Review… Sins of the Father – Conor McCabe. Irish History Press (2011)

This review is by SonofStan…for which many thanks…

What follows won’t exactly be a conventional review of Sins of the Father, and for two reasons: firstly, I know Conor slightly, and have discussed some of the material in the book with him, and read all the pieces on Dublin Opinion that preceded and informed it. So while this may not be as compromised in terms of reviewer disinterest as ex-Senator Harris’s glowing encomium to Ruth Dudley-Edwards’ Why Are Irish People Grudgeful?, it is unlikely to be entirely objective either: I was well- disposed to this book long before ever seeing a copy. Secondly, and more importantly, I imagine a fair number of people reading this will have either already read the book, or will do so, irrespective of anything I say. So in this regard, the advertising function of a glowing review is also irrelevant.
I will, therefore, be less concerned with telling you what a good book this is and why you should buy it – it is, of course, and you should – and more to do with examining matters arising. It is not at all a criticism to say there is no new information here: a look at the notes while show that all of Conor’s sources are in the public domain. Newspapers, books, academic papers: no hitherto unrevealed sources, no new letters or emails that explain ‘everything’. What is new is the piecing together of this information and the construction of what – in the end – seems the only possible conclusion, or conclusions. So, if all this information was already out there, why didn’t the people charged with studying this – economists and economic historians – spot all of this before?

This is a relatively short book, and it covers a great deal, and with fine, polemical force: it is admirably concise, but necessarily selective, and, in respect of all of it, there is much ‘reading in’ to be done, and indeed, Conor has already started running some ‘B-sides and Outtakes’ on Dublin Opinion. I had intended to talk about all of it, in greater or lesser detail – and the housing chapter, especially, deserves a longer discussion here – but that would have been beyond the scope of even an already much too long review, so what I want to do instead is to show how, with respect to one particular aspect of the Irish economy –agricultural policy – the very same information was used to build an entirely different narrative, and how that narrative became the official story of the Irish economy since independence. In order to do this, I want to view the same information through a different lens.

That lens is James Meenan’s book The Irish Economy Since 1922 (Manchester University Press: 1970). Conor briefly references it in his text (McCabe 77) although it is absent from the bibliography. Meenan was Professor of Political Economy and National Economics in UCD, and his only other book was an appreciation of his colleague and predecessor, George O’Brien, a man who, as Conor notes, was a friend of Patrick Hogan, the Minister of Agriculure in the first Cummann Na nGaedheal government. Meenan’s background and education might dispose him towards a sympathetic view of the CnaG/ Fine Gael orthodoxy, and his book largely confirms this. Nevertheless, it is a thorough and clear account of what happened when, and the more political parts of it offer an interesting insight into what the current generation of UCD economists would have been taught. He held his chair from 1961 until the late seventies, and a short list of those who studied economics at UCD during that period would include Colm McCarthy, Moore McDowell and John Fitzgerald. So it is likely, to say the least, that his book represents a link in a chain that stretches from the economic policies that set the state on the road, to the people who advise the current lot. It was published just after the midpoint between independence and now – before the EEC, before the Oil Crisis, and at a time of modestly optimistic expectations for the future.

Conor’s book consists of 5 chapters: on housing, agriculture, industry, finance, and a final one on the current crisis. Meenan divides up the territory in a roughtly similar fashion, though at (much) greater length. However, it is instructive to note two variations: Meenan doesn’t have a chapter on housing, and, indeed, the building industry as a whole is remarkably underrepresented in his book. It is taken as a given for every other kind of economic activity, much as water or power or transport are treated, but is not, in itself, considered as one of those activities. It is hard to imagine that a book written even ten years later would have been capable of such a glancing presentation.

Equally, Conor’s book has no specific chapter on population and population change, to which Meenan devotes a long chapter. Emigration is not, of course, ignored in the Sins of the Father, but neither is it given the centrality as both an index and a cause of economic underachievement that Meenan affords it. I’ll come back to this, but briefly: Conor quotes Senator O’Farrell in 1923, to the effect that ‘the ranches were created by filling the emigrant ships’ (McCabe 63). In other words, mass emigration suited the graziers and their political servants, and therefore, if it was not actively encouraged, no serious attempt was being made to curtail it. Meenan’s argument is revealingly different: because the young people all emigrated, leaving children, the old and the infirm, there was a shortage of suitable labour to attract industry, at least until the sixties. Therefore the country lacked an essential resource needed for development. He further argues that the provision of technical education effectively functioned as a source of skilled labour for British industry – we trained them, and the ingrates took their skills to well- paid jobs, decent housing and a functioning health service in Birmingham or Glasgow. And, in a very revealing phrase – and again, I will return to this – he characterises this as a ‘clash between the interests of the Irish individual and the Irish state’ (Meenan: 1970 269).

