When Jack Lynch dissolved the Dáil in February 1973, Labour and Fine Gael hastily concluded a coalition agreement and issued a joint fourteen-point programme that contained few specific promises and that Labour's historian described as ‘consisting largely of platitudes’.17 Due to the success of vote transfers between the two parties, Labour won an extra seat, although it had lost votes compared to 1969, particularly in Dublin, where anti-coalition supporters transferred to Official Sinn Féin, which had fought the election on a fairly left-wing set of policies. But it was Fine Gael who benefited most from the transfer pact, gaining four seats. Thus, despite the fact that Fianna Fáil increased its share of the vote slightly on 1969, it lost the election, and the two opposition parties were able to form a stable coalition government.18
To many observers the most remarkable thing about the National Coalition was its unity. It faced economic problems and challenges on the security and Northern Ireland fronts that were far greater than those that the previous inter-party governments had had to endure. Key to this unity was the absence of any major divisions on left–right lines between Labour and Fine Gael members of the government. Much of the credit for this must go to Liam Cosgrave, who from his initial decision to offer Labour five ministries – one more than their electoral performance strictly warranted – had operated as a considerate and fair chairman of government meetings.19 However, it also reflected the fact that the Labour ministers did little to put a distinctive imprint on the key areas of domestic policy during their time in office.
As Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Social Welfare, Brendan Corish at sixty was running out of steam and lacked the inclination or time to give direction to his colleagues. Three of them were particularly forceful personalities: Justin Keating at Industry and Commerce, Conor Cruise O'Brien at Posts and Telegraphs, and Michael O'Leary at Labour. They had their own departmental agendas and, in the case of Keating and O'Leary, leadership ambitions that took priority over any notion of a common Labour strategy. This would, in any case, not have been easy to develop, given the buffeting that the Irish economy was receiving from the end of 1974. The 1973 manifesto had promised that a ‘programme of planned economic development’ would be a central feature of the government's policy and that an immediate aim was a stabilization of prices, a halt in redundancies and a reduction of unemployment. The fivefold increase in oil prices removed any possibility of these ambitions being realized. Prices rose by about 90 per cent during the first four years of the coalition's term, an average rate almost twice that experienced during the previous four years of Lynch's government. The combined effect of freer trade and recession caused many firms to cease production or cut their workforces. The number of unemployed rose from 71,435 when the coalition took power in March 1973 to 115,942 four years later, or from 7.9 per cent to 12.5 per cent of the insured labour force.20
These dismal figures undermined any possible electoral benefit Labour might have had from the achievements of the coalition in the areas of social expenditure and taxation. Expenditure on social welfare rose from 6.5 per cent of GNP in 1973 to 10.5 per cent four years later and most benefit rates rose by 125 per cent, considerably more than wages and prices. The rate of house building increased by 50 per cent and expenditure on health services increased almost threefold.21 Taxation was an area in which Fine Gael's left made common cause with Labour. The election manifesto had committed the coalition to a wealth tax, and Garret FitzGerald, who was a member of the cabinet's economic subcommittee, supported his Labour colleagues on the need for taxation of capital gains and wealth.22 A White Paper published in February 1974 proposed a capital gains tax of 35 per cent and an annual wealth tax on estates of over £40,000. In an attempt to lessen criticism from the large propertied and middle-class element in Fine Gael's traditional support, death duties were to be abolished. The intensity of the reaction to the proposed taxes on capital gains and wealth, led in the Dáil by the only recently rehabilitated Charles Haughey, resulted in the introduction of a higher threshold of £100,000 and a lower rate of 1 per cent. Such redistributive policies alienated the middle class, while their only marginal contribution to the public purse did little to compensate Labour's working-class supporters, many of whom experienced a real drop in their living standards in the last two years of the coalition. Labour's presence in government had made it easier for the leadership of the Irish trade union movement to be persuaded of the need for ‘responsible’ wage demands. Real pre-tax incomes rose in 1974 and 1975, but then National Wage Agreements were amended to introduce pay curbs, which, together with a heavily regressive tax system, led to a squeeze on working-class living standards.23
The apparent lack of division within the coalition on the economy, the issue that would lose them the election in 1977, was in contrast to the open tensions over how best to deal with the reverberations of the northern conflict. Cosgrave, along with Conor Cruise O'Brien, had favoured a low-key approach to Northern Ireland, aimed at a largely internal power-sharing deal between the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP. Garret FitzGerald had been appointed to Foreign Affairs by Cosgrave, who had an uneasy relationship with his voluble and super-confident colleague and had hoped that the many ramifications of EEC membership would result in the minister spending a lot of time out of the country. This ignored FitzGerald's formidable energy and his conviction that having a mother from a northern Presbyterian background gave him a particular insight into the mentalities of both communities in the North.
