IRELAND Reaction Makes Its Last Stand
By TIM PAT COOGAN
DUBLIN
WHAT'S going to happen at Easter?' Honestly I don't know, and what's more, I don't think anyone else does either. People are talking IRA, thinking bank managers, watching 1916 fif- tieth anniversary commemoration preparations, and threatening to go on strike. The Irish economy which has been hurdling its fences with an Arkle- like impressiveness for the last seven years is now slowing down as the British credit squeeze is dup- licated in Ireland. Yet Ireland is passing through one of the most fascinating years in her history.
By the time that 1966 is over we will know, of course, what if any were the IRA's plans to cele- brate the anniversary of the 1916 Rising. But we will also know the result of the Presidential elec- tion in June in which eighty-four-year-old Presi- dent De Valera (Fianna Fail) stands again for his second seven-year term against Tom O'Higgins, (Fine Gael), a nephew of Kevin O'Higgins, Vice- President of the Irish Free State who was mur- dered in 1927. Later on in the year there should have been the local government elections, but these have been postponed in view of the general joie de vivre. Looming above all these there is the question of what will be the effect of the new An4o-Irish free trade agreement which comes into effect in July. Far down on the horizon there also stands, of course, the ultimate goal of Common Market membership. Meanwhile, stand- ing symbolically in the centre of Dublin, Nelson's empty site turns a blind eye to everything.
A year ago all was euphoria. There was the wonderful improvement in North-South relation- ships follow ing the unprecedented meetings be- tween the Republic's Sean Lemass and the North of Ireland Premier, Captain O'Neill. Spreading benignly throughout the country there were the liberalising effects of the Ecumenical Council (which, as religion is a daily part of the 95 per cent Catholic Irish Republic's way of life, means far more than can be readily understood in Eng- land). Now all has been overshadowed by the failure of the Second Programme for Economic Expansion, in which the entire economic planning of the economy is based, to reach its targets so far this year. This failure follows a sharp rise in the excess of imports over exports and a year of over- enthusiastic governmental and private spending. These blows were reflected this month in the reluctantly taken decision to pull the Irish UN contingent out of Cyprus unless the UN pays for it, and in a scarifying budget aimed at putting up income tax and cutting down luxury spending.
With the national nerves sharpening as a result of all this, attention has now focused rather twitchily to the implications of these retrench- ments and to problems which it had been hoped had been left behind for ever, the probability of a recurrence of IRA violence and the possibility of conflict between church and state over the state's increasingly large intervention into the domain of education, hitherto an almost exclu- sively clerical sphere of influence. Complicating the picture there was an unprecedented wave of strikes, as unimaginative managements and the rising cost of (and appetite for) living caused trade unionists to seek increasingly unrealistic slices of the national cake.
However, all this does not mean that the Irish economy is grinding to a halt. Although suffer- ing from British economic fall-out, the economy is fundamentally sound. The tourist trade, the country's newest and most helpful industry, pro- mises to have a record year. Cattle stocks, the mainstay of the nation, are also at an all-time high. The industrial unrest is in different circum- stances analogous more to the kind of turbulence
experienced in England in the late 'forties and early 'fifties than to any imminent economic crack-up. Irish government-management-union relationships are evolving, however awkwardly, towards a twentieth-century awareness of the economic facts of life. New labour legislation has been hinted at. Reaction in fact is making its last stand in Ireland.
No matter what old bitternesses are 'aroused by the 1916 anniversary Ireland can never be the same again. The younger men and women now coming to the fore at all levels of national life, are, apart from the extreme Republican elements and some second-generation patriots, a genera- tion without rancour. They have grown to maturity without suffering the pain of losing a relative or friend in war against the British. In civil war between Irishmen in the South. In pogrom between Protestant and Catholic in the North. The language of this generation reflects the kind of interests which animate it. It talks not of 'Staters' and 'Irregulars' (the terms used to de- scribe the opposing factions in the civil war), partition, the civil war or 1916 but of the cost of living, growth rates, selling, the Council, the Pill, telly, Vietnam. It lives in an era where although the censorship system still permits some ghastly blunders (for instance the banning of John McGahern's book The Dark, which led to his los- ing his teaching post, and of the films Darling and The Knack) it is nevertheless steadily becom- ing more liberal.
Even the potentially explosive problem of im- proving the educational system is slowly work- ing towards a solution. For instance, in February the Bishop of Galway lashed out at the Minister for Education over his plans to replace insanitary, inefficient, one-teacher schools in rural areas with larger, more central units. This did not betoken a head-on clash between church and state. Up rose another bishop six days later, Dr Rogers of Killaloe, to say that all the Hierarchy wished to see each child get an equal educational oppor- tunity and that a difference of opinion between an individual bishop and the Minister for Edu- cation was simply that.
When, a little later, another bishop, Dr Ryan of Clonfert (it's been a good year for bishops), issued a statement to the press and preached a sermon in his cathedral condemning a show on Telefis Eireann, in which the compere asked a woman what did she wear on her honeymoon, a nightie or pyjamas (answer: `nothing'!) the letter columns of the papers erupted three to one against such a majesty of crozier being raised against such a mite of tastelessness. The upshot was that the show went to the top of the TAM ratings. Ireland gained a talking point, 'The Bishop and the Nightie,' but, one imagines, lost a television critic.
Along with losing her inhibitions Ireland is also, unfortunately, losing some of her old rhythms (and not merely because Radio Eireann has banned all rebel songs for Easter). The Roll- ing Stones and what they stand for echo loudly in other places than around Nelson's vanished column. However, some pleasant things will, I trust, always remain. Like the character of the little Dublin newspaper boy who scooped up a fistful of small change that I unknowingly dropped through a hole in my pocket as I ran for a train the other night. He raced after me through a cloud of traffic, returned the money and refused to let me either tip him or buy a paper in gratitude. And so it goes. Economically and politically progress should be back in full swing by, at the very latest, the end of 1967. Meanwhile ,it's still Ireland, in a rugged year but a stimulating one.
Previous page
