IRISH GOVERNMENT  A CRITIQUE
1942

 -  1942
 Dear 	 [A Nation again]
 After seven and a half centuries wandering in the stygian caves of  wars, persecutions, dissensions, frustrations, we emerged twenty years ago, abruptly and self-consciously into the light of nationhood.   The story of these seven hundred years, daintily unified in the shining pages of our school history books was made for us a tale of never-ending struggle for something that was condensed into "Irish freedom";  and when in our school days of 1922 the Treaty was made, we were merely relighting the fire that had gone out in 1169!   Granted, there was still the question of the 1fourth green field', and its pogroms, of which we got scanty mrosels of news from those Brothers who had lived there, but taking it all in all, the fleece had been won, freedom attained, and everything was to be for the best in a peaceful and prosperous world.
I can still recall the shock when a certain lay teacher of Gaedhilg (whose apparel of breeches and green stockings will recall him to your mind) whispered to us that there was a big cleavage of opinion  "amongst the boys" over the Treaty, and that it was likely to provide us with trouble as unpleasant as any that had gone before. Here was the first inkling I had that there was more than one opinion on the meaning of the 'freedom' for which so many  generations of Irishmen had wrestled.  Roisin Dhu had a dual personality.  And when, in the years of our adolescence, I began  to understand and appraise, to some extent, the conflicting views of the pro and anti-Treatyites, I became aware of echo voices outside this arena calling for Economic Freedom, Religious Tolerance, Social Justice, Financial Freedom, Gaelic Revival, and  all the rest.  And I wondered at the clamour - were we not all of  one mind on the matter?
[Before the Treaty]
Now, when I look back on the history of our country, the Gael and the Gaul, the Clans and the Earls, on the pro-Stuarts and the Republicans, and the Catholic Emancipationists and the Home Rulers,  and the cross-currents and the cross-purposes, I marvel that we ever

attained to 1922 at all.   If peace between Ireland and Britain had come about in our time otherwise than through the blood and  bitterness of 1916-21, what measure of agreement would have survived between leaders of Irish opinion, even were there no Treaty-differences to divide them?  What policy of administration had been  formulated that would have satisfied the desires of Pearse,  Connolly, Griffith, Yeats, Russell, Plunkett?  We were to be truly Republican, Democratic, Gaelic, Social, Religious - but where was the plan to give body to all these spirits;  to unify factors that were strongly suspected of being antipathetic to each other?
What might have happened had the circumstances been different, had our leaders had a free hand to devise and build at their liberty and  leisure, one can only guess.   But when peace came in the way it came, we improvised.  And we have been improvising ever since.
One of the strongest features of our new national existence has been  the pathetic affection we have cherished for the ways and manners of our late oppressors.   The Constitution of the Free State enabled us to have a form of government that was almost an exact replica of the 'Mother of Parliaments'.   And although some would have it that the Free State Constitution was thrust on us, the figures of the plebisciti on the new one are a measure of our reluctance to part  with the old.
When one considers the greatness of Britain, the longevity of her  institutions, her standard of living, her people's respect for her code of justice, it would be folly to deny that there was much we could learn from her.  We might have learned without complete  imitation.
[Present System of administration]
In this country every adult, man and woman, has an equal say in electing those we wish to rule over us.  We have an opportunity of  changing our minds about them at frequent intervals.  We have a  watchdog in our President that will keep them between the traces of the constitution that we voluntarily adopted.  We have a cabinet,  customarily chosen from those whom we chose, each member of which  sits on the apex of one facet or other of the polyhedron that is our