FitzGerald soon assumed a key role in Northern Ireland policy and used it to support the more activist policies favoured by John Hume. O'Brien, who was an increasingly scathing critic of the conventional Irish nationalist analysis of Northern Ireland, was kept on as Labour Party spokesman on Northern Ireland and at Sunningdale tried in vain to argue for a deal more palatable to Faulkner's supporters. After the UWC strike he became the first Irish government minister to state publicly that he was not working actively for Irish unity, as it was not a practicable goal. In a document prepared for his party colleagues and leaked to the press, he argued that to prevent a ‘doomsday situation’ in the North the government in Dublin should adopt a relatively low profile.24 In fact, the UWC strike's success had forced the Irish government to pay more attention to O'Brien's analysis. Concerned that Harold Wilson might be considering a unilateral British withdrawal, the government established an inter-departmental unit to plan for such a scenario. It warned that British withdrawal would not lead to a united Ireland but to a loyalist-dominated independent state, and that the best that could be hoped for was some form of repartition following inter-communal violence.25
O'Brien was criticized at the time and since for an unbalanced approach that demanded from Irish nationalists an intellectual maturity and generosity of spirit that he never demanded from unionists.26 Yet it was precisely O'Brien's point that much of the rigidity, lack of imagination and simple bigotry associated with the unionist cause was a result of nationalism's refusal to accept that there could be any democratic validity to partition. He was convinced that reform in the North and better North–South relations were a real possibility if the unity issue were put to one side. This inevitably meant that he concentrated his attentions on those best placed to unlock this progressive potential in the North by abandoning positions that, no matter how appealing in Dublin, strengthened the hands of the most reactionary opponents of change in Belfast.
O'Brien's most vociferous critics were within his own party. Justin Keating was in the forefront of those wedded to the republican socialist mantras of James Connolly, demanding British withdrawal at a time when the North was as near to a sectarian civil war as at any time since the 1920–22 period. Anti-partitionists were soon joined in the ranks of critics of ‘The Cruiser’ by civil liberties groups and a substantial sector of the Dublin print and broadcast media as O'Brien and Cosgrave became identified with a heavy-handed approach to the activities of the IRA in the South.
Cosgrave had outraged his more
liberal colleagues and threatened to split the Fine Gael parliamentary party when, in December 1972, he had indicated that he would support Fianna Fáil amendment to the Offences against the State Act, which allowed the indictment by a senior police officer of those suspected to be terrorists. The explosion of two bombs in the centre of Dublin, killing two people and injuring over a hundred, which was probably the work of loyalist terrorists, led to the withdrawal of Fine Gael's opposition to the amendment and saved Cosgrave's leadership. However, his government was soon faced with intensifying and often sickening reminders that neither republicans nor loyalists would respect the border when the exigencies of the ‘war’ in Northern Ireland demanded it.
