Irish History: Make no mistake about it, this is an academic page-turner and as provocative a read as it is scholarly and challenging.
Tom Garvin, using his accomplished and characteristic combination of history and political science, sets out to discuss the simple question: Why was Ireland so poor for so long?
Put in the starkest terms, the book asks why this country - spared the ravages of occupation, systematic bombing and political disintegration during the second World War - did not share in the unprecedented prosperity and the "economic miracles" experienced by countries of former enemies during the 1950s. Britain, Germany, France and many other continental countries like Austria - all devastated by Hitler's total war - enjoyed the benefits of planned economies and welfare states.
Put another way, was it inevitable that nearly 400,000 Irish people had to emigrate during The Lost Decade? - the title of a book I helped to edit recently. Why did many Irish people not get a glimpse of economic growth and experience limited prosperity until the 1960s - a decade after welfare state success next door and across the border?
Before discussing Garvin's analysis, I would like to isolate two recurring themes underpinning the work. First, that "the Irish polity has yet to consider seriously the teaching of true citizenship, in the way that it is commonly taught in most advanced western countries". Second, the author warns political scientists, many raised in the American behavioural or rational choice traditions, never to ignore or play down the semi-independent role of ideas in political action. Ireland provides ample evidence of the latter.
Garvin, with a firm footing in the discipline of history, shows how in the post 1945 period in Ireland "institutional systems and systems of ideas interact in a complex way in political life". His model of analysis is based on selected ideas from James Madison, father of the US constitution, and from Mancur Olson, the US economist and political scientist.
Madison warned of the dangers of the power of blocking coalitions in a small democratic polity. Garvin quotes Robert Dahl as stating that making a government decision was not "a majestic march of great majorities united upon . . . matters of great policy" but rather the "steady appeasement of relatively small groups". Olson argued, to quote Garvin, that stable democracies produced elite complacency and vested interests determined to frustrate radical change even when there was common agreement that change was necessary.
Applying those ideas to Ireland, Garvin argues that the polity was enveloped by a complacent tranquillity soon after independence and that that was reinforced in a partitioned island by the "monolithism of the culture" and by the "intense authoritarianism and appetite for power of a popular \ church". When, helped by outside forces, that "stagnation" waned by the 1960s there was an elite awakening to the need for change.
Garvin, with his very entertaining and sometimes passionate style of expression, seeks to shoehorn history into those categories. William T. Cosgrave and Eamon de Valera are presented as being relatively weak leaders. Both sought to achieve a "parochial, rural, neo-Gaelic and, above all, Catholic arcadia" and that goal "absorbed the energies of many Irish educators, clerics, planners and politicians for a generation after independence".
Embedded elites, like the farming class, trade unionists, the Irish political left, the professions retained an interest in preserving a static state. Successive governments did not so much govern as engage in a process of the "steady appeasement of relatively small groups". The Catholic Church was consistently appeased in what I might call a system of monopoly Catholicism.
The argument is convincing only up to a certain point. On page 154, the author writes perceptively: "However, the Catholic Church, contrary to stereotype, was no monolith". My question is simply: why then treat Catholicism and a reactionary cast of mind as virtually interchangeable terms throughout the volume? Why not give a positive weight to the huge investment of social capital in an impoverished state by the churches, Catholic, Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist, Jewish, and so on in education, institutional care and hospitals.
The central argument turns on a view of Cosgrave and de Valera, together with their respective ministers, as being subservient to the dominant religion in the state.
Paradoxically, the only serious threat from Catholic integralism to the independence of Government in Ireland came between 1948 and 1951 when neither was in power. In contrast to John A. Costello and Sean MacBride - the leaders of the first inter-party government - William T. Cosgrave and Eamon de Valera shared a sens de l'État. They had, after all, built the state and established a democracy where, for example, appointments to the civil service and local appointments were in the hands of independent commissions.
Paradoxically, the civil servants responsible for spearheading economic reform in the late 1950s and early 1960s were in many cases the products of the Christian Brothers or schools run by religious orders. Maurice Moynihan, perhaps the most influential civil servant from the mid 1930s until the 1960s, (only one reference in index) had - like many of his generation employed in the public service - a shared sens de l'État that obviated subservience to any lobby or church. That was also the case for John Leydon, T.K. Whitaker, Con Cremin, Frederick Boland, James Deeny, Tom Barrington, John Garvin, etc. Bowing the knee to the church was an insult to their professionalism.
A number of the civil servants named above had witnessed the destructiveness and insanity of the "Economic war" of 1932-1938 and of the politics of clientelist protectionism to which it gave birth. Garvin provides a refreshing analysis of a system that provided ample opportunity for rewarding your political friends to the detriment of the common good.
But why did the breakthrough not come until the 1960s? Tom Garvin argues that the older generation, represented by Frank Aiken, Seán MacEntee and Eamon de Valera, stayed on too long in cabinet. It is fortunate that Sean Lemass, who implemented protectionism as Minister for Industry and Commerce since the 1930s, did not take early retirement. He was the chief political architect of the move to free trade in the 1960s made unavoidable by the decision of the British to seek membership of the European Economic Community.
The author gives Patrick Hillery, Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey and others of that new Fianna Fáil generation credit for the change.
Garvin argues strongly that the failure to develop different types of education in the new state and extend the system to include the widest possible social group severely slowed down the process of change.
He writes with withering accuracy about the mind-set that preserved the conservative status quo. Why, for example, did the then President of the Executive Council, Eamon de Valera, against the advice of a number of bishops, bring in a ban on married women teachers in primary schools in the mid-1930s? That ban persisted until the late 1950s when there was a chronic shortage of eligible trained teachers in the system; many untrained "teachers" were put into classrooms around the country until the Minister for Education, Jack Lynch, abolished it. What role did vested interests play within the male-dominated educational establishment in Ireland in the retardation of the Irish system?
The failure to view education as social capital was a debate waged feebly in the 1940s and 1950s but won decisively in the mid-1960s with the publication of Investment in Education and the subsequent radical policy decisions of the Ministers forEducation, Dr Patrick Hillery and Donagh O'Malley. The undervaluing of the importance of technical/vocational education was decisively and irrevocably reversed. But it came very late in the history of the Irish state, as Tom Garvin argues trenchantly.
This book charts the reasons for change in the 1960s and continues the analysis to the end of the 20th century. I would very much like to have read Tom Garvin's forensic skills applied more widely to the anti-entrepreneurial ethos prevailing in Irish banking institutions until the 1970s. How well developed was a sense of citizenship or a sens de l'État among bankers and accountants in 20th-century Ireland? There are many dogs that don't bark in this volume; the role of the universities; an analysis of family business ethos; a critique of the performance of management; the failure of the state to provide risk capital; and the under-performance of state-run companies due to the incompetence of boards stuffed with clueless political appointees.
Looking back from 1970, the distinguished Professor Roy Geary is quoted by Tom Garvin writing to a professorial friend: "My own mood, and I find it shared by many of my generation, old Sinn Féiners, is one nearing despair. The dream we dreamed - and the reality! We are a miserable money-grubbing lot, utterly bereft of ideals. We started with two, both phoney, the Language and the Reintegration of the National Territory. Both collapsed because of their absurdity, leaving us with nothing at all . . ."
That is a bleak obituary.
I will not burden the author with ownership of the following hypothesis about what happened to the country in the 1980s: a number of political leaders and members of professional elites opted for sectional loyalty rather than any broader commitment to a sens de l'État. This breakdown in leadership resulted in a betrayal of trust and ultimately a betrayal of the state, a betrayal that is chronicled in the reports of the many tribunals. To paraphrase a renaissance pope: God has given us the papacy. Let us enjoy it. And many sectional interest groups did so without check or censure to the detriment of the common good.
But things may not now be that depressing. Tom Garvin writes of the ending of the old Faith and Fatherland alliance, and the weakening of the historically authoritarian and secretive Irish political style of governance in the latter part of the 20th century. He quotes Michael Davitt's response in 1906 to Bishop O'Dwyer of Limerick: "Make no mistake about it, my Lord Bishop of Limerick, Democracy is going to rule in these countries". But whatever the problems in the early history of the Irish state, there was leadership from the top based on a highly developed sens de l'État.
Ironically, the Catholic Church was obliged to accept the rules of a democratic state. But that was not the case with other powerful lobbies and elites in Irish society. This is particularly relevant for the second last decade of the 20th century. In a polity of tax breaks, serial tax amnesties and planning exemptions, the reasons for the retardation of modernisation in this state may be found in a more systematic evaluation of the role of interests and lobbies other than in the unchecked power and educational influence of the churches.
Reading Tom Garvin's book would make for a good start on the road to developing a deeper sense of citizenship and of a sens de l'État. It may come to be regarded as a classic of its kind. It ought to be required reading. May it quickly appear in paperback so that it can find its way to the widest possible reading public, if only to show that the slowness of Irish development was substantially a self-inflicted but not fatal wound which can't be blamed on the British Empire or, for that matter, the Rolling Stones. We did it our way.
Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so poor for so long? By Tom Garvin Gill and Macmillan, 278pp. €29.99
Professor Dermot Keogh is head of the History Department at UCC and is currently writing a biography of Jack Lynch. He is one of the editors of the recently published The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s and of Ireland in World War Two