Ireland

THE long and dismal record of British misrule in Ireland cannot be easily forgotten. But that it is lapsing in the memory of the Irish people may be due to a new emphasis on material prosperity and to a determination to reinforce the art of living with the means to live reasonably well.

Ireland has crossed the threshold of an economic revolution which is taking two forms: a slow but steady rationalization of agriculture, and a limited degree of overdue industrialization. Both developments are being pushed ahead with one particular objective — to raise the standard of living by increasing exports, thereby enabling greater consumer spending.

This revolution is being encouraged by the government in every possible way. Political issues have been virtually obliterated by the general desire to achieve material progress.

The Irish farming system

The need for rationalizing agriculture is pressing, especially because Ireland may soon become a member of the European Common Market. Membership is supported by the politicians, and even more fervently by the farmers, who can hope for 15 to 25 percent higher prices for their agricultural products. The six major Land Acts between 1870 and 1910 created 400,000 small landholdings, many of them basically uneconomic. Today, 208,000 out of 360,000 farms comprise less than thirty acres each, and the government has decreed that forty-five acres constitutes a reasonably viable farm unit.

Nearly one million out of eleven million acres of farmland are leased on the eleven-month, “con-acre” system. This system owes its existence to legislation under which a tenant who farms a piece of land for twelve months or longer has a legal claim to possession of it, on adjudicated payment. The con-acre system means that neither owner nor tenant has an interest in improving the land. In fact, tenants may impoverish or ruin it by growing cash crops of grain on it four or five years running.

There has been no hint from the government that it intends to change this state of affairs, although it has shown an interest in increasing the size of farm holdings and has created machinery for dispossessing lazy and inefficient farmers by compulsory purchase.

Another curiosity of Irish farming is that a large proportion of Irish cattle — the main prop of the whole economy — are sent to Britain as twoand three-year-olds to be fattened there and sold at high prices on the British market. Obviously, the Irish economy forfeits a large slice of the profit on cattle which are disposed of in this way. The solution is to fatten the cattle in Ireland, slaughter them there, and export fresh, chilled, and frozen beef. The government has recognized this obvious fact; exports of beef rose by 30 percent last year and have played a big part in the overall increase in exports of foodstuffs, from a value of $108 million in 1959 to $140 million last year.

Rationalization of agriculture will be a slow process, for no government will want to proceed harshly against the small farmers. The drift to the towns which has already set in, moreover, may not be helped by Ireland’s entry into the Common Market. For the drive to secure an increased measure of industrialization has inevitably meant the creation of industries which have had to be protected and which will be susceptible to the rough winds of unfettered European competition. In the view of one Irish minister, “Entry into the Common Market will mean industrial adjustment, and some of it may hurt.”

Especially vulnerable will be the textile and motorcar industries. There will certainly have to be greater emphasis on industries for which raw material is already available — leather goods from the hides of Irish cattle, woolens from sheep, furniture and packaging from timber. It is significant that Ireland last year exported $14 million of raw wool but only $11 million of finished woolen products, garments, fabrics, thread, and carpets. Ireland’s main disadvantage in the industrial field will always be lack of coal and steel and of many raw materials. This necessitates transporting nearly all the means of production to the place of production.

Yet the industrialization program has some factors in its favor too. The main one is the availability of labor. The only other European countries with a surplus of labor are Italy, Spain, and Greece. Irish emigration, which had been 40,000 a year, has been reduced by the industrialization program to 22,500 a year. The decline of the population (reduced by 83,000 to 2,900,000 in the period 1956-1961) has been arrested. Unemployment has been cut to 36,000. Earlier emigrants are returning, and the small but useful surplus of labor should persist for some years.

Industrialization, moreover, should stimulate earlier marriage, as well as a higher birthrate. There is no reason, if all goes well, why Ireland should not have a population of five million in fifty years’ time.

New industries

Limited industrialization will not spoil the beauty of the countryside or the friendly nature of the people, who have time for every stranger and who are almost alone among Europeans in not wanting payment for small services and helpful advice. Limited industrialization will be an answer to those critics of Ireland who insist that the country lives off the remittances of emigrants to America and Britain, off its tourist trade, off greyhounds and bloodstock and blood sports. The government of Sean Lemass is keenly aware of the need to industrialize. It has set up an Industrial Development Authority, backed by an Industrial Credit Company, which has achieved remarkable results in efforts to attract foreign capital and know-how. Here are some of them:

In the last five years 130 new industries have been introduced from outside the country, a dozen of them American. They have included such diverse projects as the manufacture of transistors by the Japanese firm of Sony, of precision instruments by SPS International of the United States, of cranes and excavators by Leibherr of Germany, and of radio equipment by Phillips of Holland. The Israelis are making razor blades in County Carlow, and the Italians silk ties in County Cavan.

