Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  Fine Gael's Patrick McGilligan was seen by the economic conservatives in Finance and the Central Bank as a safe Minister for Finance. His first budget took an axe to estimates prepared by Fianna Fáil, which had planned an increase in spending on food subsidies, rural electrification and the treatment of tuberculosis. His views on Norton's proposals to overhaul and extend the state's social welfare system were clear in some of his notes for the 1948 budget: ‘Social services levelling down… servile state… all taken by state to pay out pocket money.’38 Despite this, some commentators have seen the introduction of a capital budget in 1950 as a triumph of Keynesianism.39 But, as Brian Girvin has noted, the capital budget was not part of an overall strategy to facilitate growth in the economy, and there continued to be a commitment to a balanced budget.40 McGilligan's central purpose remained the traditional Fine Gael one of lowering the rate of income tax.

  The idea for the capital budget came from Patrick Lynch, a young Finance official who was seconded to the Department of the Taoiseach to act as Costello's personal economic adviser. He had discussed it with Alexis FitzGerald, an adviser to the Taoiseach who was also Costello's son-in-law.41 It attracted Costello because it represented a via media between the conflicting economic and social views of McGilligan and MacBride. Although MacBride's ministerial domain was a non-economic one, his strongly developed economic views and his desire to promote the socially radical image of the Clann led him into direct conflict with Finance. He remained a strong proponent of the need for more state investment in areas such as land reclamation, afforestation, housing and health to be financed through the repatriation of sterling assets. MacBride's department was also responsible for Ireland's participation in the European Recovery Programme: the Marshall Plan. Between May 1948 and May 1951 the country received £6 million in grants and £46 million in loans. This did something to ease intra-government conflicts over public expenditure issues, and its emollient effects were amplified by an unprecedented willingness to resort to borrowing: £65 million was borrowed through national loans between 1948 and 1950.42 It was in this way that some of the major social achievements of the government were financed. There was a remarkable improvement in house building, particularly in the countryside. In 1945 it was estimated that 110,000 new houses were required to deal with the immediate need.43 In 1947, local authority houses had been completed. By 1950, through the effort of the National Labour Minister for Local Government, T. J. Murphy, the annual figure had risen to over 8,000. In the countryside the Minister for Agriculture, James Dillon, had used a large amount of the Marshall Aid to launch the Land Project, which aimed to reclaim four million acres through drainage and fertilization and, by providing new holdings and extra employment, did much to launch Fine Gael's electoral recovery in the 1950s.44

  The Mother and Child Crisis

  But the main social achievement of the government was in public health, where the Clann na Poblachta Minister for Health, Dr Noel Browne, gave a forceful political lead and urgency to the anti-tuberculosis campaign. There had been a sharp increase in the tuberculosis death rate during the war years, in contrast to that in Northern Ireland, which, after an initial rise, had declined by 1945. The southern Irish death rate from tuberculosis in 1945 was 124 per 100,000, compared to eighty in the north, seventy-nine in Scotland and sixty-two in England and Wales.45 The government's response had been constrained by the dominant feeling that Ireland could not afford the sort of welfare state envisaged in the Beveridge Report, and also by the Catholic Church's resolute opposition to government intervention in these areas. The Church believed that the provision of social and medical benefits by the state undermined the integrity of the family. When the initiative for a more pro-active policy had been taken by non-governmental organizations and private individuals who set up an Anti-Tuberculosis League in 1942, this was sabotaged by Archbishop McQuaid, who saw it as a Trojan horse for the expansion of the powers of the state. A Red Cross investigation in 1943 pointed out that there were only 2,110 beds for tuberculosis patients, the majority in small voluntary and local authority institutions. This left a shortfall of 4,500 beds by current international standards of treatment. Growing dissatisfaction with sanatorium conditions and the treatment of patients had led to the Tuberculosis (Establishment of Sanatoria) Act in 1945 and the Public Health Act of 1947. Despite this, the number of beds for tuberculosis patients had increased to just 3,701 in 1948, with only a third of these in institutions that had access to the latest clinical and diagnostic facilities.

  Browne had been recruited to the Clann by Noel Hartnett when the former was working at Newcastle Sanatorium. Browne's passion for the fight against tuberculosis came from bitter personal experience: his parents and three sisters had all been killed by the disease. He was educated in England, where he and his siblings had been forced to move after the death of his parents. He later studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin. Browne had contracted tuberculosis himself in 194046 and been treated in England, subsequently working in English hospitals before returning to Ireland in 1945. Having been treated and having worked in English sanatoria, he was scornful of the services available to tuberculosis sufferers in Ireland. He had played a central role in making the disease a major issue during the election campaign and was, to the chagrin of some of the older and more ideologically driven members of the party, chosen by MacBride to be the other Clann member of the government. In government he secured a remarkable expansion in anti-tuberculosis services. By the time he left office in 1951 the total number of beds had risen to 6,857. Expenditure on the disease increased almost fourfold between 1948 and 1953, the largest increase in any area of health and social services.47 Just as the Clann had modernized political campaigning by the use of the cinema with its effective propaganda film Our Country, Browne's department ran a national tuberculosis-awareness campaign using posters, film and radio. He achieved all this by liquidating the assets of the Hospital Sweepstake Fund, which until then had been used stint-ingly to cover the working deficits of hospitals. Now Browne, despite the unease of McGilligan, used not only the fund's interest but also its capital to finance the department's ambitious programme.48