Within a fortnight of the coalition coming into office, the Claudia, a fishing boat filled with an IRA arms shipment and with the senior Belfast IRA man Joe Cahill on board, was captured off the Waterford coast as a result of joint British–Irish intelligence work. Over the next two decades the IRA's ‘southern command’ would use the Republic as the major location for its arms dumps, for the training of its ‘volunteers’, and as a source of funds through bank robberies, kidnappings and other forms of extortion. In the autumn of 1973 all the members of the government were informed that they and their families were under direct threat of kidnapping by one or other of the republican groups. In 1975 the Dutch businessman Tiede Herrema was taken by the IRA, which demanded the release of its prisoners in Irish jails. The government refused to negotiate. As Conor Cruise O'Brien puts it in his account of the coalition, ‘We and Herrema got lucky’: police interrogation of a suspected member of the gang revealed where the victim was being held and he was released without physical harm.27 Others were less fortunate. In March 1974 a Fine Gael Senator, Billy Fox, was visiting his fiancée in the border county of Monaghan when he was shot dead by the Provisionals. Fox, like the family he was visiting, was a Presbyterian, and the motive for the murder was apparently sectarian.28 Although the IRA had attempted to deny its involvement in Fox's murder, it openly admitted responsibility for the murder of the British Ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, whose car was blown up by a landmine near his official residence on the outskirts of Dublin on 23 July 1976.
The Dáil was recalled for a special emergency sitting, and Cosgrave proposed a state of national emergency with a substantial increase in the powers of the state in its ‘anti-subversive’ struggle. A politically embarrassing conflict with the President, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, occurred when he referred one of the proposed pieces of legislation to the Supreme Court in September. The Minister for Defence, Paddy Donegan, a strong Cosgrave loyalist, departed from his script in a speech to troops at Mullingar to refer to Ó Dálaigh as a ‘thundering disgrace’, provoking the President's resignation. It is hard not to agree with the journalist Bruce Arnold in his judgement that Cosgrave overreacted to the murder, in part to wrong-foot Fianna Fail with the objective of an early election on the law-and-order issue.29 It is difficult otherwise to explain why similar measures had not been proposed after the appalling atrocity committed by the Ulster Volunteer Force when it exploded car-bombs in the centres of Dublin and Monaghan on 17 May 1974, killing thirty-three people in the worst single loss of life during the ‘Troubles’.
If Cosgrave did have an undeclared electoral agenda, the President's resignation frustrated it and intensified the authoritarian and repressive image of the government. Newspaper reports of police brutality in the interrogation of terrorist suspects by what was described as the ‘Heavy Gang’ were taken so seriously by FitzGerald that he considered pressing for an inquiry and resigning from the government if it were not granted.30 In 1975 O'Brien amended the Broadcasting Authority Act of 1960 to allow the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs to name certain organizations that would be prevented from making broadcasts and from having their members interviewed. Broadcasting by the IRA and Sinn Féin had been effectively banned from the airways since broadcasting began in the state, although neither organization was referred to in the legislation. Now, for the first time, Sinn Féin was named as a proscribed organization, and the resulting furore only enhanced the government's ‘law-and-order’ image.
If, as Garret FitzGerald claims, the coalition lost the 1977 election because ‘the people were tired of us’,31 then what J.J. Lee calls the ‘constipated’ image of Cosgrave, as opposed to the amiability of Jack Lynch, may well have played a role.32 His obvious relish in the fight against subversion, and O'Brien's ‘anti-national’ views on Northern Ireland, have been seen by some analysts as key elements in the coalition's defeat.33 The repressive image of the government may have damaged it amongst younger voters. The voting age had been reduced to eighteen for the first time, and a quarter of the electorate was under twenty-six. The coalition's appeal to this group had been hurt by Cosgrave's decision to vote against his own government's legislation on contraception. This had been prompted by a Supreme Court ruling in the McGee case in December 1973, which declared the ban on the importation of contraceptives under the 1935 Act to be unconstitutional. The government's legislation, which aimed to regularize the situation by allowing chemists to sell contraceptives to married couples, was hardly a charter for promiscuity, but worried a number of Fine Gael TDs with rural seats to defend.34 Cosgrave's vote and a number of other Fine Gael defections killed the bill. Yet, if some younger voters were dismayed by the coalition's failure on contraception, they were hardly likely to turn to Fianna Fáil, which took an unabashedly traditional line on the issue. It is also unlikely that Northern Ireland played much of a role in Cosgrave's defeat. It featured little in the campaign, and if the defeat of Conor Cruise O'Brien was seen by some as a blow struck by the electorate against revisionist views on the North, what then was the significance of Justin Keating's loss of his seat, given his unreconstructed anti-partitionism?
