Sins of the Father

by Conor McCabe

  Even today, after all that has happened, there are alternatives. They are present in the work produced by the likes of the Nevin Economic Research Institute; TASC; NIPSA; Trademark Belfast; Social Justice Ireland; Unite; MANDATE; Research on Money and Finance; the New Economics Foundation; ATTAC; Syriza; Dexter Whitfield; Yanis Varoufakis; and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, to name just a few. There are many others across Europe engaged in struggles against the dominance of the financial rentiers in political, social and economic life. It is incumbent upon us to learn more about the work they do.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  i Fintan O’Toole, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (London, 2009), p.219.

  ii The Irish Times, 20 December 2008.

  iii Ibid., 14 February 2009; 15 June 2009.

  iv Fintan O’Toole is an exception here, as he consistently highlighted the moral failings of Irish businesses and financial institutions for almost thirty years. His is no ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion.

  v Shane Ross, The Bankers: How the Banks Brought Ireland to its Knees (London, 2009), p.271.

  1. HOUSING

  1 Ruth McManus, ‘Blue Collars, “Red Forts” and Green Fields: Working-Class Housing in Ireland in the Twentieth Century’, International Labor and Working Class History, No.64 (Fall, 2003), p.52.

  2 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), p.49.

  3 Tony Fahey, Brian Nolan and Bertrand Maître, Housing, Poverty and Wealth in Ireland (Dublin: Combat Poverty Agency, 2004), p.20.

  4 British Medical Journal, 23 June 1906, p.1,494.

  5 Michelle Norris, ‘Housing’, in Mark Callanan & Justin F. Keogan, Local Government in Ireland Inside Out (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2003), p.169. Additional figures relating to labourers’ cottages are from this source.

  6 President W.T. Cosgrave, 1 April 1925.

  7 The Irish Times, 3 May 1923.

  8 Ibid., 3 January 1921.

  9 Ibid., 26 February 1924.

  10 Quoted in Ruth McManus, Dublin 1910-1940: Shaping the City & Suburbs (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), p.359.

  11 Quoted in McManus, Dublin, p.358.

  12 McManus, Dublin, p.81.

  13 The Irish Times, 24 May 1924.

  14 Ibid., 12 November 1924.

  15 Dáil Debates, Vol.6, 25 January 1924, pp629-30.

  16 Cathal O’Connell, The State and Housing in Ireland: Ideology, Policy and Practice (New York, 2007), p.25.

  17 McManus, Dublin, p.80.

  18 The Irish Times, 2 September 1925.

  19 McManus, Dublin, p.182.

  20 The Irish Times, 21 May 1925.

  21 Ibid., 8 June 1925.

  22 Ibid., 21 May 1925.

  23 Ibid., 26 November 1927.

  24 Ibid., 29 September 1926.

  25 McManus, ‘Red Forts’, p.46.

  26 Murray Fraser, John Bull’s Other Homes: State Housing and British Policy in Ireland, 1883-1922 (Liverpool, 1996), p.284.

  27 Fraser, p.162.

  28 Report of Inquiry into the Housing of the Working Classes of the City of Dublin 1939/43 (Dublin, 1943), p.25.

  29 Report, p.35.

  30 McManus, Dublin, p.212.

  31 Ibid., p.220.

  32 McManus, ‘Red Forts’, p.46.

  33 Ibid., p.50.

  34 The Irish Times, 8 February 1940.

  35 Ibid., 30 May 1940.

  36 McManus, Dublin, p.225.

  37 Quoted in McManus, ‘Red Forts’, p.48.

  38 The Irish Times, 22 January 1948.

  39 Ibid., 26 July 1948.

  40 Ibid., 21 September 1946.

  41 Ibid., 16 July 1949.

  42 Ibid., 15 October 1952.

  43 Ibid., 26 May 1956.

  44 Ibid., 24 May 1957.

  45 Leo Grebler, ‘National Programs for Urban Renewal in Western Europe’, Land Economics, Vol.38, No.4 (November 1962), p.12.

  46 The Irish Times, 5 October 1963.

  47 Ibid., 9 February 1966.

  48 Norris, ‘Housing’, p.173.

  49 Fahey, Nolan & Maître, p.21.

  50 Census ’91, Volume 10: Housing (1997), pp42-3.

  51 Housing in the Seventies (1969), p.9.

  52 The Irish Times, 10 February 1973.

  53 Ibid., 26 September 1973.

  54 Ibid., 26 September 1973.

  55 Ibid., 1 November 1974.

  56 Ibid., 18 February 1971; 1 November 1974; 28 August 1974.

  57 Ibid., 28 August 1974.

  58 Ibid., 13 December 1974.

  59 Ibid., 10 January 1975.

  60 Ibid., 19 March 1975.

  61 Ibid., 28 October 1987.

  62 Minister for the Environment, John Boland, in response to a question on the £5,000 Surrender Grant Scheme, Dáil Eireann, 10 June 1986.

