FROM THE ARCHIVES:This leading article by editor Douglas Gageby reflected on recently published cabinet papers under the headline "Change and No Change".
– JOE JOYCE
THE CABINET minutes and other official papers released last week must seem to the young to reveal an Ireland of incomprehensible attitudes, an Ireland nearly as remote and misty as in the famous era when we were all saints and scholars.
Those who lived through the years in question (1951 – 54) will remember it as a time of little introspection or self-examination, though this had one advantage: the citizen was not belaboured and bewildered by the advice industry which today tolls out ever-more reports from an ever-increasing roster of institutes and boards. Much of this is questionable effort.
There has indeed been remarkable change in the thirty years just past. Education has been improved beyond recognition – with some way to go yet. Employment in certain areas soared, then relapsed. We are readjusting for a completely different world of less work and more leisure or worklessness. Mores have changed and sexual attitudes have gone through a revolution, without, so far, a noticeable reaction.
The world has opened to us as never before. For generations the separatist case has been that England stood between us and the rest. The UN started to open up things for us. The EEC has too often been seen as a source of income rather than a challenge to our maturity. Yet it has brought us out of ourselves to some extent.
In one thing there is little change. Dr Ronan Fanning in an article here on Saturday referred to the lack in these minutes of any substantive references to Northern Ireland. Where the North was not forgotten, it was treated with something more than circumspection. It was almost as if it was populated by untouchables.
Thus when the Tourist Board sought advice from the Government concerning possible Northern participation in An Tostal of 1953, the board was instructed to take no initiative in regard to co-operation with the Northern Tourist Board or with any other official or semi-official board in Northern Ireland, and, if approached, should refer the matter back to Mr Lemass, the Minister concerned.
But if Cabinet minutes revealed no great deliberation given over to the problem, there was never any shortage of references to it.
Of course, the pluralist concept of Ireland had not yet been widely mooted. There was respect among separatists for the old stories of the Presbyterians of ’98, but Northern Presbyterians of the 1950s were somewhat different.
Today the diverse origins of the various peoples who have come to populate this island are better understood. It should stir the imagination rather than arouse hatreds to face the task of constructing an Ireland where all will be free to be themselves yet serve the common good. That is one difference from the Fifties: Ireland is in various kinds of turmoil, but perhaps we see the problems more clearly.
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