More than 1800 people are working in small firms set up at Shannon Airport. These firms have total exemption from income and corporation taxes on profits from goods exported until 1983. The project, which has special privilege, is primarily intended to save Shannon Airport, now bypassed by jets from the European mainland bound for America. The goods produced at Shannon are all transportable by air — even the grand pianos of the Rippen firm of Holland.

In the last five years capital in Irish industry has been increased by $85 million as a result of the introduction of foreign firms. Less than one quarter of this amount has been provided by government grants. More than 21,000 new jobs have been created. Indirectly, employment has been given to the hotels, the catering trade, and building firms.

To speed up foreign investment, it was decided in 1958 to waive the clause under which there had to be a 51 percent Irish interest in new projects. Today they can be totally foreign-owned, and usually are. Their profits can be repatriated at any time. Government grants assist in the costs of constructing buildings, installing machinery, and training workers. The grants are most generous in development areas — Connaught, the three northern counties of Donegal, Cavan, and Leitrim, and the southern counties of Kerry and Cork. In these areas the grants can cover 100 percent of building and employee-training costs; in the rest of the country, only two thirds of building costs, with no coverage for training.

To an American, the Irish export drive may look small-scale, But it has made a substantial contribution to the national economy. During the last three years exports have increased to a value of $427 million a year. There is now a favorable balance of payments. In the same period, industrial production has increased by roughly 20 percent — more than in Britain, but still well below the 40 percent of the Common Market Six.

The total national income has been rising by about 4 percent a year, and 25 percent of it is still derived from agriculture. When one considers that the figure for Denmark, the most highly developed country in Europe agriculturally, is only 20 percent, one realizes Ireland’s dependence on the land. But this reflection should only spur the Irish government to greater efforts to secure a more balanced economy. In the last ten years one fifth of the people employed in agriculture, or approximately 100,000, have left the land.

Yet the government still complains of land congestion, especially in the west, where one farm in three consists of under fifteen acres. Ireland’s prosperity is still bound up with agriculture, but as Sean Lemass pointed out on September 13 in Skerries, there must be increased industrial efficiency if the country is not to succumb to inflation with a low-geared economy.

The fighting Irish?

The heartache and glamour have gone out of Irish politics. Irishmen are much more interested today in the possibility of bringing in Charollais cattle for crossbreeding, in Princess Margaret’s three-hour cruise on the waters of Lough Derg, or in the Curious circumstance that Irish girls have become a full inch and a half shorter in the last sixty years. Of equal moment is the news that the pony and jarvey men of Killarney are up in arms because it is proposed to build a new motor road from the “back door” of Windy Gap to their Dunloe preserve (no motorcar can use the Gap of Dunloe road from Kate Kearney’s Cottage to the Upper Lake).

Irish politics has become unemotional and matter of fact. There are no major differences of policy between the two main parties, Fianna Fal and Fine Gael (“Tribe of the Gaels”), on whom the mantle of opposition mainly falls. Fianna Fal still benefits from the prestige of President De Valera, although he has withdrawn from active politics and maintains a commendable neutrality on all controversial issues. Fine Gael lacks leaders and organization, and Fianna Fal has become so firmly established in power that observers believe it will obtain an increased majority in the elections which are expected next year.

Both principal parties want Ireland in the Common Market as soon as possible, but only if Britain comes in. Both preach the virtues of commonsense, pragmatic rule. Both favor the projection of Ireland’s image in the eyes of the outside world, and much has been done in this respect by Ireland’s attention to its UN obligations and by the part played by the Irish contingent in the Congo troubles.

Nothing, perhaps, better illustrates the shift to the mundane in Irish politics than the fact that De Valera’s one-time shadow Minister of Defense in the revolutionary war waged against the legally established Free State is today Prime Minister, and his former chief of staff is Minister for Foreign Affairs and a pillar of the rule of law. Yet when Lemass and Aiken first Served under him, De Valera did not even accept majority rule as the basis of Irish democracy.

One issue which divides Fianna Fal and Fine Gael is the compulsory teaching of the Irish language. Fine Gael would allow it to become a voluntary subject in the schools. But Fianna Fal supports compulsory teaching of it. There is a timehonored saying that the only way to make the Irish speak their Gaelic tongue is to ban it.

Today the Dublin slums are vanishing, and it is a hard job to find a bottle of the “rale stuff” — the colorless, tasteless, fiery poteen illicitly brewed in the hills. The retreat of poverty and ignorance leaves little room for Synge’s playboys of the Western world. The beggars are leaving the main streets of Dublin, and the semiveiled, black-clad shawlie women of the southwest have vanished. But the old Irish charm remains. It will survive the growth of a materially minded middle class, the outward conformities of habit and dress which limited prosperity brings, the declining usage of fine phrases and cracker mottoes.