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On Tom Garvin's Judging Lemass, published in the Sunday Independent 18/10/09:

Seán Lemass: The Limits to Liberty

In the midst of the present malaise in Irish politics and economics it’s tempting to look back to the Great Men of Irish history and juxtapose them against the somewhat sorry current crop of Irish politicos. Of these Great Men few are as celebrated as Seán Lemass. Lemass, the son of a Dublin hatter, was born in 1899. A veteran of the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War, he held ministerial appointments in successive Fianna Fáil governments, heralded two Irish macroeconomic revolutions, and served as Taoiseach between 1959 and 1966. Lemass, a true giant of Irish history, has always attracted scholarly attention. His latest biographer is veteran UCD political scientist Tom Garvin. Launching Garvin’s Judging Lemass Brian Cowen staked a typically rodomontade claim to the Lemassian mantle by asserting that the great Lemass would back the current government’s economic strategy.

As demonstrated by Cowen’s reversion to ‘What if?’ history – a dubious form of historical enquiry once dismissed by an eminent historian as ‘unhistorical sh*t’ - the danger of all this celebrating of Great Men is that everyone tends to get a bit carried away. Lemass, as Garvin states in the book, was ‘not infallible’. This is about as close as the learned professor gets to any meaningful criticism of the authoritarian tendencies of the former Taoiseach though. Documents held in the National Archives and UCD Archives reveal a darker side to Lemass to which Judging Lemass devotes precious little attention. During the Emergency (1939-45), a period which came to define Irish neutral statehood and the limits of self-sufficiency de Valera made Lemass Minister of Supplies, a specially created portfolio in which an unprecedented degree of economic control was placed in one man. Lemass became the economic overlord of Ireland in charge of the ‘treatment, keeping, storage, movement, distribution, sale, purchase, use and consumption’ of all goods.

While most Irish people put up with the grim conditions of the Emergency, telling themselves it was an exceptional experience that would soon be over, to Lemass it was an exciting opportunity during which liberal constraints had happily been bulldozed aside. Under Lemass, state bureaucracy swelled to monstrous proportions. His department’s inspectors were omnipresent and promoted a report-thy-neighbour ethic in a heavily regulated market pockmarked by black market activity. As Ireland’s supply crisis worsened Lemass aggressively pushed the boundaries of intervention so that the state assumed a presence in everyday Irish life not witnessed before or since.

Characteristically, Lemass’s schemes to increase productivity during the 1940s were brashly implemented with a testing-ground mentality. During this period he was an ardent advocate of camp labour. When it was pointed out to him that Irish workers would not work in such Gulag conditions he targeted the unemployed, insisting their ‘voluntary enrolment…would be assisted by withholding their dole’. In Judging Lemass Garvin lists the many successful semi-state business brainchildren of Lemass such as C.I.E. Other earlier and more statist examples included the Emergency turf labour camps which the future Taoiseach advocated press-ganging men into. Lemass wanted military discipline to prevail in the camps and the punishment of those who turned down such work ‘by fine or imprisonment’. Another early brainchild scheme of Lemass’s was the Construction Corps (1940-48) – a teenage labour battalion composed of coerced inner-city boys attached to the Irish army whose members were sent around the country digging remote bogs. As well as producing the largest recorded instance of homosexual abuse in the Irish army, Construction Corps members lived in conditions which were compared to Nazi concentration camps.

As the Emergency wore on, Lemass’s desire to exert his control over the nascent Irish state grew and had to be constantly reined in by his colleagues in government. His ambition was not always matched by competency. Garvin briefly mentions that farmers were forced to increase tillage during the Emergency, but the ‘happy result of this policy was that bread was never rationed during the war years’. In fact, ‘compulsory tillage’ placed a huge burden on Ireland’s small farmers to grow more wheat, a desperate scheme that enabled the state to dispossess property from those considered ‘unproductive’. In many cases farmers were unable to meet state quotas because they had horses and carts rather than modern fertilisers or machinery. Who was responsible? In large part it was Lemass. Garvin claims his stockpiling of fuel and foods ‘paid off handsomely’ during the 1940s. In fact Lemass failed to stockpile many essential supplies at the start of the Emergency and continued to sanction the export of materials key to Ireland’s survival in food and fuel when it was obvious that a British trade squeeze was impending. In correspondence with Lemass in 1945 Minister of Agriculture Jim Ryan cited the ‘serious agitation and public disturbance’ that would occur if evicting farmers – an act that excited the uncomfortable memory of the Land War - were to continue post-war. While Ryan and most of his contemporaries shied away from any scheme redolent of Soviet-style agricultural collectivisation Lemass, displaying a haughty disregard for the nation’s rural peripheries, wanted the state to ‘eliminate incompetent or lazy farmers’. Ryan retorted by highlighting Lemass’s naivety in farming issues, pointing out that the productive patterns of farmers were ‘unlike coal miners’. Irish Farmers’ toil, despite Lemass, ensured bread was never rationed during the Emergency while he took on an unfavourable folk reputation as the man responsible for the detested ‘black loaf’ and the miserable quarter ounce ration of tea.

This was, of course, an Emergency. Then, as now, the government claimed that desperate times called for desperate measures. But this wasn’t enough for Lemass. By 1944 most people were looking to the freedom that the post-war period would deliver. Lemass, however, writing in that year, rued democracy itself for its disruptive effect on long-term planning. He held the Irish people in cold economic regard, claiming they needed strong central government to counteract what he called their ‘fissiparous tendencies’. Lemass was certainly less inhibited by the dictates of Catholic faith than his colleagues in cabinet. There were clear limits, however, to the progressiveness Garvin sees Lemass as championing against the orthodox stasis of Catholic nationalist Ireland. Lemass’s wartime drive for productivity did not stretch to antagonising Catholic sensitivity to the family to the extent of advocating a Women’s Land Army, as witnessed in most other countries at this time (with the notable exception of Nazi Germany).

Lemass straddled Fianna Fáil’s twin inheritances of militarism and constitutionalism. On the one hand he is widely believed to have been one of Michael Collin’s ‘Twelve Apostles’, the IRA assassination squad which eliminated fourteen British secret agents in cold blood on Bloody Sunday 1920. On the other he proved willing to embrace liberal democracy rather than lament the loss of the green dream of priests and patriots. Fundamentally however, and despite his dapper appearance, Lemass was a bruising character who possessed an almost autocratic single-mindedness that exposed the anti-democratic origins of Eamon de Valera’s soldiers of destiny. Party loyalty aside, it is hard to imagine Lemass falling in behind Brian Cowen’s leadership as he did de Valera’s. In his early political career Lemass’s righteous and means-to-an-end mentality pitted him against the Boys of the Old Brigade. But it was them who rightly rebuked Lemass when he trod the wrong side of the liberal / authoritarian divide. In his later career he indeed proved himself a Great Man, perhaps one of the greatest men of twentieth century Irish history, but a man nonetheless: fallible, human, the product of social and economic currents rather than their master, and certainly undeserving of a hagiography he himself would have disliked.