Ireland Since 1939
Page 41
The more euphoric accounts of the Republic's ‘economic miracle’ need to be deflated. Gross National Product, which is the final output attributable to Irish workers, firms and government, has consistently grown less quickly than Gross Domestic Product. This is because an increasing proportion of production within the country accrues to foreigners, mainly in the form of profits going to foreign investors and as interest on the foreign debt. GDP was also overstated because of transfer pricing by multinational corporations who exploited the fact that Ireland was a low-tax jurisdiction for most corporations (10 per cent on the profits of manufacturing firms) by inflating the proportion of their overall profits that they claimed to have been generated in Ireland. Disposable income per head also grew much more slowly, in part because of unfavourable movements in the terms of trade and also because of a fall in the transfer payments from the EU as the Republic's economic success made it less eligible for such assistance.95
Ulster Unionist critics made much of the role of these transfers in generating the boom. The EU had created Structural and Cohesion funds to deal with the difficulties that the less developed and poorer members would experience in the process of creating a Single Market that began with the Single European Act in 1987 and was completed with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. The strong endorsement of both by the Irish electorate reflected government promises of Euro bounty to come. In 1992, promoting a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum on Maastricht, the Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, claimed that the Republic would receive £8 billion in the next allocation of Structural and Cohesion funds. Although this claim was inflated and received frostily in Brussels, Ireland did eventually get over £6 billion, and this was reckoned to have raised GNP by between 2 and 3 per cent. Although small in gross terms, the funds did make a very significant contribution to public expenditure in infrastructure projects, which were important in the 1990s take-off.96
All serious accounts of the boom agree that it was a product of a number of factors, of which EU funding was a real but in no way decisive one. The Single Market was much more directly important, as it made the Republic an even more attractive location for foreign investors, particularly US ones. The Republic's IDA was already offering high grants, tax breaks, and a young and skilled workforce. It had also proved adept at ‘picking winners’ - setting out to expand particular industrial sectors, including electronics, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, software and, more recently, financial services and tele-services. By the end of the 1990s leading-edge companies such as Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Kodak were all represented in Ireland. The Republic was also benefiting from the substantial increases in investment in education and training dating from the 1960s. As one US commentator noted, ‘Ireland's well-educated workforce today offers multinational businesses perhaps Europe's best ratio of skills to wages.’97
For all the complexity of the debate on the causes of the unprecedented levels of economic growth, there is little doubt that the reinvigoration of social partnership between unions, employers and the state played a fundamental domestic role.98 The National Economic and Social Council (NESC), an offspring of Lemass's corporatist initiatives in the 1960s, had in 1986 worked out an agreed strategy to escape from the vicious circle of stagnation, rising taxes and exploding debt. Haughey had used this as the basis for his negotiation of the Programme for National Recovery in 1987, which ran to 1990. It was the first of four agreements that brought the Republic through more than a decade of negotiated economic and social governance.99 The Programme for National Recovery was followed by the Programme for Economic and Social Progress (1991–3), the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (1994–7) and Partnership 2000 (1997).
In exchange for trade union support for corrective measures in fiscal policy, the government committed itself to maintaining the value of social welfare payments. In return for moderate pay rises, take-home pay was increased through tax reductions. The agreements fixed pay increases and established common ground on a range of issues from tax reform and measures to tackle poverty to exchange-rate policy and measures Ireland was to adopt to prepare for membership of a European Single Currency. Although there was some rank-and-file dissatisfaction with evidence of rocketing corporate profits while wage increases lagged behind, a dramatic drop in the number of strike days from an average of 316,000 a year in the eight years to 1987 to an average of 110,000 a year in the nine years to 1996 was an indication of the success of social partnership.
The evidence that the economic gloom of the coalition years was fast dissipating and the opposition's tacit support for the main lines of his government's economic policy encouraged Haughey to call another general election in June 1989. Although Fianna Fáil's vote dropped only marginally, it lost two seats. More importantly, while its support among middle-class voters increased, there were major losses of working-class support to Labour and the Workers' Party. With fifteen Labour Party TDs and seven from the Workers' Party, together with two left-wing independents, the Irish left had won its highest share of Dáil seats ever. Richard Sinnott noted that ‘The story of the election is undoubtedly the polarisation of the voters along class lines.’100 Fine Gael had improved its position somewhat, with an increase in its vote from 27.1 per cent to 29.3 per cent and in its seats from fifty to fifty-five. More than half of the Progressive Democrats' support was lost to Haughey's new-found economic respectability: the party's vote dropped from 11.8 per cent to 5.5 per cent and its seats from fourteen to six.