national life.   (I borrow the metaphor from Desmond Fitzgerald).  And he (or remember it may be she) directs and is advised by a body  of public servants, with a good measure of intellectual gifts and which is unworried by the fickleness of public opinion that may topple their masters.  Altogether, a system, you might say at a glance, of excellent virtue, though of course without the Divine  benediction that its champions are wont to claim for it.  Add to all this a judiciary of unchallenged integrity, public men of undoubted good will, a people with a long and a strong Catholic tradition, a land of sufficiency if not of plenty, - and it would seem that we should have lighted in this corner of the earth a  beacon for all the world beyond.
[Symptoms of disease]
If you visit those country places where you spent your school  holidays and find them deserted by the pals of your boyhood;  if you  go down Gardiner St. after lunch and see the ooze of apathetic men from the Labour Exchange, or listen to the more fiery groups that congregate in Beresford Place;  if you note the stream of  propertyless provincials that is flooding into the capital to refill our slums;  if you see the restless queue of children with their tight-gripped pennies outside the Cinemas;  if you read of the adolescent contempt for rank and property and institution - you must ask yourself where have we gone wrong.
Of answers there are plenty.   Some saying (and do I gather you are  one of these?) that we but need, as individuals, a spiritual  renaissance.   Others, that it is our alliance with sterling.   One fellow holding (in the words of the Paycock) that all is god and no man, and the other fellow arguing that all is man and no god.
[Faults of our present system]
I do not suppose there is any single or simple solution.   But if some of our ills can be traced back to the rules in which we have  voluntarily bound ourselves, and if these rules can be changed  without disadvantage, should we not change them?  Let us have  another look at our system of government.  We elect our rulers - but do we select them?

Almost as soon as the first adminsitration began to function, party organisations were set afoot.   The Treaty, its acceptance or rejection, provided the first main difference between the two  largest groups.   If there had not been this cause of contention,  no doubt we would have discovered others.  At the moment, when the  differences between the two main groups are more obscure, their separate identities are vigorously maintained.   More regrettable is the presence of a Labour Party.  Not that I think for a moment  that organised Labour has not a right to and need for a voice in the highest councils of the State;  but that it should take the form of a political party seems to me to be bound to result in the setting of one class against another within the State.   This is to be deplored;  and if it should happen that a Labour government, carrying out a policy of even the mildest socialism should alternate every few years with a government of conservative or re-actionary views, the result for the country could not be anything but catastrophic.   That danger may not be acute here, as organised labour represents but a small proportion of our adult population, and our differences so far have been mainly political.   But even Britain, with its much longer tradition of parliamentary government has come close to disaster on occasions in the past hundred years through such a course.
[Political parties]
This, then, is how our parliament is formed, by members of political parties, selected by these parties, and sustained in their candidature by the finances and organisation of these parties.  There is no spontaneous eruption of our deputies from the community.  Nor could it well be otherwise.   Electoral districts are large and candidature is a costly business.   Besides, popular appeal and public oratory may not be attributes of those who would be best fitted to govern us.   The Government is put into power and kept  there by the largest parliamentary party.  There is no compromise, no picking out of the best administrators in the parliament.   The majority party takes exclusive control and occupies all the ministries.   The next biggest is accorded official recognition as  the chief opposition.  Mark the word, opposition!

And the tides of government ebb and flow, the party in power ensuring the passing of its legislation by rigid discipline of its members;  the opposition concentrating its forces on the discomforture of the government not only in the parliament but  through the length and breadth of the land.  All this punctuated by very occasional and equally grudging acknowledgements of each others honesty of purpose.  What of the citizen in all this?  He is told to obey and uphold those who rule over him, he is also told  they are arrant fools who are leading him to his doom.   He is asked to appreciate (in his average mind, remember) fine distinctions between private and public life, between persons and officials, between parties and governments, and all too often it is beyond him.
[The Mandate]
To add to the citizen's confusion there is a matter of "mandate". This is an authority which a government claims to have got from the  citizens for the operation of a programme put before them at an election.   This programme may have contained a diversity of problems, enough to puzzle the Brains Trust.   There may be  questions of Protection and Free Trade, Taxes and Bounties, Central  Banks and National relations, all combined together into one prospectus to which each citizen who has attained the age of one-and-twenty is invited and empowered to answer a single yes or no.
There is of course no constitutional provision that such a mandate be obtained, nor, if obtained, is there any constitutional obligation on the government to abide by it.  A deal of danger  attaches to this new convention.   If a government on taking office should think it wiser or more expedient to temporise on the  programme for which it got its mandate, or to exceed it, may not the electors accuse it of breach of faith and logically enough, deny it their allegiance?
There is another aspect to it.  A party might appeal to a majority on a programme that would do an injustice to a minority.   "The greatest good of the greatest number" is a catchword popularly associated with democracy and is often not too well understood or  too carefully examined by those who use it.   It cannot be construed

