allow for that sense of recognition whereby the viewer would hear their own story, and that of their parents and grandparents, in the wider story.
The series by its nature would ask the question: “How did we get here from there?” As its starting point, it took the occasion of the first Dáil gathering, held in the Mansion House in Dublin on January 21st, 1919, and the Democratic Programme issued by that assembly. The Democratic Programme was a promise made to the people of Ireland that the welfare of its citizens would be a priority.
How well or otherwise that obligation had been discharged was something which the series would address over its three programmes. Clearly there was evidence abundant that things had not got any better after independence, but actually worse for all those on the margins of Irish society, the poor, the old, the sick and especially children.
Part of the answer as to why this was so seemed to lie in the way power was exercised in the State, in that the overriding objective was to concentrate power at the centre of government. Over-centralisation would always work against the likelihood of effective local government developing.
One of those interviewed for the series, Dick Haslam, now in his 80s after a lifetime in local government management, pointed out that “the first major piece of legislation” (which was the Local Government Temporary Provision Act 1923) brought all local bodies in the country under the centralised control of the relevant government department.
“It was always overly centralised . . . ridiculously, things would go to Dublin just to get the official stamp on them.”
This policy of increasing centralisation – a live and sometimes burning issue today in local government – was pursued by successive Irish governments, crossing party lines and ideologies. Seán MacEntee, a TD elected to the first Dáil and one of the longest-serving politicians in the history of the State, believed that the mass of Irish people were not capable of self-government. This was a widespread view among the grandees of all political parties. Ironically, the one power retained by elected councils was that of control over land zoning and development. But that’s another story.
On July 14th, 2009, we were in Letterfrack, Co Galway, site of the notorious industrial school run by the Christian Brothers from the late 19th century until the 1970s. These days, Letterfrack sits in the midst of the spectacular rugged beauty of the Connemara National Park, a place busy with holidaymakers, hill- walkers, hikers and cyclists.
We were there because one of the earliest accounts of what it was like to be in institutional care in Ireland post-independence was written by a former inmate, Peter Tyrell.
He was sent to Letterfrack in 1924 with his three brothers at the age of eight and left it in 1932, broken and unfit forever for normal life or intimate relationships. His account of Letterfrack, written in great pain in 1961, lay in the papers of Senator Owen Sheehy Skeffington in the National Library until recovered by historian Diarmuid Whelan and published in 2006 under the title Founded on Fear.
In 1967, Peter Tyrell burned himself to death on Hampstead Heath in London. We filmed in the graveyard high above Letterfrack. More than 99 bodies lie there under 77 marble, heart-shaped headstones. The bleak inscription “Died as a young boy” features on many. One of these memorials I remember was of a boy who, had he lived beyond the age of four, would be my own age now.
In Letterfrack, a toxic mix of unbridled power, self-loathing sexuality and a breathtaking, visceral hatred of poverty came together under State licence and church control. It represents in its most pathological expression the abusive and dysfunctional nature of all power relationships in the State, and the fear they engendered.
“No politician in Ireland would say boo to [Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin] John Charles McQuaid,” said another of our interviewees, Sam Nolan. “They were afraid.”
To its eternal discredit, the Ryan commission report inflicted a posthumous injustice on Peter Tyrell when it decided to give him the bizarre pseudonym “Noah Kitterick”. This was in face of the fact that Peter Tyrell had died in the attempt to put his story in the public domain. The Ryan report denies him his place in the official account.
Almost as soon as the power structures which defined the Irish State were in place, resistance to them took root in unlikely ways and in unlikely places. The three films document the first tentative moves towards challenging the hegemonies of church and State in the early years of independence, progressing over the decades to the landmark constitutional victories of the later period, establishing the right to contraception, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, to give two examples.
In the early 1920s, Sean O'Casey's play The Plough and the Starstold, in Lelia Doolan's words, "the real truth of what was going on for the people who were nine tenths of the iceberg of what was happening on the surface". In 1966, Doolan directed an award-winning adaptation of the play for television – an ironic counterblast to RTÉ's 50th anniversary celebrations for 1916. For her, "Every aspect of Irish life is present there, every theme of the lack of power and of the small exercise of power."
Interviewed for The Limits of Liberty, she was surprised to be told that her name was in McQuaid's papers as being one of a number of women employed in RTÉ about whose religious affiliations his Grace was concerned.
While we were filming a sequence on the riots in the Abbey which had been provoked by O’Casey’s play (causing Yeats to utter the lacerating “you have disgraced yourselves again” speech), from inside the lobby we saw the ceaseless toing and froing of street drug dealers and their clients.
It is clear that over a period of about 70 years, the absolute scale of State and church power was rolled back. This came about initially as a consequence of activism of all kinds, beginning within self-help organisations such as the Irish Housewives’ Association (a prototypical consumers’ and women’s rights organisation in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s), the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (first into the field of adult education, partner to the State in the electrification of rural Ireland and delivery of mains water), and the Credit Union movement, first to offer an alternative to the rapacious money-lending system.
Later in the century, increasingly militant public protest and legal activism added to the momentum. There was widespread and active resistance to State authority as the country moved into the 1960s and 1970s. The days of unquestioned and unquestioning State authority seemed to be on the wane.
These movements and organisations were secular, modern and democratic. They were responsible for moving the national project forward in ways that bridged the gulf between governors and governed. The foregrounding of human rights and the acknowledgement of needs allowed for more consultation in policy-making. The practice of government itself became more layered and specialised.
However, somewhere along the way, the momentum of that activism has been lost. Many of these organisations are ageing and badly in need of new blood. Their service to this State is immeasurable and now, when we need activism anew, the template is there.
Perhaps now, when once again there is mass disillusionment with the processes of State power, and with those who wield it, it is time to look to back and learn.
Nuala O'Connor is is a producer with South Wind Blows and is series editor for The Limits of Liberty, which will be broadcast on RTÉ1 television on June 1st, 8th and 15th. She wrote Bringing It All Back Home, a documentary exploring the influence of Irish music on American music, and vice versa, made for the BBC and for which she won an Emmy Award