But, while the Irish media's fixation on the repressive and authoritarian features of the coalition and O'Brien's revisionist agenda had little impact on the electorate, it did dent the morale of many of the government's members and contribute to the decision to go to the country in June 1977. This was despite the fact that the government had another six months to run and despite signs that the economy was moving back to rapid growth and inflation was falling.35 Cosgrave was proud of the coalition's ability to hold together for four and a half years, longer than any government since the Emergency, and hopeful that a radical redrawing of constituency boundaries by the Labour Minister for Local Government, James Tully, would damage Fianna Fáil. While the infamous ‘Tullymander’ might have been effective against a moderate swing to the Opposition, what occurred in June 1977 was a massive surge to Lynch's party. For the first time since 1938, Fianna Fail won over 50 per cent of the vote, and their eighty-four seats represented a gain of fifteen. The combined vote for the coalition parties dropped from 49 per cent to 42 per cent and from seventy-three seats to sixty.36
The key to Lynch's success was a sharp turn of working-class voters towards Fianna Fáil. In 1969, 40 per cent of skilled workers voted for Fianna Fáil and 26 per cent for Labour. By 1977 the gap had widened to 54 per cent for Fianna Fail and 11 per cent for Labour.37 Disillusion with the coalition on unemployment and falling incomes was decisive, and it was transformed into a surge of support for Lynch through Fianna Fáil's first ever election manifesto, Action Plan for National Reconstruction, which was the most extravagant and reckless collection of economic pledges ever made in an Irish election. It promised to create 25,000 jobs a year, when the previous average had been around 4,000 a year. Income tax was to be cut and domestic rates abolished along with road tax. First-time house buyers were to receive a grant of £1,000.
Conor Cruise O'Brien has claimed that this audacious programme ‘bore all the hallmarks of C.J. Haughey, now again the rising star of Fianna Fáil.’38 The manifesto, however, was designed to ensure such a margin of victory that Lynch would once and for all be able to put the ‘unconstitutional element’ in the party in its place. In this sense Northern Ireland did play
a subtle and subterranean role in the election. Haughey had maintained a strong body of support within the party, and after the collapse of the power-sharing executive and the apparently bleak prospects for further political reform in the North there was an upsurge of traditional anti-partitionist sentiment within Fianna Fáil. Michael O'Kennedy, the party's new spokesman on Northern Ireland, was in awe of Haughey and in March 1975 the party published a distinctly hawkish policy document calling for a British commitment to implement an ‘ordered withdrawal’ from the North.
Haughey's post-1970 public posture of loyalty to the party and his strong performance in the Dáil as a critic of the coalition's wealth tax had led to his return to the opposition front bench in 1975 as spokesman on Health and Social Welfare. He had used his time in the political wilderness to cultivate the party's grass-roots. There was no ‘rubber chicken’ function in a rural backwater that he was not prepared to grace with his presence. Lynch, aware of Haughey's popularity with the party's foot-soldiers, hoped that a major election victory would allow him to re-establish his authority in the party. It was with this in mind that he had asked Martin O'Donoghue, Professor of Economics at Trinity College, to be a candidate in the election and write the sort of expansionist manifesto that would copper-fasten his leadership.39 Against his better economic judgement, O'Donoghue delivered the victory. Unfortunately for Lynch, the influx of new TDs included many who would look to Haughey for the strong leadership deemed necessary when O'Donoghue's strategy appeared to threaten the possibility of national bankruptcy.
Ireland Since 1939 Page 38