 as a justification for not dealing equitably with a minority.   But where parties are canvassing the votes of the majority a temptation exists to make promises that will not have due regard to the rights  of others.  And if such promises are later regarded as a mandate, what then?
[Advantage of present system]
I think I should interupt the enumeration of the defects of our  system to recall the fact (should you have forgotten it) that the system has undoubted advantages.  And I recall you to it, for  several reasons.   Firstly, no change should be attempted for the sake of change.   If we alter, let us alter for the better. Secondly, if there are features of our present sytem that are  indispensable to the proper regulation of our national life, they  should be incorporated in the new.  We are, by tradition, a  conservative people, suspicious of change.   Any alteration must come about with understanding and good-will.
One of the features it is vital to retain in any new system would be a facility for changing the government by peaceful means. Again, the government must be representative of the entire community, which postulates some manner of election, though not  necessarily direct suffrage of all adults.  The presidency, providing a titular leadership of the State and a protector of the  constitution, is another factor to be retained.   Parliamentary  control over the Army, independence of the judiciary, freedora of  religious worship, these are all essentials.   There is also our heritage of freedom of opinion, the right to every man to his own  view and to state it if it does not offend against the morals or  religion of the people, or against public security.
Can we not have all these things and yet rid ourselves of those absurd political conventions that deny to the community the blessing of the combined wisdom of all her sons;  conventions that set us all  at loggerheads, party against party, class against class?  Can we not honestly admit the force of pretending that each man and woman (it would be truer to say boy and girl) of twenty-one years of age can analyse and pass judgement on every one of the complex problems  that beset our modern society?  But yet devise a system that will

enable each citizen, according to his ability and position in life, to take his part, not every five years but day by day in the running  of the country?
[The case for group formation - Fr Devane]
These considerations seem to me to lead to the conclusion that all members of the Community must be brought into a series of local vocational permanent organisations that will be represented in some  form of council, and that this council will direct the economic life  of the state.   This, you will say, is corporativism.  Maybe - for my own part I dislike using "isms" as I have never heard two exponents of the same "ism" agree even on its essentials.
I must digress here for a moment.   Fr Devane in speaking of the guild organisation of Europe of the middle ages, put forward the view that the "Reformation" with its emphasis on the individual,  destroyed first the communal form of religion, and successively, the communal organisation of society.  That people who were taught to think as individuals spiritually, came also in the course of time to think of themselves as complete social units.   Certainly the seal was put on this outlook by the French revolution.   Fr Devane drew attention to the present tendency of European leaders, in  Russia, in Germany, in Pétain's France, to urge a return to the idea  of co-operation and interdependance.   He remarked too upon the measure of material advancement and strong civic spirit that these ideas brought forth in Russia and Germany before the war, ideas based in their case on no greater ideal than the glorification of race or country.  And he asks, what could not be done by a people  inspired with the greater idea of Christian fellowship.
These, as I said are the views of Fr. Devane.   I do not put them forward as my own, or as ones with which I completely agree.  Nor  do I consider that the best form of society to which men can attain was necessarily achieved in the past, or that any particular past form can readily be applied to present circumstances.   But it may well be that we took the wrong turning in accepting the republican idea of society consisting of a number of individuals forming the state, rather than the guild idea of the state consisting of a number of vocational groups in which personal interest is

s
subordinated to the common good, and in which the individual may  neither remain aloof for his own ends, nor be case adrift like our  unemployed.
[Suggested method for forming a government]
The State has to be catered for in other respects besides its  economic life.   There are its relations with other states its code of Justice, its defence etc.   So that the Council of Vocational  organisation of which I spoke would not of course be the government of the country.   It would, as a constitutional body, direct the economic life of the state under the authority of the government. I would not anticipate any conflict between these two bodies, drawn as both would be from the same source.
How would the government be formed?  We have a system of local  authorities already established here (to which incidentally the greatest practicable power should be given).   These would be the electoral bodies, sending chosen members to form the Supreme Parliament.  (Better, perhaps, would be to put a form of provincial  government in between).  This parliament, in like manner, would choose its executive.  The electors would choose, by secret ballot,  those who were being sent froward to the Supreme Parliament, and those sent forward would not be answerable to the authorities who  elected them, for the votes they cast in the supreme parliament.  Each elector on the local authority would be required to make, before the national election, a solemn declaration that his vote  would be cast in the national interest according to his lights, and with no regard to personal gain or interest.
Here, I anticipate you raise two queries.  Who will elect the  electors, and how to prevent deadlock at the parliamentary election by each voter choosing himself.   The last point could be met by the  reguirement that the deputy to be chosen from the parliament should secure a certain minimum of the total votes, and that the election be continued until that situation was arrived at.   The other point  is a fundamental issue.  The family vote is an ideal.   But as we are not at present a young-marrying race, and not so closely bound together in family life as we are supposed to have been, it can be  but a goal to which we should work.  Well, to whom shall the vote

