Irish Notebook
By BRIAN INGLIS
NoTHINa seemed changed. From hoardings, `Dev' and General Sean MacEoin canvassed against each other for, the electorate's support, as they have been doing for nearly forty years. The train to Cork went past field after field of what surely ought to be considered Ireland's staple crop : rushes. The journey was quick and com- fortable, but we passed only half a dozen or so other trains, goods and passenger—no great advertisement for the health of the country's economy—on the way. At Cork the station taxis were of a wonderful senility—American models, which Irish taxi-owners favour, do not age grace- fully. The hotel was undergoing one of those periodic renovations which are the tourist's occu- pational hazard in Ireland. A new bathroom had been built into a corner of my room; the hot tap gave abundant scalding water, but the cold tap produced nothing; I had to transfer cold water to it from a wash basin with the help of a small carafe—a remarkably laborious process. And the electricians had achieved some interesting results in wiring the room. The bedside light did not function; taking up the house telephone to report the fact, I found myself connected not to the switchboard but to a piped-in pay-as-you-listen radio programme—relaying, appropriately enough, a Radio Eireann news bulletin which announced the resignation of a member of the Electricity Supply Board. In a provincial town anywhere else such things may breed exaspera- tion; not in Cork, where any inconvenience is snore than compensated for by the pleasure of bearing local voices inveighing against Fate's whims, and of feeling that the hotel staff actually like having visitors.
But though this was outwardly the old Ireland --almost, at times, a parody of it—there were restive stirrings underneath. Reading the Irish Times on the train I saw that Sean Lemass—Mr. de Valera's second-in-command for many years, and his presumed successor as leader of the party when Mr. de Valera becomes President later this month—had frankly admitted that the day of economic nationalism is now over; 'it seems that small countries like ours will have difficulty in maintaining viable economies outside the ambit of wider economic combinations.' Mr. Lemass, more than any other man, can claim to be the Chief Engineer of economic nationalism in Ire- land, with its tariffs and quotas fostering home industries, to fulfil the Sinn Fein ideal of self- s'ufficiency. When he has to admit (and this is not the first time he has done so) that the ideal is impracticable, it is melancholy but irrefutable confirmation that the economic road Ireland has been travelling since the Treaty of 1921 has at last reached its dead end.
• The trouble with the ideal, it is now generally conceded, is thatch could only be attained if the people of Ireland were prepared to accept the lower standards of living which it would entail; and they are not. Instead—to quote Patrick Lynch, the Chairman of Aer Lingus—they are trying 'to reconcile an imperial standard of living with a republican income.' It is significant that Mr. Lynch, and many others in positions of administrative or political authority in the Republic, can today refer to economic nationalism as the 'Sinn Fein myth' without a qualm, and go on—as he did in a recent paper—to argue the case for an Anglo-Irish common market, on the grounds that political in- dependence can only be retained by renouncing economic independence. Ten years ago people did not care to say this—any more than ten years ago, when the anti-Partition campaign was at its height, people in public life in the South cared to concede there was a case for the Border. To do so was almost sacrilegious. But today, the anti-Partition movement is totally discredited. It is rarely even mentioned. When Ernest Blythe, who owns the Abbey Theatre, was conducting almost a one-man campaign in the early 1950s for a more rational approach to Partition, he was ignored as a crackpot; now, his views are so far accepted that the recent re-publication of some of his writings in a pamphlet, though it calls itself 'A new departure in northern policy,' looks old hat. Writers in the National Observer, an oppo- sition monthly written by what might be called the Irish equivalent of the Bow Group, have no hesitation in making what until recently would have been regarded, as crypto-Unionist or Protestant criticisms: they are even prepared to denounce over-garrulous bishops. To my surprise, I found less violent anti-clerical feeling than the last time I was over—partly, no doubt, because it is being more freely and publicly expressed : partly because the anger is in any case concen- trated against lay Catholics who trade in bigotry • or obscurantism, rather than against the hier- archy.
The significant division in Ireland 'today has ceased to be between the two main parties, de Valera's Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. It is now between the old mystique and the new prag- matism—which makes the contest for the Presi- dency and the referendum on Proportional Representation seem irrelevant. Young men of both parties would like to see de Valera become President to get him out of the way. They regret that one of the old political neanderthalers is opposing him, because they feel that an all-party agreement to allow Mr. de Valera to be returned unopposed would have helped to end civil war bitterness. If they support PR, as most of them do, they also regret that many Fianna Fail sup- porters who would not have bothered to go to the polling stations to vote on the PR issue alOne will now, because they have arrived to vote for him as President, also vote for the abolition of PR.
But on PR there is no opposition unanimity; some of the younger members of the Fine Gael Party feel that if it is to defeat Fianna Fail at all it must do so alone—not, as recently, in coalitions with the blown corpse of the Irish Labour Party and miscellaneous splinter groups. They argue that the straight vote, by eliminating the other coalition elements, will in time actually help Fine Gael back into the power it has not enjoyed alone since 1931.
Whatever the opinions about PR, there is a general feeling that it is characteristic of the less creditable side of Mr. de Valera as a politician that he should be trying to push through its abolition at a time when he is just about to leave politics. In his attitude to his retirement he closely resembles Dr. Adenauer : the Irish Times cartoon hit it off nicely when it showed Dev looking out of a window and musing, 'It's so difficult to ensure that one will have the right kind of politics to be above.'
The Irish Times this month celebrates its hundredth birthdaj,. Anybody who passes his formative journalist years in that establishment never, in a sense, leaves it; I would consequently be as embarrassed to make the usual congratu- lations as I would be-to shake hands with myself. I can still feel the trepidation with which I climbed the stairs to the reporters' room to my first marking; and the astonishment at finding that I had been put down to attend the trade show of Three Smart Girls Grow Up. Subsequent markings were less congenial; as junior reporter I was sent to inquests, funerals, Protestant fetes, traffic accidents and, worst of all, dinners. Chicken and ham, Graves, speeches, 'renderings.' . . I have attended public dinners since, but not if I could help it.
The Irish Times provided, in the best sense of the cliche, a liberal education. My first mentor was a reporter so ancient that his first marking had been to cover the Franco-Prussian war; and he was only one of a remarkable gallery of charac- ters, some on the staff, some in a state of semi- permanent suspension owing to fearful breaches of decorum—too disreputable to be retained, too much a part of the place to be irrevocably fired.
And there was Smyllie. I came into his office, as supernumerary leader writer, shortly after the era which Patrick Campbell has described re- cently in the Spectator. Dominoes were played no longer, and the songs which were sung while we waited for the first edition to appear off the presses had taken a turn for the bawdier; otherwise the picture was unchanged. Alec New- man (now editor of the Irish Times) chanted the responses : and in Campbell's locker sat John Robinson, whose destiny it was to feature in a news story which was more widely quoted than any other, I would guess, in the paper's history. John was on the Repulse at the time it was sunk by Japanese torpedoes; when a greatly relieved Smyllie (furious though he was when his protégés left the paper, on any pretext, he followed their careers sentimentally) wanted to give the news that John was safe, the censorship stopped him. Thereupon Smyllie wrote and printed an appar- ently innocent account of how John had been rescued after 'a boating accident' and slipped it through the censor's net. A great editor and an influential one, was R. M. Smyllie; and delightful company.
The Irish Times had many failings, but profligacy used not to be one of them. I was in- terested to observe last week that this charac- teristic, at least, remains unchanged. On the wall of the reporters' room there was a printed notice: Irish Times centenary 8th June, 1959 To mark the above occasion the Directors have decided to give to each member of the Staff a
bonus of five pounds or one week's wages, whichever is the lower.
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