The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (45 page)

In economic terms, the sense that the country had survived the war unscathed – that the political and cultural rupture witnessed in other European countries had
not
been experienced in Ireland – ensured that the policies and rhetoric of the 1930s continued to be applied to the post-war economy. Prewar economic dogma persisted, emigration continued unabated – and the result was that after 1945 Ireland’s economic performance fell rapidly and decisively behind that of its European neighbours. While there were elements in government willing to recognize the inadequacies of the current economic regime, they remained few and commanded little attention; the drift was permitted to continue.

One change, however, did take place – and it must have proved startling to some: in the general election of January 1948 de Valera and Fianna Fáil lost power, to be replaced by a fractious coalition of opposition parties. Fine Gael was the largest element in this new government; but it also included ministers from a political party called Clann na Poblachta, which had been formed as recently as 1946. The leader of this new entity was Seán MacBride, the offspring of the short and unhappy marriage of Maud Gonne and John MacBride: the party itself was philosophically unwieldy, being composed of left-wing social reformers, Catholic intellectuals and activists who took a dim view of parliamentary politics in general. This new party would at length disintegrate under the weight of factionalism and bitter internal disagreements: the incoming government itself survived only three years, the first in a series of weak and unstable administrations.

This postwar government is best remembered for a struggle that took place between the zealous Clann na Poblachta minister for health, Noel Browne, and the Catholic Church. Browne had previously taken successful steps to cut dramatically the high rates of tuberculosis in Irish society, and in 1950 he turned his attention to other aspects of the country’s health system. The wartime Fianna Fáil government had already begun to implement health reforms: sweeping change, however, had been stymied partly as a result of active lobbying on the part of the Irish Medical Association (IMA), which saw socialized medicine as a threat to its members’ activities in the lucrative private health sector; and party because of private lobbying from the Church, which noted that the idea of the state educating ‘women in regard to health [was] directly and entirely contrary to Catholic social teaching’.
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Browne anticipated few such issues, however, with his so-called Mother and Child Scheme, which proposed free health-care for expectant and nursing mothers: it was a useful measure, but seemed relatively uncontroversial.

But the Church – embodied in this instance in the figure of John Charles McQuaid, who since 1940 had served as Archbishop of Dublin – begged to differ, for again it sniffed in the air the stench of State interference in family life. But this was rather more than a mere struggle for power between Church and State: Browne was, for example, not wholly backed by his own party, elements in which would be happy to see him brought low; and McQuaid was essentially speaking on behalf of the IMA, the members of which wanted ‘to remain gentlemen and not let officials near them or their tax returns’.
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The scheme, in other words, was regarded as a threat to class interests and as a result was duly quashed; Browne resigned in 1951. Ironically, the essentials of the scheme were quietly passed by the subsequent government.

This episode, complicated though it was, does point to the tremendous temporal influence of the Catholic Church at this period – and to the authority of McQuaid not least. The archbishop was a commanding presence on the national stage, fiercely intelligent and deeply interested in matters of education and health. He was in his own terms a reformer and willing to respond to the changing times: in, for example, setting in motion a renewed programme of church-building in Dublin to cater to the city’s rapidly increasing population; and in publicly opposing de Valera by supporting the cause of striking teachers during a six-month dispute in 1946. Yet it is his commitment to power and authority that reverberate down the years – and in particular his attempts to exert control over myriad Church and secular organizations, as well as over the lives of his flock. McQuaid monitored academic appointments to University College Dublin; his agents attended public meetings throughout the archdiocese and brought news of what transpired to the Archbishop’s House in north Dublin; he had direct access to government ministers and civil servants, to administrators, legislators and medical consultants; and he sought to control the administration of charities and hospitals and to keep the Protestant influence of Trinity College Dublin from leaching into wider society.