The chapter on agriculture is the pivot around which Sins of the Father turns, I think. You can sense the excitement at discovering the absolute centrality of the cattle industry to the whole story in some posts Conor wrote last year. On first reading, the sentence that leapt out at me was ‘But Ireland was always part of the modern era’ (McCabe 61) and that’s the big insight: Agriculture, is not the opposite, or the complement of industry, as it was presented in our school geography – it is an industry, and Irish agriculture was a production line stretching from the small farms of the west to the slaughterhouses of East London, and the small farmer, raising his handful of calves, before selling them on to the grazier in the east, had more in common with an industrial piece- worker than with the generic European peasant. And further, Ireland – and Irish beef production – was an integral part of the biggest, and most developed economy in the world by the end of the 19th century.

Meenan’s book is in two parts: the first section analyses the various sectors of the economy and their performance since independence – the second is more engaged and offers prognoses and critiques of each segment in turn. It is instructive to compare Meenan’s chapter on “Agriculture: Issues of Policy” with Conor’s corresponding chapter. Both quote almost the same passage from George O’Brien’s eulogy to Patrick Hogan, to the effect that:

The principle aim of agricultural policy in the Free State should therefore be the maximisation of the farmer’s income, and not, as in certain other countries differently situated, the provision of food for the urban population or the solution to the unemployment problem. (McCabe 70/ Meenan 303)

The rationale for this prioritisation – from which Hogan was never deflected, even by actual cases of rural starvation (McCabe 71) – was as follows: farmers (for which read: ranchers) were the most important segment of the economy because, almost alone, they were the export sector – which meant that, as Meenan puts it:

Policy should encourage the concentration of public and private resources on the production and marketing of commodities for which the country possessed the greatest comparative advantage. In the 1920s, after 80 years of free trade, it was fairly clear that the forms of production which the Irish farmer had adopted under those conditions were prima facie those in which he had the greatest superiority. (Meenan 304)

Livestock production was, effectively, the export sector, and thus without it, the country would have been unable to finance its imports. Large farmers were therefore – affirms Meenan – of national importance, and, in a classic piece of special pleading, as Conor notes, quoting Joe Lee:

…dogmatic free traders cleverly succeeded in confusing all farmers purchases with farming ‘costs’. There was no immediate reason why protection on consumer goods should have directly and sharply increased farmers costs of production, as distinct from the cost of living. The convenient confusion between farmers’ consumer purchases and producer purchases was a shrewd propagandist non-sequitur (J.J. Lee, quoted in McCabe 74)

The result of this was twofold, as Meenan states, more or less approvingly. Farmers’ costs were to be kept down, and thus, he ought to be free to purchase as cheaply as he could, wherever he could, so no tariffs were imposed to protect the domestic production of feed or fertilizer. Equally:

The agricultural community formed the principle market for Irish industrial products, whose expansion depended on its prosperity. It followed that protection by tariff for industry should be sparingly applied and confined to those cases where there was a reasonable cause to believe there would not be a permanent increase in costs. (Meenan 304)

It is, I think, no exaggeration to say that, until you understand the absolute priority given to the demands of the agricultural sector – and further, one particular sector of that sector, the production of cattle for live export – the rest of the story of the Irish economy cannot be understood. Everything else – the uneven pattern of industrial development, the maintenance of the link with sterling, the delay in setting up a central bank – flows from this one point.

The thing is, of course, such a policy didn’t appear demented to its architects, firstly, because they – or their class – were the beneficiaries of such a policy, but also because it did seem to have some ostensibly compelling, ‘objective’ features to recommend it. Ireland, or rather the Free State, was an agricultural economy, and manufacturing and other industry was very weak in comparison with its neighbours. In 1907, slightly under 300,000 were employed in industrial pursuits [32 counties]: the figure for Scotland was 885,000, at a time when the population of the latter was about 500,000 greater than that of the island of Ireland. In 1931, the figure for the 26 counties was just over 100,000. (Meenan 134). The comparable figure for those engaged in agriculture in 1926 was 670,000. And even in 1967, the last year for which figures were available to Meenan, very close to 30% of the population was engaged in agriculture. (inter alia, that figure comes from a table comparing the proportions of the labour force in various sectors across Western Europe, and I can’t resist pointing out something not directly relevant to this: the five countries with the highest proportion of the population engaged in agriculture in 1967 are Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy, and the first four also comprise the bottom four with respect to levels of industrial employment).

