NOVEMBER 4TH, 1946: During the past century there have been occasional suggestions that emigrants were to blame for emigration – that, at best, they were deluded by false promises of a better life abroad or, at worst, deserting the country in its hours of need. The former undertone was present in a speech by then taoiseach Eamon de Valera reviewing the state of the nation at a Fianna Fáil meeting in Co Tipperary in 1946, more than a year after the end of The Emergency or the second World War.
A WARNING to those seeking employment abroad was given by Mr de Valera at Carrick-on-Suir yesterday. Many people, he said, had left this country needlessly, attracted by the wages. In his opinion, said the Taoiseach, the net difference between income and outgoings in this and other countries, when balanced, was very small. “We had kept our heads above water . . . . but we are still swimming, and we have two or three difficult years, at least, to pass through,” said Mr de Valera, in outlining the Government’s economic difficulties of the past six years.
Mr de Valera said that it was extremely difficult in times like these, first of all, to provide employment, because a lot of things which had been developed and planned for could not take place until they got the necessary machinery.
He was not saying that more could not be done, but it was extremely difficult at present to get going with those things for which they had planned. Matters would ease off, but this would not come about suddenly. He hoped that people seeking employment abroad would return to their own country as work opened up for them here, and, in the meantime, the Government had to go ahead as quickly as they could.
The Government could not completely solve unemployment no matter what it did, unless they were going to give up the sort of freedom that they had won here.
Mr de Valera said that for the next two or three years there would be a shortage of supplies of various things that we want.
“You cannot destroy a whole continent, as Europe has been destroyed,” he added, “without leaving a tremendous shortage to be filled up. Houses have to be built; to get the material that we want we have to go into competition with the British and all the people of the world who have lost their homes.”
Mr de Valera referred to the country’s progress politically. “We have achieved one objective,” he said, “and that is freedom. In so far as we ourselves are concerned, I think that every fair-minded person will say that we have freedom. We can do any thing we want, from the point of view that there is nobody to stop us, except, of course, that it is against the natural law. But as far as foreign people are concerned, we can have institutions or any type of government which the people here want.
“So far as the 26 counties are concerned, we have achieved what I might call our political aim; we have not secured what the people of 1916 and so on went out to secure – the restoration of our full national life and all its characteristics. We have not got that, and we will not have it until the people here in this part of Ireland speak their own language.”
The Taoiseach spoke for an hour and 20 minutes. He was addressing a Fianna Fáil convention representative of Kilkenny, Waterford and Tipperary at Carrick-on-Suir.
He stressed the necessity for organisation, and appealed for greater effort in this direction.
Dealing with the methods to be adopted for the protection of the Irish language, he said that the one thing they wanted, and which was lacking, was the desire, in the first place, on the part of those leaving the schools to use the language, and, secondly, to be given the opportunity for using it.
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