Haughey attempted to persuade Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats to continue with the ‘Tallaght Strategy’, but both now demanded a share in government, and he was forced to abandon what had hitherto been proclaimed as a central value of Fianna Fail: its refusal to consider forming a coalition with another party. By entering into government with the Progressive Democrats in July 1989, Haughey finally ended the pretence that Fianna Fail was a ‘national movement’ and not a mere political party. At the time, the deal with their former colleagues that brought Desmond O'Malley and Bobby Molloy into the cabinet represented a deep ‘cultural shock’ to many in Fianna Fáil.101 Yet by jettisoning the traditional imperative to form only a single party government, Haughey had placed his party in a better position to maintain a dominant role in what had become a much more fragmented party system. Now it could tack to the right or left, forming alliances with the Progressive Democrats or Labour and the Workers’ Party. Ironically, the greatest obstacle to the full development of this new flexibility was Haughey himself. He remained anathema to many on the Irish left. This was not for his economic viewpoint, which, apart from his Thatcherite lapse in 1980, was rhetorically Keynesian, even Peronist. Rather it reflected the fact that the 1980s had witnessed intense debates on moral issues and Northern Ireland during which Haughey had positioned his party on the side of traditional Catholic values and irredentism.
A Church under Pressure
Two decades of rapid economic growth after 1959, urbanization, a new openness to the outside world and sweeping cultural change created the conditions for fierce debates over the Catholic Church's teachings on sexual behaviour and morality. An important factor in promoting change was the increase in the participation of women in the labour force. From partition to the 1960s, the opportunities for female participation in paid employment had been restricted by the South's lack of a significant manufacturing sector, particularly one with industries that tended to employ women.102 In 1961, 28.5 per cent of women and only 5.2 per cent of married women were economically active in the South, compared with 35.3 per cent and 19.5 per cent in the North. By 1995 the respective figures were 38.5 per cent of women and 36.6 per cent of married women in the South and 62 per cent of women and 64.2 per cent of married women in the North. Thus, even in the 1990s the proportion of women in the labour force in the South was still below the EU average of 45 per cent.103
The mass entry of married women into the labour market and the expansion of higher education formed the background in Western developed
countries to the impressive expansion of feminist movements from the 1960s on.104 Ireland's participation in these developments was later and more muted but significant none the less. Together with an urbanized, better educated and younger population in a society less insulated from the materialist values of consumer capitalism, they represented a major challenge to the defenders of traditional Catholic values.
The Irish Catholic Church had shown only very limited signs of responding to the far-reaching alterations in liturgy, theology, Church government and ecumenism promoted by the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). There was a process of liturgical renewal and a limited expansion of a lay role in Church government. Although there was no objection when, in 1972, the government proposed the deletion of Article 44 of the Constitution, which had accorded a ‘special position’ to the Catholic Church, Ireland experienced no ecumenical revolution, with inter-church activity often restricted to ‘rarefied theological discussion’.105 The Irish Church's conservatism was most obvious in its undeviating support for Humanae Vitae, the encyclical of Pope Paul VI, in 1968, which had come out against all artificial means of contraception. The hierarchy was relentless in its opposition to any change in the law on contraceptives despite the Supreme Court decision in the Magee case in 1973 and the fact that opinion polls showed a growing level of public support for legalization.106
This stance contributed to the weakening of the Church's moral authority in the 1970s and 1980s. It provided the impetus for the development of the Irish women's movement when, in 1971, feminists took a train from Dublin to Belfast in order to buy contraceptives and import them into the Republic in defiance of the 1935 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, which proscribed their sale, importation, advertisement and distribution.107 The failure of the coalition's attempt to reform the law in 1974 led to the formation of a Contraception Action Programme, a pressure group composed of women's groups and Labour Party activists, including Senator Mary Robinson, who forced the coalition's hand by introducing her own, much more liberal bill in the Seanad. It was their activist campaign that began to influence the public mood and made reform an issue in the 1977 election, inducing Fianna Fáil to give a commitment to introduce legislation. The Health (Family Planning) Bill was introduced by Charles Haughey in December 1978 and declared by him to be ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’. It provided for the availability of contraceptives on prescription where the doctor was satisfied that they were sought ‘bona fide for the purpose of family planning’.108 It was a minimalist response to a situation where couples were increasingly using birth-control methods without concern for the law.
Despite its limited nature, the legislation contributed to a growing traditionalist backlash. Following the example of ‘pro-life’ pressure groups in the US and Britain, the initiative came from lay Catholics rather than from the clergy or the hierarchy. The fundamentalists had been given major encouragement by the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979, which the Irish hierarchy had organized with the purpose of stemming what it perceived as the rising tide of materialism and secularism. The Polish pope, smarting after an Italian referendum in favour of divorce and with an ongoing campaign to legalize abortion in Italy (which would be successful in 1981), depicted Ireland as a proud centre of the faith but warned that forces were working to tempt it away from this historic role. In his address at Limerick the Pope called for a continuing Irish witness to ‘the dignity and sacredness of all human life, from conception to death’.109
Abortion was illegal in Ireland under the 1861 Offences against the Person Act, but was not expressly forbidden in the Constitution. The religious right feared that a successful campaign by feminists and Dublin liberals and leftists might result in its legalization. An Irish branch of the British Society for the Unborn Child was established in the aftermath of the Pope's visit, and in 1981 the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) was founded to push a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion. Taking advantage of the unprecedented degree of governmental instability in the early 1980s, the PLAC had no problems in getting pledges from both FitzGerald and Haughey that they would support the holding of a referendum on abortion. Before it left office in 1982, the Haughey government introduced its proposed wording for an amendment to the Constitution: ‘The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and as far as is practical by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.’ Back in government in 1983, FitzGerald rejected the Fianna Fall wording, but this was eventually endorsed by the Dáil with the support of Fine Gael and Labour Party defectors.