be given?  The vote, in my opinion, should be not less than twenty- five years of age, and of a required standard of education.   To women and men alike?   I say yes;  for remember what we require in  this parliament are men (or women) who are not necessarily experts,  but persons of good character, honesty of purpose and outstanding  intellect.  And these are qualities that women (even with an  education more fitted to their position in life than the present one) could assess as well as men.
The parliament would have the advice on internal and economic matters of the vocational organisations;  and as for external affairs, who is a greater expert than the man who realises that the State is but a large family bound by the same moral law that guides the consciences of the people who form the state?  Finally, there would be no political parties to puff clouds of poisoned rhetoric  across the simple vision of the voters.
[Economic future of Ireland]
 Recently the pronouncements of the rival sides in the present world conflict have been laying more and more stress on the social re- adjustment that will take place after the war.  Whether these are  merely attempts to bolster up morale, or whether they are opinions and hopes genuinely held by those who make them, they do at least take cognisance of the universal cry for a juster, abler, division  of the world's riches than has hitherto been made.   A juster  division not merely between states, but between the groups and classes of each state.  The Axis powers carry the banner of a 'New Order' for Europe and Asia;  the Allied powers have unrolled a new Charter.  Even those people whose countries have been swept from the map are heartened by the promises of this great Social Reformation that will follow their present ordeals.
 We alone are a nation without hope.   Our ministers (as you will  have seen from recent speeches) with brazen pessimism conjure up for  us the gloomy shape of post-war years, the contraction of our agricultural exports, increase in unemployment, and the lowering of our standard of living.  And listen to this - "taking into account  the possibilities of emigration no notable increase in the Irish population can be expected to occur during the next guarter of a

century and the continuance of a decline cannot be disregarded" and again "In the absence of an increase in population the home demand for foodstuffs cannot be expected to increase substantially.... access to profitable export markets for agricultural products will in the future as in the past govern the prosperity and welfare of the main body of the Irish people".  These doleful forebodings are culled from the report of the Banking Commission which appeared in a year of moderate prosperity, 1938.
Of what does the material wealth of a nation consist?  Basically, of the necessaries and conveniences of life that can be won from the country's soil and from under it, from its rivers and seas, by those who live in it, supplemented by the services performed by the people  of the country for other Communities, services which the latter can pay for in the shape of commodities.   The complexities of industrial progress, of exchange, of international trade, may confuse us about that fact but they do not alter it.
[Case for planned economy]
 As to the regulation and exchange of commodities, two main théories  have long held the field, Protection and Free Trade, neither of them  being completely right nor completely wrong.   It is logical that the most economic production of the world's food is attained when a commodity is produced by the country which is climatically and geographically situated to grow it with the minimum of cost and effort;  it is also true that no country which endeavours to uphold a reasonable standard of living for the community can permit the peoples livlihood to be swept away by a flood of imported commodities at whose production some distant coolie dropped unrewarded sweat.   Clearly these two theories can be reconciled  only in planned production and exchange between all nations, (commencing with a grouping of those states with a comparable  standard of living).  To have this, it is axiomatic that there be planned economy in each nation.
[The post-war world]
 When the war ends, a situation will develop, if it is allowed to  develop, very akin to that following the last war.   In the

