Jack Lynch, A Biography

The Life and Times of Irish Taoiseach Jack Lynch (1917–1999)

Dermot Keogh

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780717163762
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Jack Lynch is one of the most important and perhaps most underrated Irish political leaders of the twentieth century. A sportsman who won six All-Ireland medals in a row with Cork, he was also a civil servant and a barrister before being elected to Dáil Éireann in 1948. During his thirty-one years as a parliamentarian, he held the ministries of Education, Industry and Commerce, and Finance before succeeding Seán Lemass as Taoiseach in 1966. Lynch held office during the critical years of the late 1960s and early 1970s when Northern Ireland disintegrated and civil unrest swept through Belfast, Derry and other towns. This precipitated one of the worst crises in the history of the Irish state. Jack Lynch upheld the parliamentary democratic tradition at great personal and political cost, even to the point of fracturing the unity of his government and his party. If you want to know what happened during those terrible years, read this book.

Chapter 1

FROM SHANDON TO DÁIL ÉIREANN

History turned on the toss of a coin, or so it would appear. In early 1948 Máirín and Jack Lynch were standing inside the main door of Cash’s, a well-known department store in Patrick Street, Cork. The country faced a general election on 4 February. With only half an hour left before the deadline for the handing in of nomination papers, the couple appeared hesitant and undecided. Would the holder of six all-Ireland medals go forward as a Fianna Fáil candidate for the constituency of Cork City, or would he turn his back on public life and devote himself exclusively to his career as a barrister? It was quite apparent, however, that there was more hesitancy on her part than on his. ‘We’ll toss a coin,’ said Máirín as a way out of the impasse. They did, and fortune favoured his standing. That was how Máirín Lynch, more than fifty years later, remembered making the fateful decision that sent her husband into a lifetime in national politics.¹

The reality may not have been quite so unclear, or so dramatic. Despite some personal misgivings, the uncertainty of his wife and the opposition of his father, Jack Lynch had a strong wish to enter national politics. But he would not have done so had he not first gained the unqualified support of his wife. The willingness to consult and decide together characterised their lifetime partnership. Within two weeks of tossing the coin Jack Lynch, aged thirty-one, was elected a member of Dáil Éireann on his first attempt. He held that seat until his retirement on 21 May 1981, an unbroken parliamentary career of thirty-three years, during which time he served as a parliamentary secretary (assistant to the minister), as Minister for Education, Industry and Commerce, Finance, and finally as Taoiseach.

But who was the neophyte parliamentarian? John Mary Lynch was born on 15 August 1917 in the family home in Shandon Churchyard.² Still standing, the house has been renovated by the state and bears a plaque in his honour. Now officially known as Bob and Joan’s Walk (though not to local people), the laneway ran down to a graveyard and to the back entrance of what was then the mortuary chapel of the North Infirmary. Skiddy’s, a home for the elderly, was nearby. Jack Lynch was born and lived until his early teens in Shandon, literally under the bells of the landmark Cork clock-tower known as the ‘four-faced liar.’ Exchequer Street was around the corner from his home, and the Butter Market (known locally as the Buttera) was close by, as was also T. O’Gorman and Sons’ Cork Cap Factory, to which Lynch gave patronage all his adult life.

POVERTY AND SOCIETY IN THE SHANDON AREA

What was the social milieu into which the future Taoiseach was born? Some 77,000 people were living in Cork, according to the 1911 census, taken six years before his birth. The city engineer, J. F. Delany, reporting in 1918 on social conditions, estimated that 18,645 city residents were living in ‘undesirable conditions’ in premises ‘approaching a condition of unfitness for habitation.’ That represented nearly a quarter of the city’s population.³ An estimated 8,785 were living in tenements and 9,860 in cottages or single houses.⁴ In relation to the ‘very poor’ Delany suggested that ‘it is clear that the care of this section of the community, which is on the lowest scale of living, cannot be met by the erection of houses.’ The reason was straightforward: such people would not be able to meet the rents on new premises.⁵ Delany indicted the government for its inaction: ‘The state is not meeting the case of Irish Housing as it ought to do.’⁶ He was not hopeful that the British Government would provide a new housing programme and noted: ‘Derelict areas are not so numerous as on the North side’—the area of the city where the young Jack Lynch was living.⁷

The state had not been effective in its interventions, and wartime conditions had exempted local authorities from expenditure on public housing.⁸ However, the Notification of Births (Extension) Act (1915) empowered local authorities to provide maternity and child welfare (up to the age of five); but, as the historian Ruth Barrington noted, ‘the legislation was permissive, not mandatory.’⁹

Local effort was encouraged instead, and Cork was one of the early respondents. The lord mayor, T. C. Butterfield, convened a public meeting in City Hall on 12 February 1918, which was ‘largely attended’, to ‘consider what steps should be taken to inaugurate a child welfare scheme in Cork.’¹⁰ The Bishop of Cork, Daniel Cohalan, moved the motion ‘that in order to reduce and as far as possible prevent infantile mortality in Cork City and to promote a healthy race, an association be and is hereby formed to be called the Cork Child Welfare League.’ Prominent citizens duly filled the posts.¹¹ The Child Welfare League quickly determined that a health centre should be created, and that it would be ‘sufficient to have one whole-time nurse,’ with the assistance of nurses from the Maternity and Erinville hospitals—provided they received grants. They approached the Public Health Committee of Cork Corporation (city council) for this support, suggesting a levy on the rates of one penny in the pound (0.4 per cent); the proposal was accepted by the corporation, provided it had representation on the proposed twelve-member committee.¹²