  Browne's single-mindedness, crusading zeal, impatience with his more conservative colleagues and an inevitable amount of political naivety, given his relative youth and lack of political or administrative experience, led him to bear a disproportionate amount of the blame for the Mother and Child Affair, which pitted the young minister against the leaders of the Catholic Church and rocked the government to its foundations. The origins of the crisis lay in Fianna Fáil 1947 Health Act, which included provisions for a free health-care scheme for mothers and for children up to the age of sixteen. The hierarchy had written to de Valera expressing their disapproval of parts of the Act, but the response of the government was not tested as it was soon out of office. These communications carried on behind the scenes, concealed from the public at large and the incoming government.

  When Browne decided, in 1950, to reactivate the provisions in the 1947 Act he was already out of favour with the hierarchy. They were unhappy with the trend towards greater state control of, and investment in, the health service, of which the anti-tuberculosis campaign was one manifestation.49 Browne's medical training at Trinity College made him inevitably an object of suspicion. Trinity was regarded as a bastion of the Protestant Ascendancy, and any Catholic who attended it was at risk of contamination. The bishops had long made clear their disapproval of attendance by Catholics, who were urged to go to one of the three constituent colleges of the National University, which were thought ‘sufficiently safe in regard to faith and morals’.50 McQuaid had tightened the screw in 1944 with a ban on attendance unless he granted permission, which would be given only ‘for grave and valid reasons’. Failure to heed the ban was a mortal sin and meant a refusal of the Sacraments.

  The hierarchy's objections to the scheme were set out in a letter to Costello that denounced the measure as ‘a ready-made instrument
for future totalitarian aggression’. The right to provide for the health of children belonged to parents and the state's role was purely subsidiary: to help the ‘indigent or neglectful’ 10 per cent through some sort of means-tested benefit. Along with the threat to parental responsibility, the scheme's provisions for health education in regard to motherhood were seen as the thin end of a wedge that could lead to Trinity-educated doctors advising ‘Catholic girls and women’ on sex, chastity and marriage, which could include advice on birth-control.51

  Browne, who was summoned to McQuaid's residence to be informed of the contents of the letter, appears to have accepted that the provision for education might have to be reconsidered, but he was not prepared to move on the question of a means test. What remains unclear is whether his subsequent quixotic attempt to persuade the hierarchy that the scheme was compatible with Catholic moral law, if not with the Church's social teachings, was a reflection of naivety or a disingenuous cover for a desire to provoke a crisis in the Clann and government because of his dissatisfaction with MacBride's leadership.52 However, there is little doubt about his passionate commitment on the issue. In speeches in 1948 he revealed that the death-rate of Irish infants in their first year of life during the previous five-year period had been 55 per cent higher than in England and Wales, and he was convinced that one of the reasons for the differential was the absence of a national system of maternity education and care for all mothers.53 McQuaid offered him no comfort with a peremptory declaration that Catholic social teaching meant ‘Catholic moral teaching in regard to things social’.54 Browne published the details of the scheme on 6 March 1951, and a month later McQuaid told Costello that the hierarchy had rejected the scheme. The cabinet met the next day and, with the exception of Browne, voted to drop the scheme and prepare another one in conformity with Catholic social teaching. When Browne did not resign immediately MacBride demanded that he do so, hastening the decomposition of the Clann as its urban radical element departed in disgust. The loss of Browne and another TD, Jack McQuillan, over the affair accelerated the process by which the government's majority had already begun to be whittled away; and when there were defections from Clann na Talmhan over the price paid to farmers for milk, the government was brought down in April.

  What did the affair reveal about the relationship between Church and state? According to J. J. Lee, ‘Browne was probably his own worst enemy, despite the competition from Costello, MacBride and McQuaid.’55 The most substantial history of the inter-party government agrees: ‘much of the blame for the crisis must rest on Browne himself.’56 It is true that the hierarchy was only one of the forces ranged against Browne. The Irish Medical Association, which feared that the Mother and Child scheme would undermine doctors' earnings from private practice, denounced it as a form of socialized medicine and state control. Other members of the government found Browne a very difficult colleague, and it has been suggested that without the antagonism of these other forces the hierarchy's intervention might not have been so decisive.57 Yet the evidence of the unalloyed and enthusiastic loyalty of Costello and his colleagues to the Church is compelling. The message of ‘respectful homage’ sent by the new government to Pope Pius XII spoke of their ‘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 teachings of Christ and to strive for the attainment of social order in Ireland based on Christian principles’. This out-deferred de Valera and prompted an unprecedented protest from Maurice Moynihan, the secretary to the cabinet.58