Voting took place on 7 September 1983 following a campaign that reached levels of acrimony ‘probably not witnessed in Ireland since the post-Treaty campaigning by rival sides in 1922’.110 Although the amendment was passed, the referendum was a disappointment for the Church. Of those who voted, 66.5 per cent were in favour of the amendment, but only 54.6 per cent of those eligible had actually voted, reflecting a feeling amongst a sector of the population that the referendum was an unnecessary distraction from more pressing economic and social issues.
At the time some argued that the low turnout and the fact that the amendment was carried with only the slimmest of majorities in Dublin boded ill for the future of traditional Catholic values.111 It was true that there was continuing evidence of large-scale rejection of the Church's position on contraception, particularly amongst the young and the university-educated urban middle class. It was this that induced the coalition government to introduce new family-planning legislation in 1985. Its most notable provision allowed for the sale of contraceptives to anyone aged over eighteen. It was passed by the Dáil despite the opposition of the Catholic hierarchy, opportunistically tail-ended by Fianna Fail. Desmond O'Malley refused to vote against the bill, arguing that the Fáil had to prove itself free to legislate on such matters regardless of the teaching of the Catholic Church. For this and his declaration that he would stand by the concept of a secular republic, he was expelled from Fianna Fail. Within a year he was leading the Progressive Democrats, a party whose main dynamic came from the secularizing impulses of the urban middle class.112
That such a secularizing trend was still relatively weak was shown in 1986 when the coalition failed in its attempt to legalize divorce, which was proscribed under Article 41 of the 1937 Constitution. The hierarchy made clear its opposition to the proposed constitutional amendment and the associated divorce legislation in a leaflet delivered to every home in the country. The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Kevin McNamara, warned that ‘divorce would generate a social and moral fallout as lethal as the effects from the recent accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station.’113 As in 1983 the traditionalist campaign was spearheaded by a coalition of lay Catholic groups headed by the Family Solidarity organization. It amplified the Church's moral arguments, with an appeal to material insecurities connected with property and inheritance rights and visions of deserted and impoverished mothers with starving children.114 The result was a second defeat for the liberal agenda. On a turnout of 60.5 per cent, the amendment was rejected by 63.5 per cent to 36.5 per cent. There was little consolation to be drawn from the fact that the amendment was supported by a small majority of Dublin voters. Optimistic liberals argued that the low turnout in both referenda and that concerns about land and property ownership as well as succession rights were important influences in the divorce referendum showed that traditionalism was on the wane. Yet, when a further referendum was held nine years later, the amendment in favour of divorce was carried only by a paper-thin majority.115
This was hardly a ringing endorsement of pluralism, particularly given that there had been a number of major blows to the religious right and the moral authority of the Catholic Church in the early 1990s. In 1992 a fourteen-year-old girl who was pregnant as a result of rape was prevented from seeking an abortion in Britain by an injunction obtained by the Irish Attorney-General and a subsequent High Court decision that
forbade her to leave the jurisdiction for nine months. An appeal to the Supreme Court produced a ruling that the 1983 amendment did in fact provide for abortion when, as in this case, there was a real threat to the life of the mother through a possible suicide.116 The ‘X’ case complicated the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, as the government had previously obtained a protocol in the Treaty designed to ensure that future EU law could not override the 1983 amendment. An attempt to regularize the situation with a further and more restrictive amendment failed to satisfy either side of the debate and was rejected.
To the disarray of the religious right was added the discomfiture of the Church as a result of a series of clerical sex scandals that dominated the media and fascinated and repulsed the public. In 1992 the Irish Times revealed that the high-profile Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, had fathered a child when he was Bishop of Kerry in the 1970s. He had pressurized the mother to have the child adopted and then used diocesan funds to make payments to ensure the mother's silence.117 Even more damaging for the Church was a deluge of charges that there had been an institutional cover-up of the sexual and physical abuse of children by priests and members of religious orders. The dam broke in the autumn of 1994 when Father Brendan Smyth was convicted in a Belfast court of sexually abusing children. A subsequent television documentary revealed that he had a record of paedophilia in Ireland, the US and Britain that had been known to his own order and other Church authorities who had shielded him by moving him to another parish whenever complaints arose. Exposures of the physical and sexual abuse of children by members of religious orders, male and female, who had been responsible for running residential institutions quickly followed.