Speech by An Taoiseach at Irish Labour History Society Symposium

“Fianna Fáil and the labour movement – friend or foe?”

 

I would like to start by thanking Moira Leydon and the Irish Labour History Society for both organising this symposium and inviting me to address it.

 

The Society has a long and proud record of being a catalyst for substantive and open debate on not just the history of the labour movement but also wider topics relating to work and class in Ireland.

 

Its journal Saothar has for over fifty years been one of the most important contributors to new generations of historical scholarship.

 

During the commemorations of our revolutionary years the Society’s members and its journal have ensured that there is a new level of understanding about the role and activities of the labour movement.

 

Because of this, in place of older more simplistic narratives we have a much broader understanding, and we know far more about the importance of widespread industrial conflict at key moments during the War of Independence and after the establishment of the Free State.

 

We also know that the political situation of those years was far more complicated than the simple “Labour must wait” framing of electoral politics.

 

The importance of the 1920 local elections in securing a broad electoral base for the Labour Party and its relatively high vote in 1922 give an important perspective.

 

This is a perspective which I believe gives greater agency to the labour movement in terms of later failures to grow.

 

As such, I very much welcome the holding of this symposium which coincides with anniversary of the foundation of Fianna Fáil a short distance from this place a hundred years ago.

 

Most events we have held within the Party to mark the centenary have included independent scholars who have been free to challenge and question the Party.

 

Our members have approached this in a very open way, rejecting the idea that we should promote an official or propagandistic story of the foundation, growth and success of the Party.

 

While I will not be able to be with you for the rest of the day, I very much look forward to reading the contributions of the impressive speakers from which you will hear from.

 

I hope that this marks another step forward in the development of serious study of Fianna Fáil and the labour movement.

 

In the spirit of the invitation, I would like to focus primarily on the often overlooked elements of our history rather than contemporary debates and events.

 

In asking me to speak today Moira referenced Fianna Fáil’s impact on the labour movement and “the workers which it represents.”

 

I know and respect the theory, developed in hundreds of works and thousands of speeches, that the interests of workers can only ever be progressed by and within a distinct class-based movement.

 

It is, however, not a theory I agree with, nor do I believe it stands up to the scrutiny of experience.

 

I believe that the failure of labour to develop a dominant political party is not because it was blocked by nationalism, but rather because another party developed and implemented a more effective approach to overcoming the unique challenges faced in this state.

 

I believe that the hard facts show that the Irish working class achieved very significant progress through Fianna Fáil – and crucially that no credible alternative programme was either offered or could have delivered more for workers.

 

We still face many serious problems as a country. We urgently need more social and affordable housing.

 

We have significant disadvantage to tackle. We have to further improve vital services, particularly those which the most vulnerable rely upon.

 

But nobody can deny the scale and nature of the progress which has been achieved, and which has especially benefitted workers.

 

I don’t accept the idea that nothing has been achieved until there are no problems left. Crucially, there is little or no evidence that the counterfactual – a left/right divide like those of Britain, France or Italy – would have delivered as much for the Irish working class.

 

On the most basic level, there are one and a half million more jobs today than in 1926.

 

Standards of living, literacy, educational attainment, life expectancy and a range of other basic measurements are not only better, but they have also moved Ireland close to or above most comparable countries in Europe and the wider world.

 

And on equality, the most commonly used measure of this, the GINI coefficient, shows Ireland as being more equal than the average in Europe countries and significantly more equal than countries like our nearest neighbour.

 

According to the OECD, this is because we have both a highly progressive tax system and a highly redistributive welfare system.

 

In terms of the labour movement specifically, the International Trades Union Congress has published an analysis of workers’ rights in every country.

 

The ITUC lists Ireland as one of only seven in its highest category for respecting workers’ rights.

 

There have been important differences between Fianna Fáil and the labour movement – and failures of policies which directly and negatively impact on workers – but taken together the impact of our approach to government has been both respectful of the labour movement and responsible for economic and social progress for workers well beyond that which has been delivered in many countries.

 

In reflecting on the historiography of the Irish labour movement, Emmet O’Connor, who is your next speaker, has commented that it is the nature of the field that it has tended to be dominated by people with a very definite left-wing political orientation.

 

I believe he is right in saying that this is only of concern where standards are not insisted on.

 

For me the key test is whether information is provided which empowers the reader to make up their own mind – and I think one of the great strengths of most Irish historians, in this field and others, is that they pass this test comfortably.

 

There is however one point which has always struck me about the treatment of Fianna Fáil in broader writings about labour and class issues.

 

This is the tendency to imply that Fianna Fáil somehow stopped the natural order of class politics from establishing itself – and that the party’s broad and sustained support amongst workers for most of the last century was a result of cynical politics rather than the result of representing and delivering for workers.

 

The failure of the party to adopt a single ideological rhetoric or policy programme has often been called ambiguous and opportunistic rather than representative of a legitimate approach to government in a democratic republic.

 

Because of the framing of issues within a set ideological discourse there has often been a failure to understand that the party has consistently rejected the idea that social progress and economic growth are competing priorities.

 

I’d like to explore just a few of the areas where I believe that this distinct approach should be better appreciated.

 

It is important to say that many of our members have always commented about how rarely the deep links which they have had to both trades unions and other workers organisations have been acknowledged.

 

In fact, during this centenary year, when members and supporters have talked about what they value most in our history their focus has overwhelmingly been on social and economic progress for workers and vulnerable sections of society.

 

The tradition which they speak of, and value revolves around social protection, job creation, educational opportunity and an opening of Ireland to the world in ways which directly aided the welfare of the Irish people.

 

I myself grew up in household which was both a union house and a Fianna Fáil house.

 

My father was not only a trade union activist, but he also helped to found a new union, the National Busworkers’ Union.

 

For him, the idea that promoting the interests of workers could only be achieved through adherence to a rigid political ideology and movement was obviously false.

 

He and his colleagues saw no substance in the claim that progress was possible only through applying to Ireland abstract analyses which had been developed in different times and places.

 

They regularly entered into industrial disputes with governments which they helped to elect.

 

They saw no contradiction in this because they did not believe that it was legitimate for them to seek sectional control of government, and they didn’t see their opponents in these disputes as enemies.

 

They had a deep class consciousness, but it was not one based on the idea that class conflict was essential.

 

While they had many disputes with employers, they were not industrial revolutionaries because they did not see how that would do anything but make things worse for everyone.

 

In truth this was a mainstream social democratic outlook – with the objective being improvements in levels of employment and living standards. A belief in practical action and outcomes rather than inflexible and theoretical ideas.

 

In this they were part of a trade unionist tradition which you see in Fianna Fáil’s Árd Fheis motions and actions from its very earliest days.

 

To be very direct, I believe that a defining problem for much of the commentary about Fianna Fáil’s history is that it rarely sought to look beyond stereotypes – and that it completely failed to acknowledge the remarkable achievement of persuading so many people, especially workers, to support it.

 

Fianna Fáil lacked the beguiling clarity of a simple ideological label – leaving others to define it in their terms rather than to try to understand an organisation which was different, but in international terms not unique.

 

This is certainly changing – if not in general commentary certainly in academic work.

 

In recent years, many scholars have worked to try and revisit fixed frameworks for looking at Fianna Fáil’s history – and most have identified significant differences between its policies and those of other governments.

 

These include a preference for state activism in the economy, the creation of a range of universal social supports and a sustained commitment to expanding public services, particularly housing and education.

 

Equally importantly, recent work goes much further in acknowledging how the Party’s constitutional reforms of the 1930s were a decisive rejection of the populism and extremism of the far-right and far-left which was destroying democratic rights in much of the world.

 

The renowned political scientist R.K.Carty looked at this history and found what he believed to be a sustained centrist orientation comparable to centre-left parties internationally such as the Canadian Liberal Party.

 

He pointed out that what some call “catch-all” is seen elsewhere as “big-tent”.

 

Perhaps, the single biggest issue has been what I believe to be the entirely wrong idea that Irish politics until recent years can simply be explained by using the two short words ‘civil’ and ‘war’.

 

This fundamentally ignores the fact that in the decades after the civil war much of the population chose to change its political allegiances and there were substantive differences in the programmes of the major parties.

 

If you look at the public debates and private correspondence from the run-up to the foundation of Fianna Fáil what you get is a consistent picture of people wanting to move away from the Civil War.

 

They wanted to move the agenda to a new focus on both fully establishing the sovereignty of the new state and beginning to address the very deep economic and social problems facing the Irish people.

 

Labour in the Dáil had shown repeatedly that while it felt there was no alternative to accepting the Treaty, they were both content to undermine it where possible and resolutely opposed to widespread state executions and repression directed against republicans.

 

Thomas Johnson’s contributions to the Dáil in December 1922 on the ratification of the Free State Constitution and after the clearly illegal execution of Dick Barrett, Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows and Joe McKelvey were by some distance the most powerful and cutting of any challenges to the Cosgrave government. He said:

 

For the vast bulk of republicans Labour was never the enemy, nor was this approach a reason it failed to grow into a much larger party.

 

I think the casual assumption that Labour failed to grow simply because of Fianna Fáil isn’t supported by the facts.

 

When Fianna Fáil contested its first election the number of people voting for Labour actually increased by a quarter. It subsequent failure to build on this linked to its own failures to convince even much of the labour movement that it had the organisation and the programme to deliver for them.

 

If you take all of the elections before our current, complex multi-party system, you find that the link between votes for Fianna Fáil and votes for left-wing parties is weak. It explains only roughly a quarter of the changes in votes for either party.

 

The fact that Fianna Fáil’s growth was linked to success in persuading people to move away from the civil war as the defining characteristic allegiance is seen in the growth of the Party’s vote by quarter of a million in only six years.

 

One of the first ever independent polls of Irish public opinion was taken in the late-1960s by a Norwegian academic working with the ESRI.

He found that people who had taken a particular side in the civil war had frequently changed their support in later elections, and that the Treaty had been an important but far from exclusive framing of party support.

 

In those early years Fianna Fáil was built without any significant resources and in the face of the hostility of the media, organised employers’ groups and, of course government.

Leaders travelled the country establishing a community-level party which certainly drew on old IRA connection but was very far from limited to them.

 

The message to them was, as summed up in an article published by Lemass in 1926, was: “There are some who would have us sit by the roadside and debate abstruse points about de jure this and de facto that, but the reality we want is away in the distance — and we cannot get there unless we move.”

 

Fianna Fáil was an aggressively oppositional party in the Oireachtas, but the core of its growth was a positive message of a different approach to other parties.

And within this links to workers can be seen from the very start.

 

Organisationally there was no attempt to coopt or take over the labour movement, but there was sustained engagement with trade unionists.

 

In the Party’s first Árd Fheiseanna there were many motions which met the approval of the labour movement.

 

In fact, as Niamh Puirseil and other historians have pointed out, there was a resentment amongst many in Labour about the fact that the new party was adopting policies which it felt should be its own.

 

At that time the Labour Party and the Irish Trade Union Congress were the same entity, and I think this necessarily made it more difficult for Labour to be an effective mass party.

 

The movement had 200,000 members and obviously a wider potential base.

 

That Labour never came close to securing the support of this base reflects the weakness of how it was organised.

 

In many ways it too closely followed the model and rhetoric of the British Labour Party which drew its strength from a mass industrial and urban base not present in Ireland.

 

The relationship between Fianna Fáil and the Irish labour movement was close and substantive in the Party’s early years in both opposition and government.

 

The support given by Labour for the first Fianna Fáil government did not arise through negotiating a detailed programme. Labour saw Fianna Fáil as obviously better than the alternative and believed that workers would benefit from its programme.

 

When commenting on the de Valera government’s first Budget, William Norton said:

 

“This Budget is an attempt in very difficult circumstances to give a ray of hope to the unemployed people of the country that has not been given them for the last ten years”

Other labour movement commentaries referenced specific actions on housing, pensions, social welfare, investment in public works and a free milk scheme.

 

Less appreciated is that the labour movement directly helped the new government in opening channels of communication with the Ramsey McDonald cabinet in London.

 

This was particularly helpful in lessening tensions over the abolition of the Oath and the retention of land annuities.

 

At a time when there were assertively anti-union actions in many countries this was not the case in Ireland.

 

The Workmen’s Compensation Act 1934 and the Conditions of Employment Act 1936 were two examples of the opposite approach.

 

I think it is important to note how different the rhetoric of this Irish republican government was to the nationalist ideologies then dominating Europe.

 

You can see this well in de Valera’s famous, and internationally noted, speeches to the League of Nations.

 

He constantly referenced not just national sovereignty, but the objective of promoting public welfare as the ultimate objective of this sovereignty. Contrast that to the angry exclusionary rhetoric of other nationalisms.

 

As the Depression hit the world he said:

 

I don’t think it can seriously be questioned that his governments wished to secure social progress and supported activist policies. You can argue that it failed, but this was no right-wing government.

 

An ongoing commitment to new approaches was seen, for example, in the Health Act of 1947. The fact that Noel Browne chose to join Fianna Fáil after the Mother and Child controversy showed which party was most committed to action in this area.

 

The new government’s economic protectionism today looks unsuccessful, but it has been estimated that in addition to being a practical enabler of growing constitutional sovereignty it created over 50,000 jobs at a time of international economic chaos. It also reflected wider international trends.

 

In 1933, Keynes said in a speech in Dublin that, while he felt protectionism in many contexts, “If I were an Irishman, I should find much to attract me in the economic outlook of your present government towards greater self-sufficiency.”

Unquestionably the decades after independence failed to provide an economic model capable of providing employment and social policies at a level needed by the Irish people.

Rather than attack the socially-minded governments of de Valera for having failed to spend more or be more radical, I think we should do more to acknowledge both the extreme situation faced in those years and the lack of realistic options to transform our economic prospects.

 

Independent Ireland was poor, peripheral and partitioned. It was deprived of cultural diversity and an industrial base which could have opened-up routes for more radical action.

But realistically, there was no simplistic redistributive road to creating the jobs and public revenues our population needed. No movement or party ever developed or sought a mandate for a credible alternative approach.

 

Things did of course change, and sustained progress in job creation and social programmes benefitting workers was achieved. I believe that very specific elements of Fianna Fáil’s policies are at the core of this.

 

The first element of this is that the party always rejected the idea that you must see economic and social interests as being in conflict.

 

As I said earlier, this is perhaps the defining difference between the party and more ideological parties.

 

To be pragmatic and seek new ways forward is not seen as a failing and the ‘in group/out group’ framing of issues is rejected.

 

For example, Lemass was constantly focussed on how Ireland could generate the wealth required to sustain its people.

 

He established many state companies and nationalised many others, but he was never against private enterprise. State ownership of companies was a means to an end rather than a virtuous part of an ideological construct.

 

In addition, the party generally sought constructive relations with the organised labour movement.

 

In the 1960s in terms of seeking national pay agreements, and in later years the more comprehensive social partnership model, marked both a search for a new way forward for Ireland’s economy and a rejection of the anti-labour agendas often seen elsewhere.

 

Of course there were many moments of conflict with organised labour, but I wonder if these came close to the scale and intensity of disputes seen during Labour governments in Britain.

 

Attlee’s radical government faced fuel, power and dock worker strikes.

 

Conflict between British Labour and the unions which were its largest voting block was so acute in the late 1960s that Wilson’s government produced the White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ – an almost plaintive cry for a more constructive relationship.