  63 The Irish Times, 29 March 1985.

  64 O’Connell, p.48.

  65 Ibid., p.48.

  66 The Irish Times, 29 March 1985.

  67 Dáil Debates, 10 June 1986, Vol.367, Paragraph 1,529.

  68 O’Connell, p.48.

  69 Ibid., p.50.

  70 Ibid., p.50.

  71 The Irish Times, 6 April 1987.

  72 Ibid., 1 April 1987.

  73 O’Connell, p.47.

  74 The Irish Times, 25 June 1988.

  75 Ibid., 25 June 1988.

  76 Department of the Environment, Heritage, and Local Government, ‘House Loans Approved and Paid by Year, House Type New or Second hand and Statistic’ (accessed 15 October 2010).

  77 The Irish Times, 26 April 1989.

  78 Unnamed member of the Irish accountancy industry, quoted in The Irish Times, 15 August 1988.

  79 The Irish Times, 15 August 1988.

  80 Ibid., 22 September 1988.

  81 Ibid., 25 February 1988.

  82 Ibid., 15 August 1988.

  83 Ibid., 8 December 1988.

  84 Ibid., 8 December 1988.

  85 Ibid., 24 November 1988.

  86 Ibid., 17 May 1989.

  87 Ibid. 16 January 1992.

  88 Ibid., 24 February 1993.

  89 Ibid., 27 January 1994.

  90 Ibid., 22 July 1994.

  91 Ibid., 18 November 1994.

  92 Ibid., 2 September 1994.

  93 Ibid., 2 September 1994.

  94 Ibid., 3 September 1994.

  95 Ibid., 24 September 1994.

  96 Ibid., 24 September 1994.

  97 Ibid., 25 October 1994.

  98 Ibid., 3 February 1995.

  99 Fahey, Social Housing in Ireland (Dublin, 1999), p.5.

  100 Dermot Coates & Michelle Norris, Supplementary Welfare Allowance, Rent Supplement: Implications for the Implementation of the Rental Accommodation Scheme (Dublin, 2006), p.54.

  101 A House of your Own (1967), p.7.

  102 Anonymous, quoted in The Irish Times, 19 March 1998.

  103 The Irish Times, 3 February 1998.

  104 ‘McCreevy Announces Green Light For New Urban & Rural Renewal Schemes’, Department of Finance press release, 23 June 1999 (accessed 21 October 2010).

  105 The Irish Times, 7 January 1999.

  106 Ibid., 1 February 1999.

  107 Urban and Rural Renewal Tax Incentive Schemes (1999), TSG 99/32, Paragraph 34

  108 ‘An Estimate of Vacant Housing in Ireland’, http://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/an-estimate-of-vacant-housing-in-ireland/ (accessed 23 October 2010).

  109 The Irish Times, 8 October 2007.

  110 Census 2002: Volume 13: Housing (Dublin, 2004), Table 19, p.42.

  111 Eurostat Yearbook 2010, p.332. Eurostat puts Irish home ownership at 79 per cent for 2007, whereas the 2006 census puts it at just under 75 per cent. The discrepancy appears to be due to Eurostat, which seems to have calculated the level of renting in the State (just over 20 per cent) and subtracted this figure from the total. There are a number of households which are rent-free but not owner-occupied, and this explai
ns the difference. Even with the higher rate of home ownership in the Eurostat figures, Ireland is eighteenth out of the twenty-nine countries listed. For more detailed figures see Europe in Figures – Eurostat Yearbook 2010: Living Conditions and Welfare (tables and graphs), figure 6.13.

  112 Ship of Fools, p.102.

  2. AGRICULTURE

  1 An obvious exception here is concrete and other building materials. For more on this, see Chapter Three.

  2 Digest of evidence taken before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the state of the law and practice in respect to the occupation of land in Ireland. Part I, House of Lords, Vol. XXXV (1847), p.73.

  3 Dáil Debates, 19 September 1922, paragraph 443.

  4 Mary E. Daly, Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, 1922-1939 (New York, 1992), p.15.

  5 The Irish Times, 8 March 1926. Total export sales are listed at £49,752,313, which is £1.83 million short of the figure cited by Daly. The 35 per cent figure is based on The Irish Times estimate.

  6 Raymond Crotty, Farming Collapse: National Opportunity (Naas, 1990), p.5.

  7 Sir William Petty, A Treatise of Ireland (1687), preface (accessed online, 26 July 2010 http://www.taieb.net/auteurs/Petty/pastimes1.html#00).

