The Government and Politics of Ireland

Basil Chubb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317896449
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The third edition of Government and Politics in Ireland has been updated to take account of the political developments that have taken place in Ireland between 1981 and 1991. Amongst the topics covered are political parties, pressure groups, the government and the Dail and local government.

Chapter 1
Basic Influences

I

The state with which this book is concerned is in the words of its Constitution called 'Éire, or in the English language, Ireland'.¹ We shall call it 'Ireland' and its people 'Irish'. However, Ireland, the state, does not extend over the whole island of Ireland, nor does it include everyone who calls himself or herself Irish or everyone who might be reckoned to be Irish. Both inside the state and especially outside, it is often called by other names - Eire, the Republic of Ireland, the Irish Republic. In this book, whenever the use of 'Ireland' would be ambiguous or confusing, the term 'Republic of Ireland' will be used.

II

The Irish are a peripheral people: their homeland is on the fringe of the British Isles, which in turn is on the edge of Europe. They are, too, a not very numerous people. After well over a century of population decline - in 1841, 6.5 million people lived in the area now known as the Republic of Ireland - the population, then below 3 million, began slowly to increase from the middle of this century and in the late eighties was about 3.5 million. The overwhelming majority - 93 per cent in 1981 - were Roman Catholic and all but a tiny minority ordinarily speak English.

This population, which is small for a sovereign state, has a large rural element and with 50 people per square kilometre is the least densely populated of the countries in the European Communities. Only in the late 1960s did the number of people living in 'towns' (defined as places with a population of 1,500 or more) rise above that living in rural areas. In 1981 four out of ten people were rural dwellers. Outside Dublin City and County and the southern region (the counties of Cork, Waterford, Limerick, and South Tipperary), the population is still overwhelmingly rural; as many as three-quarters in the western seaboard counties. Many people who today are counted as urban were born and reared as country people; many more have country-bred parents; and more again have relations who still live in rural areas. Dublin and environs, with 1 million people (about 30 per cent of the population), is the only large conurbation. Cork, the second largest city, has about 175,000 inhabitants (5 per cent); the other towns are mostly small regional centres serving and attuned to the farming people of their hinterlands.

The proportion of the work force engaged in agriculture (about 15 per cent) is large compared with the highly industrialized countries of the European Communities and in this respect Ireland more resembles the southern European peripheral countries like Spain, Portugal and Greece. However, more important for understanding the country, are the facts that only forty years ago half the work force was in agriculture and that farming was, and to a large extent still is, on small units. The picture which the traveller gets in the countryside is overwhelmingly of scattered small farms.

The land reforms initiated by British governments in the late nineteenth century and completed in the first decade of independence in the twenties, effected a rural revolution and quickly produced a class of owner-occupiers who came to dominate Irish politics. In 1981 over half of all farms were of less than 50 acres. By the standards of late twentieth century Western Europe with its ever more commercial farming and rising living standards, farms of this size have become increasingly less viable. Today 'less than one third of Irish farmers operate commercially viable enterprises'.² In the west almost all are unviable.

The existence of a large agricultural sector of small farmers means that Ireland is a peripheral country in another, the economist's, sense of that word. It is 'one of the small peripheral societies of capitalist Europe. . . . Ireland's affinities in the European context are with those societies - like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Finland - that evolved within a sub-region in the shadow of a powerful centre, and for whom economic development remains incomplete'.³ Ireland's is a small, open economy with all that that implies. Notwithstanding a rapid pace of industrialization from about 1960 onwards and a consequent big growth in professional and technical employment, white-collar positions, and skilled manual jobs, Ireland lags behind the most industrialized countries of Western Europe. Gross domestic product per head in 1988 was £8,297. Although this put Ireland among the rich countries of the world with a highly literate population enjoying high standards of social services, it amounted to only 42 per cent of the figure for Denmark, the richest of the Community countries, and 71 per cent of the neighbouring United Kingdom. It rated ninth place in the Community league table with only Portugal, Greece and Spain less wealthy. In the absence as yet of effective Community policies to redress the differences between the members, Ireland's position relative to the developed industrialized members is not likely to alter materially in the near future. Emigration, both a social safety valve and a debilitating haemorrhage, was for a century and a half a feature of Irish life. Fluctuating between 5 and 15 per 1,000 of population from independence to the mid-1960s, it was halted and reversed for a short period, but resumed in the eighties, and in 1989, at 13 per 1,000, it was almost as high as it had ever been.

