Sir, – The contemporary political and economic context and purpose of John Maynard Keynes’s seminal 1933 “National Self-Sufficiency” inaugural Finlay Memorial Lecture is critical to understanding Keynes’s lecture in order to avoid his lecture being misinterpreted and misrepresented 80 years later (Books, Weekend Review, July 28th).
The lecture, delivered at UCD’s Earlsfort Terrace, was attended by an unprecedented gathering of Ireland’s political “aristocracy”; de Valera, Lemass and most of the Fianna Fáil cabinet, WT Cosgrave, Gen Mulcahy, Douglas Hyde, Desmond Fitzgerald, and Oliver St J Gogarty. Keynes’s lecture was published by Studies and is the only version that matches his handwritten manuscript held in his archives at Cambridge University. Three other shorter more general versions of his lecture were contemporaneously published in America, Britain and Germany.
The original Dublin version of Keynes’s lecture did not endorse de Valera’s policy of economic protectionism (Autarky). In his lecture, Keynes qualified his oft quoted assertion that “if I were an Irishman, I should find much to attract me in the economic outlook of your present government towards greater self-sufficiency”.
Keynes confirmed that his Dublin lecture did not endorse protectionism but rather qualified his opinion according analysis of the lecture and related contemporary correspondence. He was acutely aware that his lecture “might be taken as giving him [de Valera] undue encouragement.” A week before his visit to Dublin, Keynes explained the broad outline of his Dublin lecture in correspondence with the Yale Review’s editor.
Keynes wrote that he would attempt to understand the “nature and strength of the reasons” underlying the popularity of national self-sufficiency, and then analyse these reasons “in a somewhat sympathetic way, and wind up by pleading for a middle ground”. The overarching context of the retaliatory “Economic War” (1932-1938) between Britain and the Free State was de Valera’s nationalistic desire for Ireland’s political independence from Britain. Abolishing the oath of allegiance, refusing to pay the land annuities, and making the governor-general position an irrelevance were examples to the British of de Valera’s rejection of the 1921 Treaty.
Keynes, an Eton and Cambridge educated Bloomsbury intellectual, could never expect to dissuade de Valera from embarking on what Keynes considered de Valera’s “foolish things”, cutting off economic and political ties with its neighbour.
Despite having a positive private meeting with Keynes prior to the lecture, de Valera did not accept Keynes’s warning in his lecture that de Valera’s “self-sufficiency”policies could not “be feasible without a disastrous reduction in a standard of life which is already none too high”.
Keynes tried to persuade his 1933 Dublin audience not to interfere with the historic economic relations between the two islands because “these economic relations are of such great economic advantage to both countries that it would be most foolish recklessly to disrupt them.”
Irish and British newspapers reports on Keynes’s lecture the next day (April 20th, 1933) all supported Keynes’s criticism of de Valera’s policies, including even de Valera’s own newspaper, the Irish Press. The Irish Press cuttingly dismissed Keynes’s warnings against protectionism by asserting that “Mr. Keynes’ words show how unwise wise men can be when they speak on countries.”
De Valera wasn’t to forget either the newspapers’ or Keynes’s criticism of his economic protectionist policies, and his government imposed a 40 per cent punitive tax on imported daily newspapers the next month. A year after his Dublin visit, Keynes was recommended by the Department of Finance as an outside expert member for the proposed Irish Banking Commission, and de Valera’s cabinet rejected his appointment. – Yours, etc,