MacBride's Progress
By RAWLL KNOX
AMONG regular attendants at European conferences there must by now be a strong tendency to cry leprechaun every time
an Irish delegate rises to his feet. The Irish have blandly declared they intend to use all such meetings as places from which to broadcast their own private grievances. So it must have been with rather shocked incredulity that O.E.E.C. last Sunday heard from Mr. MacBride a proposal which far overstepped in conception any- thing put forward by other European planners. Mr. MacBride wanted nothing less than a world conference of the Marshall Plan nations, together with Canada, U.S.A. and all the sterling area coun- tries to discuss, first, the extent of European and American surplus production ; secondly, the development of the world's backward areas to proved markets for these surpluses ; thirdly, the creation of "an investment mechanism " to achieve this purpose ; and, lastly, the possibility of providing an international currency or else restor- ing full convertibility over as large an area of the world as possible.
It was so large-minded a plan that members of the O.E.E.C. were extremely doubtful whether they were the right persons before whom it should be brought for discussion. It was a plan produced by a country whose word has so far been only a feather-weight in inter- national affairs. Yet this time no one felt inclined to reply with the century old jibe that " the Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on the Tsar of Russia."
It is no accident that the only two Irish politicians in the past twenty-five years who may be said to have graduated to international rank are Mr. De Valera, who escaped execution in 1916 because he was an American citizen, and Mr. MacBride, who was educated wholly in France. Both are first and foremost Irish Nationalists, but they have the stature to see above the green mist of shamrock which always seems to colour the international vision of the ordinary home-grown patriot. For the statesman who is capable of achieving an objective outlook—though such a feat might be considered a piece of unnecessary snobbery by some of his country- men—Ireland provides some remarkable advantages. In the first place, he can immediately discard the normal occupational worry over the problem of defence. Whatever he may have to pretend in St. Patrick's Day speeches, he knows perfectly well that Ireland's protection will be undertaken by Britain should there be any danger
of attack. Eire, owing to her high principles about Partition, is not even tied by the slender strings of the Atlantic Pact. Belgium or
Luxemburg may choose between neutrality or alliance with larger Powers, but they know all too tragically that in the event of war rushing upon them from the East, neither policy will save them from occupation. It is a harrow of which Ireland almost alone in Europe is totally free. She is alone, too, in having no local Com- munists snapping at her Government's heels. Also she is an agri- cultural country which has shown during the war that at a pinch, though admittedly a tight one, she can make do with practically no dollars at all. These conditions pass for fairly exotic luxuries in the modern world, and relaxed amongst them there is no reason why an Irish statesman should not be able to view the whole economic scene with exceptional clarity.
Mr. MacBride has duly made his survey, and has come to the con- clusion not only that the dollar gap will never be closed by the methods suggested in O.E.E.C., even if the nineteen Marshall coun- tries should exceed in action their own optimistic estimates, but also that many of the efforts to export to dollar areas are actually distorting Europe's economy. At home, as he is not allowed to forget by the opposition, his Government vetoed a proposed Irish transatlantic airline, and thus forfeited the earning of a number of dollars. But the reason for the veto was that the airline would have been hopelessly uneconomic. There are other European coun- tries striving after dollars with industries far less defensible in common sense. To what sacrifices are the rest of a country's economy to be driven in the desperate hunt for hard currency ? Even natural dollar-earning exports are to an alarming degree luxury goods which would be the first to suffer exclusion at the whisper of an American recession. It must be admitted that in the last resort the United States has no need to buy from Europe at all ; that it is as much a charity, though a charity which certainly helps at home, for her to buy British cars as to hand out free cigarettes. Mr. MacBride is presumably not the only European statesman to have noticed these mountainous difficulties, but he may be one of the few who arc making a shrewd and unemotional estimate of the American Con- gressional mind. The Irish can lobby as successfully as most pressure groups in Washington, and yet, despite efforts which they renew at practically every session, they have been unable to persuade the U.S. Government to intervene in Ireland's quarrel with Britain. This must have made Mr. MacBride think. And he may well be sceptical of the widespread European belief that America can be persuaded for ever to bolster with dollars their first defence against Communism. Moreover, Southern Ireland was never com- pletely overrun by G.I.s, and so is less obsessed by physical contact with inexhaustible American wealth than the rest of Europe.
It is natural for the United States, with her present trading structure, to regard the European problem merely as a dollar deficiency. But granted a pessimism which accepts that deficiency as permanent, what is the remedy ? Mr. MacBride believes that it is not to build up a tough Pan-European economy which, as Mr. Hoffman thinks, would be able to bargain with the United States ; but rather to create right away new consumer areas to take American exportable surpluses which Europe is never likely to be able to afford. Mr. MacBride has, of course, only taken up President Truman's famous point four, which proposed the use of American capital to develop backward areas, and which has so far remained little more than an aspiration. At the time of the President's speech China still meant Chiang Kai-shek, and there was perhaps a tacit prayer among American opportunists that the Dutch would be forced to leave the N.E.I. in the hands of inexperienced Nationalists eager for American aid. Since then the Far Eastern picture has drastically changed, and American capital is presumably still waiting. Mr. MacBride would not be so tastelessly blunt as to describe his own country as a backward area, but he did point out in a recent lecture to his party followers that the twenty-six counties of Eire suffer from ridiculous under-investment. Eire, he said, was at present only able to support—and that with chronic unemployment— one hundred and eleven persons per square mile,.as compared with Holland's seven hundred and thirteen and Austria's two hundred and fourteen—the highest and lowest figures for other West European countries. Mr. MacBride's plan, therefore, is no remote detached dream, but is very definitely related to the needs of his own country.
Under-investment in Eire is due to two factors which even Mr. MacBride's enthusiasm is unlikely to change. First, the peasant mentality of the ordinary small farmer utterly jibs at turning profits back into the business. Let alone re-equipping his farm, he seldom even reclothes himself. Secondly, the National Bank, under the presidency of Lord Glenavy, has never really overcome its unbelief at the possibility of Irish independence. It was the bank that turned down Mr. William Cosgrave's request for a loan to his infant Free State. Last month the banks stated that they could only grant half of the £5,000poo loan which Dublin Corporation had asked for housing. The banks must have a first duty to those whose money they have in keeping, but there is something in Mr. MacBride's contention that to hold sterling assets in the Bank of England, earning 1 per cent. and suffering from periodic devaluation, has, few advantages over investment at 34 per cent. in bricks and mortar to house the citizens of Dublin.
Another matter which riles Mr. MacBride is the Irish Currency Act of 1927, which provides that the Central Bank must buy every British pound delivered to it at the rate of one Irish pound. Eire was thus the only independent European State which not only followed British devaluation, but was forced to do so by its own law. It is possible that in seeking a universal currency Mr. MacBride has it in mind to rid his country of her dependence of Threadneedle Street, for a universal currency would at least need an International Bank in which Ireland would take her place. Most of all, however, Mr. MacBride has the passionate desire to end the steady annual emigration of the Irish. In the twenty years following 1926 over three hundred and fifty thousand Irishmen left home for overseas, and Mr. MacBride estimates that it cost his country some twelve hundred pounds to feed, clothe and educite each of these persons before they vanished. What Mr. MacBride is now proposing is not to him merely a scheme to rehabilitate Europe, but a plan of investment in his own country that will provide employment to keep Irishmen at home. •
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