Sean Lemass, The Enigmatic Patriot, by John Horgan, Gill & Macmillan, 424pp, £19.99
Sean Lemass has been something of an iconic figure in Irish life. Since his death in 1971, politicians, historians and political scientists alike have given him a good press. His reputation has stood mainly on the unprecedented economic growth and self-confidence of the early 1960s and the prospect of rapprochement with Northern Ireland offered by the meetings with Terence O'Neill in 1965.
John Horgan's biography is the latest addition to a substantial literature on Lemass. He has produced a lengthy study of the whole of Lemass's career based on an impressive range of archival sources and interviews with contemporaries. The book will probably stand as the definitive biography for some time.
Horgan spends the first half of his book looking at Lemass's life from his birth in Dublin in 1899 to 1959 when he succeeded de Valera as Taoiseach. Lemass's Dublin roots were important throughout his career, accounting for his preference for industrial development and relative lack of interest in agriculture. His mother's advanced nationalism also played an important part in Lemass's early involvement in the Irish Volunteers - he lied about his age to enlist - and participation in the 1916 Rising. Lemass showed considerable bravery in the Post Office during Easter Week, but prudently avoided almost certain death when ordered to retrieve the Tricolour from the roof of the building before its evacuation. Fifty years later the flag and the remains of Roger Casement were sent to Ireland by Harold Wilson when Lemass was Taoiseach.
A combination of courage and coolness marked Lemass's career as a revolutionary. He was probably a member of Collins's squad which carried out the assassination of the British intelligence agents in Dublin on Bloody Sunday 1920, but he refused to discuss this affair in later life, merely saying that "firing squads don't have reunions". Lemass brought similar determination to the Civil War, but was very quickly at the centre of moves to end republican abstention from the Dail, which brought Fianna Fail out of Sinn Fein and into parliamentary politics in 1927. By 1932 the strategy had paid off when de Valera became Taoiseach and Lemass was made Minister of Industry and Commerce - the department which he ran for most of his career.
Economics and industrial development were Lemass's passions. He was impatient of intellectuals and when not working preferred to relax with his golfing and cardplaying friends. In many ways his political interests were the reverse of the cultural nationalism at the heart of de Valera's ideology. He admired Connolly among the 1916 leaders "because he was attempting to translate the emotional desire for freedom into a practical social policy". In the 1930s, Lemass oversaw an economic policy of dirigiste protectionism which delivered instant results by fostering domestic manufacturing and creating industrial employment. Protection worked in the worldwide slump conditions of the 1930s and in the autarchic war years during which Lemass was also Minister of Supplies, probably the hottest seat in the Cabinet and a position where Lemass's integrity and incor ruptibility were essential. In the long term, however, protectionism was stultifying and led to an economic stagnation which produced political unrest and near-despair in the 1950s.
Horgan argues convincingly that Lemass had been concerned about the inefficiencies of protectionism even before the war. He remained a believer in intervention, spurred on by reading economists like Keynes and Beveridge, but his efforts to shift economic policy in the direction of freeing up trade and encouraging the import of capital ran into opposition from those in Fianna Fail who were afraid of the unemployment that might result from a change of policy. Lemass's enthusiasm for state-sponsored development through the state companies also ran into the conservatism of Sean McEntee and the Department of Finance. De Valera's resignation in 1959 finally gave Lemass the opportunity to pursue his ideas to the full, though many felt he had had to wait too long.
Horgan's verdict on the Lemass premiership is mixed. Lemass, ably assisted by a brilliant group of dedicated civil servants led by T.K. Whitaker, delivered years of high growth, exceeding the goals set in the First Programme for Economic Development, but by 1965-6 growth was declining and the country faced unprecedented industrial unrest and a looming balance of payments crisis. De Gaulle's veto on British membership of the EEC effectively ended Ireland's application, and even the limited gains of the AngloIrish free trade agreement were hard won. Likewise Lemass's overtures to Northern Ireland - typically Lemassian in their pragmatism and in their contrast with de Valera's virtual lack of a Northern policy - also ran into difficulties which blighted its early promise. Terence O'Neill may have sought the 1965 meetings mainly to protect the Unionist government from criticism and possible intervention by the Wilson Labour government.
By 1966, lack of progress and rising tensions in the North - not helped by the triumphalism of the 1916 commemorations in the South - began to close down the opportunities for change in crossborder relations. Lemass re mained committed to ending partition but he saw unity as only achievable by consent and within the context of economic development and co-operation on both sides of the border acting as forces for convergence.
The Lemass years were also a period of rapid cultural change in Ireland. As one might expect, Horgan is particularly interesting on this, and on the evolution of social policy in the 1960s. Lemass retained a strong commitment to greater social provision which began to bear fruit in educational policy during the 1960s. Forwardlooking in many pragmatic ways, in other respects he could be conservative. Despite his agnosticism, he accepted the dominance of Catholic social and moral teaching and did little to disturb the widely held identification of Irishness and Catholicism. He could be overbearing with dissenters, as revealed by his heavyhanded approach to Telefis Eireann when it failed to project the "picture of Ireland as we would like to have it". There is some evidence that Lemass thought that prosperity and modernisation would inevitably lead to secularisation in Ireland, but no evidence that he felt any urge to hasten change in this area.
On the whole, Lemass's reputation remains intact, even if there is a certain sympathy evoked by the realisation that much of what he sought to achieve eluded him during his career and may only now be becoming visible in European integration and the Northern peace process, and perhaps these are being realised in the context of transformations in Irish society and politics of which Lemass's generation might not have approved. Certainly, the integrity and dedication to public service of the group of civil servants who surrounded him did still draw on the energies of the revolutionary period and its high-minded aims. Horgan's book is large enough to consider many of these questions at length and provides a readable view of an important part of the history of independent Ireland, as well as a sympathetic but critical assessment of one of its heroes.
Eamon O'Flaherty is a lecturer in modern history at UCD