III

Identification of the basic political attitudes of a community is largely a matter either of impressionistic generalization or of drawing inferences from survey data. What is perceived or adduced can often be explained only by reference to the past, for contemporary perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes are inevitably to some extent the product of the conditions and events of the past. They are, moreover, changing continuously, sometimes slowly as in Ireland between independence and the early 1960s; at other times more rapidly, as was the Irish experience from 1960 onwards to today. This period was one of rapid industrialization, and 'industrial societies unquestionably introduce a rate of social change previously unparalleled in history'.⁴

Again, these generalizations can often be little more than statements about 'most people', for even in a comparatively homogeneous community like that in the Republic, there exist groups, such as the tiny Protestant minority, that have an outlook that is to some extent different from the outlook of the majority. Of more political significance, the attitudes and values of town people are likely to be different in some respects from those of rural people. If, as is the case in Ireland, there is a continuous movement from the countryside to the town, there will be urban dwellers who are but slowly becoming town people: perhaps they never will be, though their children probably will. Even to talk of an urban culture and a rural culture is misleading, if doing so suggests that everyone can be placed in one or the other of two identifiable groups, for this is to ignore the stance of great numbers of people who are in-between. Obviously, in times of comparatively rapid change such as Ireland has been experiencing, generalization is particularly hazardous. In these circumstances, it might be best first to identify the cultural influences contributing to the making of the Irish of the middle twentieth century, which was culturally a comparatively stable period. These are the 'basic influences' which are the subject of this chapter. Thence, in Chapter 2, an attempt is made to determine what are the social changes which have induced, and continue to induce, cultural change and which are reshaping the political culture of Irish people.

The British influence

Geography and history combine to make the British influence the most important in determining the pattern of much of Irish political thought and practice, both in the past and still, though less so, today. This is a simple matter of the geographical propinquity of a large national group and a small one, and the historical facts of political dominion, social and economic domination, and cultural blanketing. Ireland, like-Scotland and Wales, became an English province in medieval times, its politics and its economic and cultural life dominated by, and oriented to, England.

The process of assimilation was aided both by the settlement in Ireland of people of English and Scottish origins who were Protestants and by the emergence of an elite class whose members gave loyalty to Britain, in many cases their place of recent origin and in all cases the guarantor of their political and economic power. The 'plantations' that is, the placing of English and Scottish families as farmers in Ireland - in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the Irish wars of the seventeenth century resulted in massive transfers of property. In 1641, nearly 60 per cent of Irish land was owned by Catholics; by 1703, only 14 per cent. The province, for that was what Ireland was, particularly after the Act of Union (1800), was dominated by a Protestant landowning class until the late nineteenth century. If this class and the better-off Catholics who identified with them had specific Irish interests, they were nevertheless essentially provincials, London being their metropolis as it was for the Welsh and the Scots. The nineteenth century, moreover, saw the rise of the English-dominated, London-centred 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland' to the status of a world imperial power, engendering in its people and particularly its English ruling class the belief that their values and habits were in all respects excellent. Lesser breeds, among whom they included the Irish, could by espousing them hope to tread the same path of progress.

Inevitably, in these circumstances, Irish people acquired much of the culture, including much of the political culture, of the British and more particularly of the English. The substitution of the English language for Irish was especially important. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the number of people speaking Irish declined very rapidly. By 1851, less than 30 per cent of the population could speak it; by 1871 less than 20 per cent. Although significant (but diminishing) numbers in the west continued to speak Irish, in Dublin and the east, which dominated social and economic life, only 5 per cent or less could speak it from the middle of the nineteenth century. The process of absorption of English ways and values was most complete in Dublin, the bigger towns, and the east of the country generally. In addition, Ireland enjoyed, and came to expect, the standards of public services, including education, health, and welfare services, comparable in general with those of Great Britain.

