Lecture 13: Ireland: 19481957
Corpus Christi Procession,
Cahir, Co. Tipperary
‘Austerity; shortages; snowdrifts;
food and fuel rationing; low wages;
high prices; differences with the
church and with the supreme court;
the Ward affair; the teachers’ strike
and other industrial disputes – it was
hardly the most promising material
for a Fianna Fáil party seeking to
fashion the platform for the seventh
consecutive election victory.’
Fanning, R, Independent Ireland, p161
Fine Gael: the Commonwealth,
conservative, strong farmer party
Clann na Poblachta: Radical,
republican party
Clann na Talmhan: small farmer
party
Labour: split into two squabbling
factions
Clann na Poblachta
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‘Party of the republic’
Founded 6 July 1946
Many members were republican activists
Sean MacBride – party leader
Left-leaning nationalist policies
Quickly established a network of branches throughout
the country
Won 13.2% of the vote (10 seats) in the 1948
election
There was a split in the party in the wake of Noel
Browne’s Mother and Child scheme
Only won 2 seats in the 1951 election
Continued to contest elections until 1965
Séan MacBride
• Leader of Clann na Poblachta
• Son of Major John MacBride (executed in 1916) &
Maud Gonne, the inspiration for many of Yeats’
greatest love poems
• Chief of staff of the IRA in 1936
• Broke with the IRA and accepted the 1937
constitution
• Opposed the IRA bombing campaign in Britain in
1938-39
• Practised as a barrister - defended many of his
former IRA colleagues
• Appeared at inquests for the next-of-kin of IRA
hunger-strikers who died in 1940 and in 1946.
Clann na Poblachta
• Wanted the
External Relations
Act of 1936
repealed
• A thirty-two
county republic
• Advocated a more
active campaign
against partition
• Laid heavy
emphasis on
social issues
• Attacked the evils
of emigration,
unemployment
and rising prices
Original caption: Madam
Maud Gonne, 83, one known
as "The World's Most Beautiful
Woman", casts her vote in the
Eire General Elections. With
her is her son, Sean MacBride,
Dublin lawyer who is leading
his new Republican party,
Clann na Poblachta, in a
campaign to oust Prime
Minister Eamon de Valera.
Madam Gonne is one of the
great figures in Irish
Republican history.
Incomplete returns indicated
that de Valera's Fianna fail,
the government party, would
lose its majority.
1948 Election Results
• Clann na Poblachta: Won 13.2% of the vote (10
seats) - the highest ever won by a minor party in its
first election
Fianna Fáil: Won 41.9% of the vote (67 seats)
Fine Gael: 31 seats
Labour: 14 seats
Clann na Talmhan: 7 seats
Independents: 12 seats
‘The big
message was:
put Dev out
anyway and
give us – and
yourselves – a
chance.’
Dr Noel Browne (1915-1997)
• Appointed Minister of
Health on his first
day in the Dáil
• Member of Clann na
Poblachta
• Inspired by the
establishment of the
British National
Health Service
• Created problems for
his party leader,
Sean MacBride
The inter-party government
and economic policy
• Running the economy proved difficult
with four parties in power
• Shift in financial policy
• Financial orthodoxies challenged from
within the government
• Economic committee established to
undertake survey of economic position
of the state
• Ireland participated in the ERP
• Ireland: founder member of the OEEC
‘Do we mean to house the people, provide
hospital beds for the sick, or do we not? I
think we do, and prophesising woe and
dislocation…cuts no ices at all, because
whatever the economic consequences…(of)
providing hospital beds and evacuating
verminous tenement rooms, they cannot be
worse than letting TB patients cough their
lungs out in the family kitchen, or letting the
rats of Ringsend eat the second ear off the
child who has already lost one in a Ringsend
rat-ridden tenement room…’
John Dillon speaking during a Dáil debate
Taoiseach John A.
Costello
External Relations Act
repealed in
1949
Ireland left the
Commonwealth
Costello: ‘It placed the
question of
Irish sovereignty and status
beyond dispute or guesswork’
Announcement made at press
conference in Ottawa in 7
September
1948
Ended the era ushered in by
the
treaty split
John Costello and Sean MacBride during an interview with
the Picture Post magazine, where they explained why
they believe that Éire should break all connections with
the Commonwealth.
Noel Browne and TB
Brought a crusading zeal to the campaign
against TB
By July 1950 his emergency bed programme
almost doubled the provision for TB patients
in 2 years
TB death rate down from 124 per 100,000 in
1947 to 73 per 100,000 in 1951
‘It is an over-simplification to present
the Mother and Child scheme…as a
straight conflict between church and
state’
Lee, J, Ireland 1912-1985, p318
‘The episode should be viewed as the
culmination of the church’s growing
disquiet about the growth of state
power…’
Fanning, R, Independent Ireland, p181
‘If the hierarchy give me
direction with regard to
catholic social teaching or
catholic moral teaching, I
accept without qualification
in all respects the teaching
of the hierarchy and the
church to which I belong.’
Taoiseach John A. Costello
Irish Catholic hierarchy’s response to
Mother and Child scheme
‘The powers taken by the state in the
proposed Mother and Child Health Service are
in direct opposition to the rights of the family
and of the individual and are liable to very
great abuse. Their character is such that no
assurance that they would be used in
moderation could justify their enactment. If
adopted in law they would constitute a readymade instrument for future totalitarian
aggression.
The right to provide for the health of children
belongs to parents, not to the state. The state
has the right to intervene only in a subsidiary
capacity, to supplement, not to supplant.
It may help indigent or neglected parents; it
may not deprive 90 per cent of parents of their
rights because 10 per cent are necessitous or
negligent parents.
It is not sound social policy to impose a state
medical service on the whole community on the
pretext of relieving the necessitous 10 per cent
from the so-called indignity of the means test.
The right to provide for the physical education of
children belongs to the family and not to the state.
Experience has shown that physical or health
education is closely interwoven with important moral
questions on which the Catholic Church has definite
teaching.
Education in regard to motherhood includes
instruction in regard to sex relations, chastity and
marriage. The state has no competence to give
instruction in such matters.
We regard with the greatest apprehension the
proposal to give local medical officers the right to tell
Catholic girls and women how they should behave in
regard to this sphere of conduct at once so delicate
and sacred.
Gynaecological care may be, and in some
other countries is, interpreted to include
provision for birth limitation and abortion. We
have no guarantee that state officials will
respect Catholic principles in regard to these
matters. Doctors trained in institutions in
which we have no confidence may be
appointed as medical officers under the
proposed services, and may give
gynaecological care not in accordance with
Catholic principles.’
Memorandum dated 12
April 1951.
It records the visit of
Taoiseach John A.
Costello to President
Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh,
advising the President
that Dr. Noel Browne,
Minister for Health,
wished to tender this
resignation as a
member of the
government and that it
should be accepted.
(NAI, Office of the
Secretary to the
President, PRES 1/P
4633)
Ireland in the 1950s
• Collapse of the inter-party government
in May 1951 was followed by a series of
minority governments
• Fianna Fáil government of 1951-4:
worst de Valera government
• Between 1951 and 1951 employment in
industry fell by 14%
• The numbers employed in agricultural
fell by 200,000
In 1948 80,000 Irish people still lived in one
room dwellings.
In 1946 over 300,000 Irish homes had no
sanitary facilities.
The average Irish family was still twice as large
as the average British family.
Tens of thousands of Irish people left the
country in the 1950s to seek work overseas.
The Inter party governments of 1948-51 and
1954-57 had not dramatically changed the social
and economic landscape of post independent
Ireland.