immediate aftermath, a demand for food at any price to assuage the hunger of the countries devastated by war;  later, the recession, as these countries come again into production competing with the  newly-tilled acres which necessity ploughed up during the war years and which had not been tilled for twenty-five years before that.  And each new ship that goes down the runway will add its cargo of  competition to the chaos.
If Britain and her allies win the war, where do we stand?  She has been producing more of her own food than she has done for many a day.   She has been accepting lavishly the production of her  Dominions.  Her rulers are uttering solemn assurances that never again will the British farmer be sacrificed to the god of Cheap  Import.  No doubt, when the smoke has cleared away the fulfillment  will scarcely be of the same spaciousness as the promise;  (industrialists and whatever foreign investment are left to her will help tone it down a little).  Again, although the vagaries of "Finance" pass all comprehension, it does seem reasonable to doubt that a Britain which has been scattering her substance with such prodigality will have the wherewithal to purchase her pristine requirements when peace comes again.
What if Britain loses the war?  It is unlikely she will be treated with more magnanimity (or intellegence) than she showed her enemies at Versailles.   Before the war we drew some twenty millions of pounds (or their equivalent in goods, of course) from her from investments, pensions and whatnot.  No doubt during the past couple  of years we have been adding to her indebtedness.  What is to heppen to our golden eggs if the goose is cooked?  And at a time when our countrymen in Britain would naturally fly back here to escape the deluge - not merely those who went in the way years of higher wages, but also those who went earlier, all returning at a rate that would bewilder the Banking Commission.   This is a dilemma  on whose horns we may be thrust, not in a hundred years hence, but possibly this year or next.
[Retrenchment of Import Control]
I must go back again to that Banking Commission.  They discovered  in 1938 that we as a nation were living beyond our means, and they

advocated as a measure of retrenchment that we should settle no more people on the land, build no more homes for the homeless;  and they viewed, without recorded dismay, the thinning of our production  through emigration.  What reform would you suggest to a family that  was living beyond its means?  Cut down the children's food?  Throw  one or two of them out the door?  No, I think you would first  prescribe an examination of their luxuries, not always an easy thing  to curtail (I speak as a heavy smoker) but it is nevertheless the  road back to stability.  We are being taught a considerable lesson  in this at the moment but whether it is being correctly learned is open to doubt.   Heretofore we were counselled to extravagance, now  it is economy.   Take up a newspaper of a couple of years ago.   You  will find it advertisement pages chock full of reasons why you and I should pamper ourselves with a new gas fire or electric toaster or anything that would assist in the consumption of imported coal.  You will see there the too-simple scheme for buying, say, a motor-car by easy payments, a car perhaps that our government has gone to great trouble to have assembled here but whose motive power comes  from Persia or Texas.  And the only guestion was, could you or I afford it - never, could the nation afford it.
You will have noticed that, since we have had to go without imported  articles to which we were formerly accustomed, the hardship in a number of cases has been due not to the lack of the articles themselves, but the unemployment that has ensued from their  stoppage.  Vast business had grown up around articles that were not merely personal but national luxuries.
 We shall have to accept the fact that there are many desirable  commodities produced only abroad that we in this country will have to go without, until an internationally planned economy provides us with them in exchange for our own regulated surplus, or unless other  countries give them to us (not so absurd as it may seem at first sight).  What surplus of our production that can be sold and whatever income from investments abroad the war leaves to us, will have to be devoted to such things as manures to replenish our soil, machinery for essential works, fuel that we then cannot supply ourselves and so on down the essentials within the limit of our  saleable paroduction.  There should be no haphazard import of  luxuries by individuals, nor the commencement of undertakings,  however promising of employment, that would entail such imports.

This you may say is all very well, but how can we change over? When better than now to make a start?  We are almost thrown on our own  resources as it is, and we could with foresight and resolution  prevent a slip back into the old system.  We would arrive, of  course, at a very different, but not necessarily lower standard of living than we have been accustomed to.   But is a man any the  poorer for going to mass in a trap rather than in a motor car?  Is  there any solid reason why we must eat tomatoes in May rather than in September?
[Control of Investment]
We recognise the position in our Trade Unions that a man cannot ply  a trade without regard to the rules of his craft, yet we premit him to intrude his capital into this or that undertaking even though it may involve the loss of the neighbours.   In a townland of a thousand persons, adequately served by a single shop, he may if the  fancy take him open another.  And if there was originally only business enough for one, somebody must lose because of the second. Lord Glenary, of course, would have us believe that private saving, which is the basis of capital, would cease unless the individual had  free use of his savings.   Considering the number of people who  entrust their savings to Lord Glenary's banks, for investment by him at his discretion, I beg leave to doubt that.
[Vocational organisation v Bureaucracy]