McQuaid monitored cultural activities too – and sometimes his reputation preceded him, as in the notorious case of Tennessee Williams’s
The Rose Tattoo
, staged at Dublin’s tiny Pike Theatre in 1957 as part of the city’s theatre festival. The script mentioned a condom; such an article being illegal in Ireland, an envelope was substituted – but to no avail: the production was closed down and its producer, Alan Simpson, arrested on a charge of lewdness and profanity. A year later, the case was thrown out by the Supreme Court, but the damage had been done: the theatre was bankrupted and Simpson’s marriage to Carolyn Swift (with whom he ran the Pike) broke down as a result of a range of associated pressures, including widespread social ostracism. It was later claimed that the state itself – reacting to McQuaid’s unrelenting moral activity – had engineered the entire episode in order to underscore its moral vigilance and support of censorship.
¹⁹

That the Pike had existed in the first place – in its short life, the theatre had staged the works of, among others, Eugène Ionesco and Jean-Paul Sartre, and produced the Irish premiere of Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
–revealed an appetite for European art in Ireland that certainly gain-says the sense that the country was a cultural blasted heath. Yet the theatre’s destruction by a combination of Church and State intervention indicates that the forces of orthodoxy were immeasurably stronger. The Church’s temporal and spiritual power was further emphasized by the cancellation of the entire theatre festival in 1957 following clerical dissatisfaction with several productions. Three years later, in another equally notorious episode, Edna O’Brien’s debut novel
The Country Girls
– already banned – was burned in the grounds of what had been her home chapel in County Clare. ‘It was called a smear on Irish womanhood. A priest in our parish asked from the altar if anyone who had bought copies would bring them to the chapel grounds. That evening there was a little burning.’
²⁰

And yet the power and authority of the Catholic Church were certainly not absolute. For one thing, de Valera was not in the habit of taking orders from anyone: McQuaid could divine a silent distancing on the part of the Fianna Fáil government of 1951–4; and by the end of the decade, politicians were able to disagree openly with McQuaid and his fellow clerics, to plough their own legislative furrow, to ignore the archbishop’s incessant letters on a variety of matters. There were signs too that the middle classes were prepared to peel away from Church teaching and to give voice to a simmering resentment at such attempted control over the minutiae of daily life. Censorship or no censorship, Edna O’Brien’s books – and a host of others – were readily available in Ireland, for the Irish border could be porous on these matters, and goods of all kinds could also be brought in on the ferries from Britain; and Catholics had been studying at Trinity College years before the Church ban on their attendance was at last lifted in 1970.

These years, characterized though they were by population decline and continued economic malaise, seemed to mark the tentative beginnings of a new order in Ireland – one upon which McQuaid found it increasingly difficult to stamp his authority. In 1956, marking the fortieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, the
Irish Times
editorialized that ‘if the present trend disclosed continues unchecked…Ireland will die – not in the remote unpredictable future, but quite soon’.
²¹
It was indeed apparent now to even the most hide-bound traditionalist that the country’s economic situation was so dire that things simply could not go on as they were: from the mid-1950s the country was opened to direct foreign investment, and in 1955 the Republic became an enthusiastic member of the United Nations, its isolationism now definitively a policy of the past. UN membership in turn allowed the country to make its presence felt on the world stage: under Frank Aiken, who served as minister for external affairs from 1951 to 1954 and again from 1957 to 1969, the Irish at the UN and in other international bodies carved out a role as advocates for the rights of small countries elsewhere, from Tibet to eastern Europe; and as vigorous proponents of the policy of nuclear non-proliferation. The Republic also became a participant in many of the UN peacekeeping missions: its first mission was to the Congo in 1960, where nine men died in an ambush at Niemba in November of that year.

In 1959 de Valera at last stepped down as taoiseach, to be replaced by the energetic Seán Lemass, who had been a key proponent of more innovative economic policies in successive de Valera governments. That same year, the population of the state fell below the 3 million mark – and yet it was evident that a corner had now been turned. This sense was given symbolic expression in 1961, when the Lemass government applied for membership of what was then known as the European Economic Community (now the European Union). This application and subsequent ones failed – largely because the United Kingdom’s applications were vetoed by France, rather than for any particular reason to do with Ireland. The Republic would eventually join the union on 1 January 1973, following a referendum in which a majority of 83 per cent approved entry. EEC membership would change the face of Ireland – yet at the same moment, Northern Ireland had become ensnared in the Troubles. It seemed that while the future could be willingly embraced, the past could not so easily be left behind.