  8 Donald Woodward, ‘The Anglo-Irish Livestock Trade of the Seventeenth Century’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol.18, No.72 (September 1973), p.514.

  9 Woodward, p.490.

  10 John Feehan, Farming in Ireland: History, Heritage and Environment (Dublin, 2003), p.111.

  11 Alice Effie Murray, A History of the Commercial and Financial Relations between England and Ireland from the Period of the Restoration (London, 1903), p.24.

  12 William J. Smyth, ‘Landholding changes, kinship networks and class formation in rural Ireland: a case study from Co. Tipperary’, Irish Geography, Vol. XXI (1983), p.20.

  13 Quoted in Raymond Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production: Its Volume and Structure (Cork, 1966), p.16.

  14 Michael Beames, Peasants and Power: the Whiteboy Movements and Their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Sussex, 1983), p.27. Tithes were taxes paid to the Church of Ireland.

  15 Beames, p.27. The Whiteboys were a secret agrarian society that used violent tactics to defend the rights of tenant farmers.

  16 Feehan, p.111.

  17 Ibid., p.112.

  18 Crotty, p.53.

  19 Feehan, p.121.

  20 Occupation of Land in Ireland, p.73.

  21 S.H. Cousens, ‘The regional pattern of emigration during the Great Irish Famine, 1846-51’, Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers) no.28 (1960), p.121.

  22 Paul Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858-82 (Dublin,1978), p.9.

  23 Fergus Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland 1891-1921 (Oxford, 2008), pp12-13.

  24 Bew, p.223.

  25 Quoted in Tony Varley, ‘A region of sturdy smallholders? Western nationalists and agrarian politics during the First World War’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, Vol.55 (2003), p.142, note no.2.

  26 Leitrim Observer, 6 April 1907.

  27 Campbell, p.92.

  28 Paul Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890-1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 2002), p.140.

  29 Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900-2000 (London, 2004), p.69.

  30 P.L. Curran, Kerry and Dexter Cattle (Dublin, 1990), p.3.

  31 Commission of Inquiry into the Resources and Industries of Ireland, Report on Stock-Breeding Farms for Pure-Bred Dairy Cattle (Dublin, 1921), p.12.

  32 Quoted in The Irish Times, 27 August 1910.

  33 Agricultural Statistics 1847-1926: Reports and Tables (1928), pp88-89.

  34 William J. Smyth, ‘Landholding changes, kinship networks and class formation in rural Ireland: a case study from Co. Tipperary’, Irish Geography, Vol. XVI (1983), pp27,33.

  35 Daly, p.16.

  36 John O’Donovan, The Economic History of Live Stock in Ireland (Cork, 1940), p.381.

  37 Dáil Reports, 23 January 1924, paragraph 497.

  38 Paul Rouse, Ireland’s Own Soil: Government and Agriculture in Ireland, 1945-1965 (Dublin, 2000), p.47.

  39 George O’Brien, ‘Patrick Hogan: Minister for Agriculture 1922-32’, Studies 25 (1936), p.355.

  40 J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989), p.115.

  41 Daly, p.17.

  42 Rouse, p.9.

  43 Daly, p.17.

  44 The Irish Times, 27 January 1925. This was not the hyperbole it seems. The death rate among children under one year in the city was 116 per 1,000, or 11.6 per cent. With regard to children born to mothers covered by the Coombe clinic, Dr Crichton found the death rate to be around 193 per 1,000, or 19.3 per cent. The death rate in the trenches in the First World War was around 10 per cent.

  45 The Irish Times, 16 January 1925.

  46 Ibid., 16 January 1925.

  47 Ibid., 18 September 1925.

  48 Daly, p.19.

  49 Ibid., p.16.

  50 The Irish Times, 8 April 1924.

  51 Daly, p.22.

  52 Lee, p.115.

  53 Ibid., p.117.

  54 Daly, p.22.

  55 Ibid., p.23.

  56 Ibid., p.21.

  57 Ibid., p.37.

  58 The Irish Times, 1 May 1930.

  59 Peter Neary & Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Protection, economic war and structural change: the 1930s in Ireland,’ Irish Historical Studies, Vol.27, No.107 (May 1991), p.254.

  60 Neary & Ó Gráda, pp252-3.

  61 Rouse, p.15.

  62 Kieran Kennedy, Thomas Giblin & Deirdre McHugh, The Economic Development of Ireland in the Twentieth Century (London, 1988), p.40.

  63 Quoted in Neary & Ó Gráda, p.254.

  64 Daly, p.78. There is some dispute as to how many new jobs were actually created during the period 1926-1936. Daly says that ‘it seems probable that up to 40,000 industrial jobs were generated in the years 1932 to 1936’. For more on this see Daly, pp75-81.