  MacBride, later an icon of the Irish republican left and the winner of both a Nobel and a Lenin Peace Prize, was a particularly depressing example of what Ronan Fanning has termed ‘the near feudal deference’ of the government to the hierarchy in general and the Archbishop of Dublin in particular.59 As soon as he was elected to the Dáil, he hand-delivered a letter to the Archbishop's house paying his ‘humble respects’ and, like his future government, putting himself ‘at your Grace's disposal… Both as a Catholic and a public representative I shall always welcome any advice which Your Grace may be good enough to give me.’60 Later he would urge McQuaid to appoint an ecclesiastical adviser to the Irish delegation of the Council of Europe to advise on Catholic teaching on social, political and diplomatic questions. This invitation for the Church to be publicly involved in the formation of Irish foreign policy was ignored by the astute cleric, who preferred more opaque channels of influence. That MacBride had been, however briefly, Chief of Staff of the IRA may have encouraged these abject overtures to prove his reliability: In the same way, a government including a party full of unrepentant republicans and some social radicals may have seen its profuse Catholicism as an insurance policy against Fianna Fáil's tendency to resort to ‘red peril’ scares when it suited. Yet there could be no doubting the deep, obedient Catholicism of Costello, who, like at least four other members of his government, was a member of the Catholic society the Knights of St Columbanus. Founded in 1922 to counter anti-Catholic discrimination by Freemasons and others, it was soon accused of organizing discrimination itself.61

  Costello's willingness to sacrifice a colleague and put the future of his government at serious risk reflected not just personal religiosity and inter-party manoeuvring but a Church that was in a particularly peremptory mode. The post-war development of Irish Catholicism was divergent from that of most other European countries, where the Church's support for inter-war authoritarianism produced a liberal reaction. Instead, Ireland experienced a mood of increasing ‘integralism’: the desire to make it an even more totally Catholic state than it had yet become.62 One factor in explaining this divergence was the neutrality that insulated the South from the social and moral upheaval produced by direct involvement in the war. Another was the fear of ‘contamination’ from across the Irish Sea as Britain embarked on a post-war embrace of the welfare state and ‘socialistic’ planning. One of the reasons that the hierarchy was so concerned about emigration was the high level of female emigrants attracted by the demand for nurses and domestic help in post-war Britain. The threat to the moral purity of these young women from life in ‘heathen’ England prompted some bishops, supported by Sean MacBride, to propose a ban on the emigration of women under twenty-one.63 Other more realistic voices in the Church recognized that emigration continued to act as a safety valve by siphoning off many of the most thoughtful and energetic voices of potential criticism in Irish society, and the proposal was rejected.

  For those who remained, the Church still maintained a strident and ever-watchful cordon sanitaire against the threat of communist ideological penetration. The Church's anti-socialism was nothing new: both Connolly and Larkin had had bruising encounters with it before partition. But the development of the Cold War gave the struggle against the ‘reds’ a fresh intensity. It mattered little that the Irish Communist Party, revived in 1948 as the Irish Workers' League, was tiny. The Irish bishops were determined to demonstrate that Ireland's Catholics were in the vanguard of the struggle against the communist threat.64 During the Italian general election of 1948, Archbishop McQuaid appealed over Radio Eireann for funds to fight the communists, and within a month £20,000 had been collected.65 The arrests and show trials of Catholic prelates in Eastern Europe produced a display of intense and affronted solidarity. A rally in Dublin in protest against the imprisonment of Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary attracted 150,000 – considerably more than the same year's all-party anti-partition protest against the Ireland Act.

  It would be wrong to assume that the Church's pretensions were uncritically accepted by all elements in Catholic Ireland. The failure of the CIU to hegemonize southern trade unionism was in itself an indication of one important group that resisted the integralist agenda. When Archbishop D'Alton of Armagh suggested that the trade union movement affiliate to the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions, a body consisting mainly of Catholic trade unions, his advice was heeded by the CIU but rejected a
lmost unanimously by the ITUC.66 The strong support given to Browne and the small number of TDs who supported him in the 1951 general election showed that, in Dublin at least, there was a certain amount of resistance to the Church's opposition to the health proposals, leading Dr D'Alton to complain that ‘we are more deeply infected than we think with the virus of secularism and materialism.’67 Yet the fact remained that there was little inclination within the political elite to risk a conflict with the hierarchy. As the Fine Gael Minister for Justice, Sean MacEoin, put it, ‘I don't want to get a belt of a crozier.’68 At a time when electoral outcomes had a new element of unpredictability, neither the leaders of any potential coalition government nor those of Fianna Fáil had an interest in handing their opponents the role of the most demonstrably loyal sons of the Church.

  De Valera had imposed a discipline of total silence on his party during the Dáil debate on Browne's resignation, saving for himself the sole dismissive line: ‘I think we have heard enough.’ When Fianna Fáil returned to power, its new Health Bill was not as ambitious as Noel Browne's. Mothers and infants were to be given free treatment, but infants were covered only up to the age of six weeks rather than sixteen years, and a means test of £600 was a central part of the scheme.69 Initial clerical opposition was assuaged by de Valera's instruction to Lemass to ask McQuaid to suggest amendments to those sections of the draft legislation that the Church found obnoxious.70 The implications of the Mother and Child Affair for the anti-partitionist project were severe, as the secretary of the Manchester branch of the Anti-Partition League pointed out in a letter to the Irish Times: