Sins of the Father (10 page)

The bias towards beef-producing cattle stock, instead of specialisation in dairy and beef breeds, for example, was also held by the Department of Agriculture. In the 1920s it published its criteria for the register of non-pedigree dairy cattle. It accepted for registration only those cows which upon inspection were found to be of ‘good conformation, short-legged, well-ribbed and deep in body’. The reason it favoured non-pedigree dairy cattle of such dimensions was because ‘The dairy farmer is to a large extent also the breeder of store cattle … and it is essential that his cows as well as being deep milkers should be of a type calculated to produce good store and beef animals’.
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This was despite the findings of the Report on Stock-Breeding Farms in 1921, as noted above, which saw the dairy Shorthorn as ‘a fight against nature’. This did not stop Hogan telling the Dáil in January 1924 that it was the dairy farmers who were the kingpins:

The raising of grass-fed beef though an extremely important part of the industry, is at present small – it is a by-product of the great dairy industry. Anyone who knows anything about farming knows that, and as the dairy industry gets more and more efficient, as I hope it will, the less stores and the less grass-fed beef you will have in the country.
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This was simply a lie on the part of the Minister. The promotion of the ‘dual-purpose’ Shorthorn and the bias towards beef calves, ‘encouraged dairy farmers to breed as much for beef as for milk, thereby lowering yields. Inevitably, the greater profitability of the beef trade ensured a bias towards beef characteristics.’
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And as already noted, from the 1860s onwards, the total number of dairy cattle remained almost static. The growth in cattle occurred in beef-producing stock for export.

The promotion of the livestock trade to Britain was also justified with a 1920s version of trickle-down economics. According to George O’Brien, professor of economics at UCD and a personal friend of Hogan, the Minister believed that it was important to help graziers and exporters achieve greater profits because the more they consumed in goods and services, the more the rest of the economy would benefit:

The farmers being the most important section of the population, everything that raised their income raised the national income of the country. Prosperity amongst farmers would provide the purchasing power necessary to sustain the demand for non-agricultural goods and services, and it was useless to encourage secondary industries unless the primary industry was in a position to purchase their products. The principal aim of agricultural policy in the Free State should therefore be the maximization of the farmers’ income, and not, as in certain other countries differently situated, the provision of food for the urban population or the solution of the unemployment problem.
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For Hogan, ‘The lawyer son of a senior Land Commission official’, the ordinary farmer was ‘The 200 acre man’.
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In order to address the needs of this class, he ‘urged curbs on local government spending to reduce taxes on farmers, advocated cutting the wages of local authority road workers to prevent pressure on farm labourers’ wages, pressed for lower tax levels to increase competitiveness, and urged that farmers be compensated for cost increases consequent on protection’.
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For its part, the Free State government held true to these trickle-down principles by cutting services to the working classes while providing a helping hand to the graziers and livestock exporters, as well as urban middle-class house buyers (as we saw in chapter one). It undertook to encourage industry only insofar as such measures entailed no negative change in ranchers’ incomes. The senior officials in the Irish civil service, particularly those in the Department of Finance who had served under the British administration, ‘emphasised a tradition of financial austerity and avoidance of government intervention. A largely conservative party advised by a thoroughly conservative administrative elite resulted in economic orthodoxy.’
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The government’s economic policies favoured graziers and livestock exporters but ‘offered little to those facing emigration or inadequate living standards’.
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In October 1924, six months after the government had passed the Housing Act which gave purchase subsidies of between €60 to €100 to middle-class households, the Minister for Industry and Commerce told the Dáil in a debate on unemployment and welfare assistance that ‘there are certain limited funds at our disposal. People may have to die in this country and may have to die through starvation.’ This was in response to the documented accounts of starvation which were coming in from around the country. In January 1925, Dr Brian B. Crichton, who had a long association with the Coombe and Rotunda hospitals, told the Rotary Club that ‘a child’s chances of life in the City of Dublin are worse than were the chances of a soldier in the trenches during the Great War’.
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He said that women often came to him to the clinic but ‘instead of medicine, he often gave a note to some philanthropic organisation to enable them to get food’. The same month, the Clare Health Board was informed of a man and his wife who lived near Kilmikil, who had died of starvation and neglect. The relieving officer had found the woman ‘lying in a corner of a filthy and verminous room, covered only by a dirty rag. The man was also in a deplorable condition, weak and hungry.’
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In another case, a doctor visited a house in ‘New Hall, near Ennis, and found two old people living in a terrible condition of filth. They had been eating portions of the carcase of a calf, which was lying in the kitchen.’
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In Longford, two married women were charged with stealing potatoes from the mental asylum garden. ‘I took the potatoes for my children, who are starving at home,’ said one of the women. The judge said that from his knowledge no one need starve in Longford. When the defendants’ lawyer asked the judge had he read the report in the local newspapers about cases of starvation, the judge replied, ‘Yes: and I saw it contradicted.’
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It was increasingly clear that Cumann na nGaedheal was protecting the financial self-interests of the class it represented, while the rest of the nation could, quite literally, starve.

In terms of the economy, the government’s plan to keep things as they were ignored the obvious fact that they weren’t. The island had been partitioned into two separate political entities, with the twenty-six-county Free State now responsible for its own fiscal affairs. Yet, the approach of Cumann na nGaedheal and the senior officials within government was to behave as if Ireland remained a regional economy within the UK. The problem was that the type of financial redistributions and shared costs which regions could expect while part of a greater national economy were now all but gone. (One example of this was the social housing fund set up under the 1919 Housing Act, which allocated grants and loans to local authorities to build sanitary accommodation for the urban and rural working classes. With the War of Independence and subsequent partition of the island, that funding stream was now shut off for the twenty-six counties.)

Ireland was now a nation-state. ‘Fiscal separation from the UK meant that Irish exports to Britain of protected commodities became subject to British import duties, and all imports into Ireland became dutiable at the same rates as goods imported into Britain.’
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But instead of working towards the creation of a national economy with an independent fiscal policy and actual agricultural products for export (not just livestock), the Irish government took to protecting the relatively small percentage of farmers, financiers and administrators who made a comfortable living from the structural deficiencies of the Irish economy, while consigning the rest of the population to poverty and emigration. In real terms, this meant the continuation of ‘free-trade’ in livestock and finance, while finished products were subject to tariffs and quotas. The three government-appointed commissions set up to examine the economy – the Commission on Agriculture (1924), the Fiscal Inquiry Committee (1923) and the Banking Commission (1927) – all decided in their majority reports that things should remain as they were, that ‘Ireland would maintain parity and financial links with sterling, produce food for Britain, and retain a free-trade industrial sector.’
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The conservatism of Cumann na nGaedheal did not stop with economics. Divorce was banned in 1925, while in 1926 the Department of Justice under Kevin O’Higgins set up the Committee on Evil Literature. Its purpose was to consider ‘whether it is necessary or advisable in the interest of the public morality to extend the existing powers of the State to prohibit or restrict the sale and circulation of printed matter’. It was followed by the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), which sought ‘to make provision for the prohibition of the sale and distribution of unwholesome literature’. The Irish Free State may have wanted its economy to remain petrified in a pre-partition wonderland, but it had definite views on the morality of its citizens, and on this it took a more vigorous course.

Not all sections of the government were happy with the continuation of the status quo. In April 1924, the Cumann na nGaedheal TD for Cavan, Seán Milroy, told the weekly meeting of the Dublin Rotary Club that:

[The people of the Free State] had been told that any departure from the old fiscal regime which they had inherited would jeopardise, if not seriously injure, Ireland’s foreign trade. Anyone who had studied that foreign trade knew that it was uneconomic – largely an export of foodstuffs and raw material. [Milroy] asked those who opposed Protection to cease talking about theories and to take cognisance of the realities.
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Officials in the Department of Industry and Commerce also urged the use of tariffs as a means of economic and industrial development. The tasks which the Free State needed to undertake in order to turn itself from a regional to a national economy, it was unwilling to carry out. There was an ideological element to this, with free trade invariably put forward as the solution to Ireland’s economic problems.

In June 1923, the Fiscal Inquiry Committee was established to examine the fiscal situation for industry and agriculture and to report on any changes needed to foster growth. It was chaired by Timothy Smiddy, professor of economics at University College Cork and economic advisor to Michael Collins in the lead-up to the Treaty negotiations. (he would later serve as the Free State’s Minister in Washington.) Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of those who gave evidence called for protection, the Committee concluded that high wages and a lack of skilled labour, and not the uneven ‘free-trade’ links with Britain, were undermining the growth of native industry. The historian Mary E. Daly notes that ‘there was no minority report, so the message of free trade and the priority afforded to agriculture and export industries was not challenged’.
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The argument that tariffs would add to the cost of agricultural production – as was made not only by the Fiscal Inquiry Committee but also by the graziers’ supporters in Cumann na nGaedheal – ignored the important fact that fertilizer and agricultural machinery made up the bulk of important agricultural producer goods; the rest was home produced. The main cost for a grazier was the purchase of young stock, which almost invariably came from small farmers, and ‘this cost was the income of the small farmer who had reared the stock’.
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Yet the call for tariffs was made with regard to consumer goods. Any widening of import duties would have hurt a graziers’ pocket – were he to continue to buy imports – but not necessarily his profit. As the historian J.J. Lee put it:

… dogmatic free traders cleverly succeeded in confusing all farmers’ purchases with farming ‘costs’. There was no immediate reason why protection on consumer goods should have directly and sharply increased famers’ costs of production, as distinct from cost of living. The convenient confusion between famers’ consumer purchases and producer purchases was a shrewd propagandistic
non-sequitur
.
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The idea that the consumer power of well-to-do farmers and graziers should be protected at all costs made no economic sense to a country with the type of structural deficiencies such as those of the Irish Free State.

One contemporary commentated on the fact that ‘close on forty Irish manufacturing industries gave evidence before the Fiscal Inquiry Committee in support of protective tariffs, and each one of these, with one trifling exception, were prejudiced or damnified by the report, not upon the merits of each case, but upon general principles’.
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The Dublin Industrial Development Association condemned:

… the non-judicial and extraordinary manner in which the great weight of evidence in favour of some form of protection was brushed aside by the Fiscal Inquiry Committee while all who abstained from tendering evidence were, for no very cogent reason, assumed to agree with the present system of free imports.
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The Fiscal Inquiry Committee, which included such free-trade stalwarts as Professor C.F. Bastasble of TCD, ‘a survivor of the great days of Victorian liberalism when free trade was regarded by British economists as a religion rather than a policy’,
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had found that the solution to Ireland’s economic woes: put all your livestock and biscuits in the John Bull basket, and things will work out okay. The grand old sages of Irish economic thought, rather like the much-maligned insane, were staunch believers in doing the same thing over and over again in anticipation of a different result.

The early 1930s saw the Cumann na nGaedheal government forced to admit that its ‘nothing to see here’ strategy was not working and that the fundamental problems within the economy needed to be addressed. The economic downturn, the forced deflation brought on by the Irish currency’s parity link with sterling, and the crash in agricultural prices all added to the calls for protection, some from within the agricultural sector, and by December 1931 there were tariffs on butter, bacon and oats. The favouring of middle-class incomes over economic development – in tandem with the housing grants, the standard income tax rate was cut from 25 per cent in 1924 to 15 per cent in 1927, while farm incomes were already exempt from income tax – had left the State in the unenviable position of borrowing more and spending less. ‘Both taxes and expenditure fell marginally from 1926 to 1931,’ writes Daly, ‘though public debt rose from £14.1 million in 1926 to £29.3 million in 1931.’
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The Fianna Fáil TD Seán McEntee said that ‘The Churchillian principle which the Minister [for Finance, Ernest Blythe] had enunciated of meeting budgetary obligations by increasing the public debt … was simply an inducement to undertax and overspend’.
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The idea that tax breaks in lieu of structural change will save a shrinking economy has a half-life in Ireland that’s greater than plutonium, and just as toxic.