  65 Neary & Ó Gráda, p.255.

  66 Kennedy, Giblin & McHugh, p.44.

  67 Rouse, p.16.

  68 Seanad Debates, Vol.16, 15 December 1932, paragraph 559.

  69 Dáil Debates, Vol.44, 10 November 1932, paragraph 1,417. Ryan also said that an increase in wheat production would mean that Ireland ‘would be more secure in case food supplies were cut off for any reason, such as a shipping strike, a war, or anything of that sort’. See paragraphs 1,399-1,400.

  70 Rouse, p.16.

  71 Crotty, pp146-7.

  72 Ibid., p.146.

  73 Rouse, p.17.

  74 Dáil Debates, Vol.41, 11 May 1932, paragraph 1,463.

  75 Rouse, p.17.

  76 Ibid., p.17.

  77 Foster, Modern Ireland, p.541.

  78 Rouse, p.124.

  79 de Valera in a speech to small farmers and labourers in Sligo. See The Irish Times, 7 July 1930.

  80 Dáil Debates, Vol.41, 11 May 1932, paragraph 1,463.

  81 Rouse, pp55-56.

  82 Ibid., p.56.

  83 Ibid., p.59.

  84 Ibid., p.50.

  85 Ibid., p.95. The following account of Irish agriculture from 1945 to 1957 draws heavily from Ireland’s Own Soil, pp50-118, and all quotes used are from this source, unless otherwise stated.

  86 Ibec Technical Services Corporation, An Appraisal of Ireland’s Industrial Potentials (New York: 1952), p.70. All subsequent quotes from the cattle section of Appraisal are taken from pp70-8.

  87 The Irish Times, 12 November 1958.

  88 Ibid., 28 September 1957.

  3. INDUSTRY

  1 The Irish Times, 4 August 2007.

  2 Figures taken from website of the National Treasury Management Agency, http://www.ntma.ie/NationalDebt/levelOfDebt.php (accessed 20 August 2010).

  3 ‘Ireland is in Top 10 Exporters of Services in 2009’, ‘Progressive Economy Blog’, http://www.progressive-econ
omy.ie/2010/05/ireland-is-in-top-10-exporters-of.html (Accessed 20 August 2010).

  4 The Irish Times, 24 February 2007.

  5 Ibid., 8 June 2007.

  6 Ibid., 10 December 2007.

  7 ‘Statement on the Budget by the Taoiseach Mr Brian Cowen TD’, Dáil Éireann, Thursday 10 December 2009, at 11 a.m.

  8 IDA Annual Report 2009 (2010), p.20.

  9 IDA, p.19; Bloomberg, ‘Ireland’s Economy Resumes Growth After Two-Year Recession as Exports Jump,’ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-30/irish-economy-resumes-growth-after-two-year-recession-as-exports-jump.html (accessed 23 August 2010).

  10 Bernadette Whelan, ‘The New World and the Old: American Marshall Planners in Ireland, 1947-57’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol.12 (2001), p.180.

  11 Whelan, p.180.

  12 Ibid., p.188.

  13 Ibid., p.187.

  14 The Irish Times, 26 January 1956.

  15 Ibid., 8 February 1956.

  16 Ibid., 9 August 1955.

  17 Ibid., 8 February 1956.

  18 Ibid., 8 November 1955.

  19 Ibid., 31 January 1956.

  20 Dáil Debates, 2 July 1957, Vol.163, paragraph 453.

  21 The Irish Times, 19 January 1955.

  22 Ibid., 10 April 1957.

  23 Ibid., 22 November 1958.

  24 Second Programme for Economic Expansion: Laid by the Government before each House of the Oireachtas, August, 1963 (1963), p.19.

  25 Kevin C. Kearns, ‘Industrialization and Regional Development in Ireland, 1958-72’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol.33 (July 1974), p.302.

  26 The Irish Times, 7 May 1965.

  27 Patrick O’Farrell, Regional Industrial Development Trends in Ireland, 1960-1973 (Dublin, 1975), p.52.

  28 O’Farrell, p.14. Total costs for the period 1960-1973 have been indexed at 1973 values.

  29 O’Farrell, p.37.

  30 The Irish Times, 15 November 1966.

  31 Ibid., 15 November 1966.

  32 New Scientist, 10 June 1971, p.608.

  33 Ibid., 13 August 1987, p.48.

  34 Ibid., 13 August 1987, p.48.

  35 Ibid., 13 August 1987, p.48.

  36 The Irish Times, 10 January 1961.

  37 Andrew MacLaran, Patrick Malone & Cecil Beamish, Property and the Urban Environment: Dublin (Dublin, 1985), p.68.