As in the case of the white communities of the British Commonwealth, many of the currently held political traditions and values were inculcated and absorbed during a most critical and formative period: the period of the advent of mass democracy. Extensions of the franchise (the right to vote) in Britain were followed by extensions, with modifications, in Ireland; and Irish people acquired democratic habits and values. Political ideas were almost wholly expressed in British categories, for, from Daniel O'Connell to Charles Stuart Parnell and beyond, the political experience of many Irish leaders was gained in British political life, and they practised the parliamentary ways of Westminster. However, Ireland, geographically and in other ways more peripheral than Wales or Scotland, was never integrated to the extent that they were, because of the survival in greater measure of a pre-industrial rural society and the centrifugal pull of national feeling and consequent nationalism made stronger by religious differences. Yet even Irish nationalism itself was a 'revolution within and against a democracy and could not help using many of that system's institutions and procedures'.⁵

There is no better way to illustrate Irish acceptance of democratic values and British forms than by the history of the independence movement and the formation and consolidation of the new state. Although, with the founding of Sinn Féin in 1905, Irish nationalism turned away from parliamentary methods, the parliamentary tradition and the belief in the legitimacy of a democratically elected assembly can be seen to have been strongly ingrained in both the leaders and the majority of the population. By 1916, in Brian Farrell's words, 'modern Ireland already existed . . .' most of its political values - as well as its political structures - were not merely modern but were articulated in a distinctively British way'⁶ The revolutionary Dáil of 1919, legitimized by election, continued in being as a parliamentary assembly through revolution and war. If it did not in fact control the situation, nevertheless it claimed the right to do so, and those who sustained it recognized its importance in the eyes of a people, many of whom had imbibed liberal-democratic values. Farrell concluded from his study of its origins and record that it was 'as intent on maintaining the framework of an established society and its associated values as with attempting to change it'.⁷ The general acceptance of the most important norms of democracy is well shown by the widespread recognition of the duly elected government in 1922 despite its rejection by Eamon de Valera and his supporters, by the rapid acceptance of this group when they abandoned force (which was getting them nowhere) for constitutional and parliamentary methods, and, finally, by their transformation into a majority government at the election of 1932.

Political independence did not automatically bring economic or cultural independence. The Irish economy was not a balanced and viable whole, the less so because of the retention by the United Kingdom of the north-eastern part of the island, which included Belfast, the only industrial city. Agriculture, in so far as it was market-orientated, was wholly geared to British needs. Banking, insurance, industry, and trade were largely British-dominated and almost wholly British-orientated and only slowly became centred upon Dublin. Britain was, and still is, Ireland's biggest customer and its main supplier. As recently as 1968, 70 per cent of Irish exports went there and over half of its imports came from there. Only from the seventies, with Ireland's accession to the European Communities, did this pattern change quickly.

The boundaries of the Irish state were from the beginning highly permeable. People and ideas have always passed freely across them. The newly independent Irish Free State, as it was at first called, was a member of the British Commonwealth and as such its citizens were not classed as aliens in the United Kingdom or in Commonwealth countries. Even when, later, Ireland left the Commonwealth, this situation was not altered. Passports have never been necessary to travel ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Glossary of Irish terms
• Preface to the Third Edition
• 1 Basic Influences
• 2 The Changing Face (and Mind?) of Ireland
• 3 The Framework of Limited Government
• 4 Political Communications and the Mass Media
• 5 Patterns of Participation and Representation
• 6 Political Parties
• 7 Pressure Groups
• 8 Elections
• 9 The Policy-makers
• 10 The Government and the Dáil
• 11 The Oireachtas
• 12 The Pattern of Public Administration
• 13 The Central Administration and the Civil Service
• 14 State-Sponsored Bodies
• 15 Local Government
• 16 Controlling the Administration
• 17 The European Community Dimension in Irish Government
• Further Reading
• Index