 

A decade later the so-called Winter of Discontent so badly undermined Labour that it contributed to the rise of Margaret Thatcher and a systematic attack on the labour movement.

 

The Irish labour movement has not secured every demand, but it has certainly maintained a substantial ability to represent its members – and indeed deliver quite dramatic improvements for them.

 

For members of Fianna Fáil a sustained commitment to the empowering nature of education has been a key element of policies of benefit to working communities.

 

This goes much further than the extension of second level education announced by Donagh O’Malley and implemented by a series of ministers.

 

As outlined by Minister for Education Patrick Hillery in the early part of the Lemass administration, it was their shared belief that “If Ireland is to have a future it must have more education.”

The expansion in second level education was accompanied by the creation of a new community and comprehensive model of schools, the opening of Regional technical Colleges and the systematic and sustained improvement in educational attainment level for all groups. Critically, equal access to a core curriculum was set as a key objective – again very different from other countries and from the position in Northern Ireland.

 

International research shows that Ireland today has one of the lowest levels of early-school-leaving and that rising educational attainment has been directly linked to rising living standards and social mobility.

 

We still have significant work to do to help more people to overcome educational disadvantage, but the progress achieved is better than seen in most countries which have had a more traditional party system.

 

While often casually dismissed as a narrow nationalist party, the history of the party shows that Fianna Fáil has been highly committed to the idea of achieving progress through international cooperation.

 

As early as 1928 the party’s national executive discussed a paper about Briand’s general proposal for achieving peace in Europe through a form of customs union.

 

Immediately after the second world war, Lemass went further. Addressing the first meeting of what became the OECD, in 1947 he said:

 

“We cannot recover the prosperity we seek, or win for our people the high and rising standard of living we wish them to have merely by the temporary patching up of our own national economies.”

For him Europe was always both a social and economic project because a sustainable model for economic growth was the absolute prerequisite for social progress.

 

In this he and Jack Lynch had wide support but faced the opposition of the labour movement.

 

The labour movement’s arguments against the now European Union were that it was about promoting the interests of international capital, that international companies could not be relied upon and that foreigners would buy-up Irish land.

 

Membership of the Union has in fact been the key enabler of workers’ interests in Ireland and elsewhere.

 

The model of international trade based on shared standards and rights has been transformative – and so too has Europe’s support for training and education.

 

Fianna Fáil has always been proud of the role which it played in pushing Europe towards this approach. This was particularly so because of the work of our first Commissioner, Patrick Hillery.

 

His sought the then relatively lowly-ranked portfolio of social affairs. While the Council had suggested that a social programme be developed, there was no funding and no proposal when Hillery began his work.

 

Within three months he developed and pushed through the Commission a proposal for widespread action on fields like equal pay, support for retraining the unemployed, programmes for people with disability and many other areas.

 

He then travelled through the nine member countries lobbying governments, employers and unions to support his package.

 

The European Social Fund and many other initiatives stem directly from his work.

 

Over time the labour movement came to understand how this new European social model was essential for workers, but for many years this was a policy of Fianna Fáil’s which it strongly disagreed with.

 

As I have said, I think this relationship between Fianna Fáil and the labour movement is one which, when explored, shows a much more interesting story than has been widely acknowledged.

 

It was a critical relationship which helped both to promote their interests in different period of our history.

 

Significant moments of conflict cannot distract from the fact of how much has been achieved – particularly because of a programme which recognises both economic and social progress as linked. Because of a record of building key public services and empowering through education. Because of a rejection of the ideological conflicts evident elsewhere – and because of a commitment to transforming Ireland through engagement with Europe.

 

For me, a close, respectful, sometimes difficult, but ultimately productive relationship with the labour movement has served the interests of Irish workers. It is an important part of our history and our development as a country.

 

Thank you again for the kind invitation to speak today and I look forward to reading the contributions which will follow from an impressive range of scholars of the history of Irish labour.