The Child Welfare League continued its work throughout the 1920s until it was gradually subsumed into the restructured and centrally directed health structures of the Irish Free State, established in 1922.¹³ In 1931 Dr Jack Saunders, medical officer of health for the county borough (city) of Cork, paid tribute to its work in the following terms:

A voluntary body to whom the citizens generally are greatly indebted for inaugurating and carrying on in spite of great difficulties a scheme which was the first of its kind in the city and of which it may be said that the results of its work are reflected in the marked reduction in infant mortality which has characterised the statistical tables during its period of existence.¹⁴

Those same statistical tables point to a patchy record. Saunders, however, smoothed difficulties to assist with the transfer of some remaining functions from the Child Welfare League to the newly instituted Maternity and Child Welfare Scheme.¹⁵ He produced his first annual report in 1931, covering the previous year, in which he pointed out that the last annual report had been produced in 1922.¹⁶

The material suggests something of the environment into which Jack Lynch was born. August 1917, the month of his birth, was the wettest August in Cork since 1905.¹⁷ In normal circumstances that would be unremarkable, except that for the Lynch family it meant the confinement of the children indoors just after the home birth of Jack on 15 August. The year 1917 saw a birth rate of 20.2 per 1,000 in Cork, the lowest in the fifty-year period 1881–1930 and only slightly higher than for the 26 counties for that year.¹⁸ There were 1,552 recorded births in Cork in 1917: of these 169 died under the age of one, a rate of 108 per thousand, compared with the national rate (26 counties) of 84. The total number of deaths in Cork in 1917 was 1,340; the principal causes were tuberculosis (280), respiratory diseases (127), cancer (62) and deaths attributed to violence (24)—an unusually high number. There were great risks, however, for newly born children, as shown by the figures for deaths from such causes as pneumonia (74), diarrhoea (34) and whooping cough (14). Remarkably, there was no death from measles in Cork in 1917; but the following year the city was struck with an epidemic that claimed 88 lives. Pneumonia was also rampant in 1918, claiming 247 lives and the following year 248.

In 1919 also a severe outbreak of diphtheria hit Cork, claiming 32 lives, equal to the total for the previous four years.¹⁹ Diphtheria, a horrible throat infection inducing asphyxiation, was by far the most prevalent of infectious diseases in Cork throughout the 1920s, though the mortality rate was consistently lower than in Dublin. It claimed 345 lives between 1920 and 1930. Given its principal epidemiological characteristic, mainly affecting schoolchildren, the majority of those deaths occurred in children up to the age of ten.²⁰ Enteric fever, or typhoid, let loose on Cork in 1920 what was the ‘biggest epidemic of the disease in the history of the City [and] was clearly traced to infection of the water supply just above the source at which it was drawn.’ There were 244 cases that year, resulting in 13 deaths.²¹ The possibility of a recurrence, according to Dr Saunders’s report for 1930, was remote, though it would hardly have been reassuring to learn that the first systematic bacteriological survey of the city’s water was not undertaken until 1928, the year in which the rapid gravity filtration plant was commissioned.²²

According to the historian Ruth Barrington, ‘Irish sanitary authorities had been obliged since 1919 to organise the medical inspection of children in national schools but the act was a dead letter over much of the country.’²³ The meeting of the city’s Public Health Committee on 26 September 1916 heard a report from the medical superintendent regarding Coley’s Lane (just off the Old Market Place) in the parish of St Mary in Shandon. He stated that in his opinion numbers 3–16 were ‘not fit for human habitation’ and proposed that they ‘be closed up unless they are put into habitable condition, and that steps be taken to reduce the overcrowding in No. 17, 18 and 19 . . . and to have general repairs carried out to same and the kitchens concreted.’²⁴ In 1927 the school medical services officer, Dr Annie M. Sullivan, reported that the follow-up on defective children was hampered by having only one nurse allocated to general hygiene in schools. She felt that ‘it is truly deplorable that such conditions should exist in our schools.’²⁵

DANIEL AND NORA LYNCH

Jack Lynch, the fifth of seven children, was born into one of the poorest districts in the city.²⁶ He was fortunate to avoid having to live in destitution, but those images of the tenements of his childhood would have a lasting impact on him in his later public life. The family in descending order were: Theo, Charlie, Finbarr, Jimmy, John (Jack), Irene (Rena) and Eva. Theo trained as a primary school teacher at De La Salle College, Waterford, and returned to teach in Cork. Charlie entered St Patrick’s College, Mayno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: From Shandon to Dáil Éireann
• Chapter 2: Journeyman Politician: Backbench TD and Parliamentary Secretary, 1948–57
• Chapter 3: Minister for Education, 1957–9
• Chapter 4: Minister for Industry and Commerce, 1959–65
• Chapter 5: Minister for Finance, 1965–6
• Chapter 6: Neither a ‘Caretaker’ nor a ‘Reluctant’ Taoiseach, 1966–9
• Chapter 7: The Northern ‘Troubles’ and the Irish State
• Chapter 8: Ireland and Europe: Negotiating Membership of the EEC
• Chapter 9: Constitutional Politics and Revolutionary Challenge, 1971–3
• Chapter 10: Opposition and Return to Power, 1973–9
• Chapter 11: ‘Happy is the Man who Finds Wisdom’: Retirement and Final Years, 1980–99
• Chapter 12: Jack Lynch’s Place in Irish History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan