Can Irish political anger convert into effective governance?

Seán MacBride, who died in 1988, came to mind this month for various reasons. Forty years ago, MacBride, the former IRA leader, lawyer and politician, became the first Irish Nobel peace laureate, in recognition of his international work for the protection of human rights. He also features in the new volume of the long-running series Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, which covers his period as minister for external affairs as part of the coalition government in office from 1948-1951.

Some of the most striking correspondence from that period includes the craven letters he sent to senior Catholic leaders. At the behest of MacBride, the first cabinet meeting of that government informed pope Pius XII of MacBride and his colleagues’ desire “to repose at the feet of Your Holiness the assurance of our filial loyalty and devotion as well as our firm resolve to be guided in all our work by the teaching of Christ”.

Similarly, MacBride told archbishop D’Alton, the Catholic primate, he would, in government, “be entirely at your Grace’s disposal”. He also signed himself as an “obedient and sincere” servant of John Charles McQuaid, the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, with whom he regularly liaised on government business.

Limitations

There are a number of aspects of MacBride’s career that illuminate the possibilities but also the limitations and contradictions of Irish republicanism in modern Irish history, some of which reverberate today. MacBride made the transition from supporting violence to constitutionalism, used his legal expertise to expose human rights abuses. He was one of the founders of a new political party in 1946, Clann na Poblachta (CnP), which won 10 Dáil seats in 1948 to end 16 years of continuous Fianna Fáil power. When in office, MacBride sought to find an international role for the Irish State, which honed his interest in human rights that later brought him acclaim.

But the shortcomings are also apparent. CnP quickly imploded, partly because MacBride and fellow cabinet and CnP minister Noël Browne, who was admirably focused on effecting real change but was also a difficult and often sour colleague, grew to detest each other, and because Browne and Noel Hartnett, another founder of CnP, who also fell out with MacBride, accused the party of losing its purpose and identity.

Browne was minister for health until the Mother and Child controversy in 1951, during which the church, supported by MacBride and most of his fellow ministers, opposed greater State intervention in relation to free maternal and child healthcare. Browne resigned, and, politically, MacBride limped along for the rest of the decade, but neither he nor CnP recovered from the debacle.

As a supposedly radical republican, leading a party of the left, the archival material, as well as his public disowning of Browne, provide clues as to why he was so compromised as leader of his party; he became associated with a conservatism CnP had promised to overcome. One of the reasons he ended up with an enhanced profile later was because his short domestic political career gave him more time for international engagement.

Downfall

But CnP’s downfall was about more than the 1951 controversy. It never had a coherent identity. Browne’s memoir, which caused a stir when published in 1986, such was the venom in his portraits of adversaries, is self-serving and unreliable, but it is fair to conclude he was accurate in asserting that CnP “failed to establish a properly structured organisation, with clearly defined radical, social and economic policies”. Party meetings and statements, Browne maintained, “merely emphasised the party’s utopian woolliness”.

MacBride made grandiose predictions during the 1948 election campaign about the party winning enough seats to become as big as FF or FG, but it came nowhere near that. The political space, it seemed, was not available, and because of the Ireland they were moulded in, the rhetorically radical republicanism of MacBride and others was diluted by their deference to a Catholic Church that succeeded in narrowing the space for protest and alternatives.

Today, in marked contrast, church dominance is no longer an inhibiting factor in Irish politics and more political space than ever waiting to be filled. On the basis of current levels of support, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would struggle to command the support of 50 per cent of Irish voters.

But the challenges of the late 1940s and early 1950s are still relevant to those talking of building on protest and creating alliances or parties. How will personal rivalries and clashes be avoided or handled? Can anger be translated into a coherence that could facilitate alternative and effective governance? Is there an agreed new definition of Irish republicanism, or are we living through a new era of rhetorical “utopian woolliness”?