Personality, family and history were key drivers of the Irish system, the British believed, writes John Bew.
The Irish political system was "highly conservative", "deep-rooted in family relationships" and "triggered by personality rather than doctrine", according to a senior diplomat operating in the British embassy in Dublin in 1977. In an "impressionistic" analysis to be distributed among British officials who had dealings with Ireland, it was also claimed that Irish politics was deeply "imprinted" with a sense of history and was "strongly oligarchical in flavour".
Despite the fact that the Irish parliament was seen as an "offspring of Westminster" and retained many of the same characteristics, there were several striking differences. The first of these was that there was little evidence of the "correlation between voting and class" so obvious in Britain.
The second was the unacknowledged importance of "heredity" in Ireland, despite the absence of a peerage. There was a "marked tendency for seats as well as political views to be passed by inheritance from father to child or from husband to wife".
The report noted that there was a "large element of Catholic conservatism" in both main political parties, as well as in the country as a whole. There were very few radicals in the Dáil and virtually no scope for women, unless they had inherited a seat. Of the 334 candidates in the 1977 election, only six of them were women and only four were elected, all of whom were widows or daughters of former deputies.
Stability and continuity were also striking features of Irish political life, according to the report, which was written ahead of the general election of 1977. Party loyalty was "remarkably strong" and no government had been defeated in the Dáil since 1949. Since 1922, there had been 14 British prime ministers but only six taoisigh. For most Irishmen and women, the events of the treaty and the civil war were a "trauma which had conditioned the views of the next generation". Notwithstanding the splits in that period, parties descended from Sinn Féin had taken at least 76 per cent of the vote since that time. Voting for another party was "almost unthinkable". Loyalty provided "the cement which in other systems would be provided by ideology".
The issues of the 1920s "have since been kept alive by partition" and "political alignments are strongly influenced by what one's family did in the 20s". However, the British official also observed that "those in power have almost invariably been driven by the logic of their position to oppose fantasies - to fight subversion and to accept (even if they hate), the Republic's economic and cultural interdependence with Britain". Even de Valera, it was argued, had been forced to accept this reality.
Despite the fact that commentators had often suggested that Irish politics might develop differently in the future, the report concluded that serious changes were not on the immediate horizon. The newly formed Workers' Party had yet to make a serious impact with their new emphasis on socio-economic issues. Political life was "more personalised, tribalised and intimate" than in Britain and likely to remain so.
Shortly after Fianna Fáil's election victory, a rather more alarmist depiction of Irish political culture came from Stanley Orme, the left-wing Labour MP and former Northern Ireland Office minister. Orme wrote to the prime minister in June to offer his views on Lynch and the party from his experience in the late 1960s. Although he believed that Lynch, as a Cork man, tended to see the Northern Ireland issue "purely in historical context", the new Taoiseach was "charismatic" and "moderate". His party, however, was a different matter entirely. Having once addressed the parliamentary party of Fianna Fáil in the Dáil, he recalled the results were "almost terrifying". For the majority of the delegates, serious thinking about the issue "had stopped in 1916".
By contrast, an official at the British embassy reported how Peter Prendergast, Fine Gael's national organiser, told him how his party organisation had "virtually no interest in Irish unity".