Whether you accept the views I put forward or not, you cannot escape the conclusion that a more carefully planned and ordered economy will be forced upon us after the war, as it is being, during it. Such planning can be carried out only by one or two ways - the  vocational organisations that I have suggested or by an increasing army of bureaucrats.   To the latter I put forward four objections. Firstly, the greater the number of non-producers in a community, the  greater the burden (including the tax burden) on the producers; secondly, bureaucracy begets centralisation, destroying the local responsibility and initiative that should be the backbone particularly of an agricultural Community;  thirdly, it tends to give a bias to school education in that a large number of pupils will be trained not merely in the hope that they will pass Civil Service examinations but that through these they will quit the  countryside for city life;  fourthly, that the Civil Servant by the very manner of his training is not best fitted for the management  of the diversities of national life.

[The Civil Service]
Considering that the Civil Service is so widely recruited from what we call the middle and lower classes of the community, and that  there is scarcely a family in rural Ireland that has not a relative,  neighbour or friend in the Civil Service there is an amazing apathy shown regarding the functions and conditions of service of what we  like to regard as public servants.
When our first national government was formed, it took over by  agreement, a large number of Civil Servants from the British government, mostly Irishmen who were employed in the Irish Administration Offices of the United Kingdom.   Their tenure and  conditions of service were protected by a clause in the Treaty. That was sufficient to enshrine the manners and traditions (and conceptions of salary) of the British Civil Service in its Irish counterpart, but that the similarity should be on an even firmer basis, we sent specially to London for certain men to fashion the growth of the new bureaucracy.
In what was presumed to be the interests of economy, a division of grades was thought out and we have now in the Civil Service more grades, general and departmental, than I could possibly recall. There are three main classes, and it is decided by an academic and competitive test in youth, whether a man's mind will be clerical, executive or administrative.   There are, it is true, limited facilities for passing from one grade into the other, by further academic tests or by clairvoyant assessments by selection boards, or sometimes through the attrition of seniority, but seldom (and I  say it sincerely and regretfully) through the tests of character or  work performed.
 You see, in the middle reaches of the Service, the posts seldom  impose any great individual responsibility.   Thanks to the multiplication of grades and the traditional skill of passing problems to and fro, the individual is not usually thrown on his own resources;  and where an average mind can cope with the job, there is no pressing urgency to give it to the best.   It can be bestowed  where it will cause the least trouble.
One of the results of this is that the Civil Servants mind is more    often exercised about his prospects than about his work.  He  transfers from one branch to another with hopeful expectations of better fruit;  he acquires in his odyssey a smattering of knowledge  of a great many things, but seldom becomes a specialist at anything,  - except procedure.   On Mount Parnassus sit the gods of the Finance department, revising, repeating, rebutting, rebuking, all of them, because of their isolation, less skilled than those below.
[Civil Service and its effect on education]
The cream of the country's intellect, boys and girls, compete annually for posts in this mainly city service.  All of them can't  get in - but is it reasonable to assume that those who fail will easily be reconciled to a quiet rural existence?  Consider the girls.   They have been introduced by some economist who apparently thought that national economy consisted only in securing labour at  the cheapest cost.  No doubt he considered that as a good number would retire early on marriage, the average wage paid would be kept  down by having a constant stream coming to replace them at the minimum of the scale.   I wonder did he ever consider the suitability for matrimony of the education and training the girl received.   I know of course (who better?) that these girls make  excellent wives, but that is because, as I said, they are the cream  of the country, and succeed not because of their training but despite it.  We hear lamentations from time to time of the drift from the countryside into the city.  Has anyone contributed more to it than the Civil Service Commissioners who not only bring up to the city hundreds of girls each year, but also dangle the lure of  city life before the eyes of the greater numbers who fail.
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 What would be done with this machine in my scheme of things?  It  would for the great part be employed (in smaller numbers) to serve the vocational organisations.   It would be recruited locally for the local branches;  there would be no duplication of local and

central officials;  and it would be paid on a scale closer to that enjoyed by the productive elements of the community.   There would  be less girls in it, for might we hope that their school curriculum  would be more in keeping with the part they are naturally intended  to play in any true national renaissance.