Chapter Thirteen

Between Here and There

On the afternoon of 15 June 2010, a crowd of thousands gathered in the Guildhall Square in the centre of Derry. Inside, in the central hall of the Guild-hall itself – lit by long stained-glass windows chronicling the story of the seventeenth-century plantation of the city and the history of the British army and empire – the final report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry had been made available to the families of the fourteen men killed in central Derry on 30 January 1972 in the course of a civil rights march.
^*
The report’s findings, though the subject of a good deal of speculation, had not been substantially leaked; and there was an air of palpable tension in the square outside.

Bloody Sunday was but one day in the thirty years of the Troubles – nor was it the bloodiest. It had, however, assumed a unique position: the fourteen men had been killed by members of the British armed forces – in other words, by the state itself – which lent a ghastly distinction to the events of the day. The official investigation, completed by April 1972, had backed the stance of the army: that its soldiers had only responded to attacks by members of the IRA operating within the crowd. The city’s coroner, on the other hand, described the killings as ‘sheer, unadulterated murder’ – but the findings of the official investigation stood; and the events of Bloody Sunday became an open sore, a grievance visited and revisited in the following years. In January 1998 the British government set up the Bloody Sunday Inquiry to address this grievance and unpick the events of the day. This was in its turn part of a greater political move: the British, Irish and United States governments were now investing vast amounts of political energy into securing a deal in Northern Ireland that would establish peace and a power-sharing local government; a new investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday was recognized as a necessary part of this manoeuvre.

On that afternoon in Derry, large screens had been set up in the Guild-hall Square. At the moment of the report’s release, television cut to the House of Commons, where the new British prime minister, David Cameron, was due to comment on the findings. Cameron announced to a silent House that British soldiers had fired the first shots on Bloody Sunday, that they had lost control, had killed civilians who had posed no threat to their safety, and had subsequently lied in order to cover up these acts. The crowd gathered in the Guildhall Square greeted his words with applause.

The Troubles that erupted in the summer of 1969 eventually claimed over three thousand lives. To the fourteen who died as a result of Bloody Sunday can be added the fifteen killed in a Belfast pub bombing in December 1971; nine killed in the Claudy bombings of July 1972; twelve killed in the M62 coach bombing in West Yorkshire in February 1973; thirty-three killed in Dublin and Monaghan in May 1974; twenty-six killed in the Birmingham and Guildford pub bombings in the autumn of 1974; twelve killed at the La Mon restaurant near Belfast in February 1978; twenty-two killed in separate incidents on the same day at Warrenpoint and in County Sligo in August 1979; eleven killed in London in July 1982 and seventeen at Ballykelly in December of the same year; twelve killed at Enniskillen in November 1988; nine killed at Greysteel in October 1993; twenty-nine killed at Omagh in August 1998 – and this a list that is far from exhaustive.

The roots of the conflict, as we have seen, were sunk deeply into the past: into centuries marked in Ulster by persistent ethnic and sectarian tension, territorial and economic rivalry, and occasional but horrifying surges of bloody violence. The folk memories of such past violence remained alive and well: and the carnage that had accompanied the birth of Northern Ireland, of course, had taken place a mere fifty years before the outbreak of the latest Troubles – still recent enough to be vividly recalled in some quarters. Meanwhile, the sorry history of Northern Ireland in the years since its birth, characterized as it was by injustice and ultimately by political immobility, stoked the fires of grievance still further. As for the character of the Troubles, this would shift continually over the course of three decades – now rising into spikes of brutal violence, now subsiding into periods of relative calm; in the early years in particular its nature sometimes approached that of civil strife, with civilians consistently figuring among the dead and injured.