In light of this, the five reasons that O’ Brien offers for Hogan’s policy with respect to agriculture, a policy that, as we have seen, set the course for the economy over at least the next four decades, and the consequences of which we are living with still, have the appearance of ‘common sense’. These reasons are:
In the first place, it utilized to the maximum the physical and geographical resources of the country; secondly, it developed those branches of production which are particularly suitable for the average Irish farm; thirdly, it did not involve any breach in continuity in the tradition of Irish farming or in the constructive programme of the Department of Agriculture; fourthly, it promised to provide abundant rural employment, as the agricultural statistics prove that mixed farming with dairying as the principle feature gives more employment per acre than almost every other type of agricultural activity; fifthly, food production would be stimulated and the population of the Free State could never be reduced to famine during wartime. The alternative objectives of agricultural policy, namely employment and food production, would thus be incidentally secured. (O’Brien, quoted in Meenan, 305)

This relatively short paragraph encapsulates the mixed appeal to naturalism, to tradition and to the logic of the market that determined policy in the first years of this state: if nothing else, it substantiates Balfour’s claim (Meenan 15), that the polity the Free State took over was the one built by the Tories in their own likeness so as to ‘kill home rule with kindness’. To take them in turn: the first two are a simple repetition of the ‘God gave us the plains of Meath for a reason’ argument, the third elevates a relatively recent pattern of development into ‘a tradition’, the fourth, as Conor amply illustrates, is simply a lie: not only was the rest of the economy entirely subordinate to farming, but agriculture as a whole was entirely subordinate to beef production. The fifth is piety. And the notion that the object of employment and food production would be ‘incidentally’ secured, is a structure of thought repeated again and again through the economic history of the state: just as desirable housing outcomes would be ‘incidentally’ secured by offering tax incentives to builders, or employment outcomes would be ‘incidentally’ secured by a low corporation tax and the construction of, effectively, an offshore tax haven in the ISFC. The idea of directly setting out to achieve socially useful ends, rather than by the diversion of the states resources into private hands, appears never to have occurred to ‘us’.
Nevertheless, from the ‘official’ point of view, despite the sagacity and selflessness of our native ruling- class, it was clear to Meenan that it hadn’t really worked out as planned. Ireland in 1970 remained underdeveloped, both agriculturally and with regard to other economic activity, the population was limping along around the 3m mark, with bulges still at each end – the very young and the very old – and a shortage of those of working age to support the rest. How had it happened? I noted earlier his conclusion that, in matters of emigration, there was a ‘clash’ between individual interests and the interests of the Irish state – the young and able-bodied taking themselves off to decent prospects, good housing and proper health and education in the UK, rather than staying here to be patronised and bullied. Well, apparently with regard to farming, it was the people all over again who weren’t doing their bit: and in particular small farmers, who refuse to adapt, to learn new tricks: Irish agriculture has ‘a long, unhappy and complicated history’ he sighs(Meenan 308). Problems of ‘psychology and attitudes of mind’ resistant to robust competition are ‘a recipe for a stagnant state and a second-rate people’ (Meenan 314). Interesting how tradition and continuity are laudable with regard to prosperous farmers, but to be deprecated when it comes to the other end of the scale. Put crudely, too crudely maybe, I suspect that Meenan feels that the state, or at least the state in CnaG/ FG hands, and under Lemass/ Whitaker, did its best, but the people – the bastards – let it down.

Conor, of course, also sees the history of our economy as a clash between ‘individual interests and the interests of the Irish state’ but correctly identifies those individual interests as being the interests of a particular sector of society, over-represented in politics, banking and finance, and with familial and business links with the grazier and rancher class, whose interests are decidedly not identical with those of the Irish state, if that state means ‘the rest of us’.

There was loads more I wanted to talk about, but this is already much too long: the history of the Irish banking sector, for instance, offers just as dispiriting a narrative. One story from a very recent paper by Cormac Ó Gráda is worth repeating in this regard though: In 1940 a delegation from the Bank of Ireland travelled to meet the head of the Bank of England, Montague Norman, to seek reassurance concerning the safely and liquidity of Irish capital held there. This is what he told them:

Notwithstanding the long and intimate relations between the two institutions he was not prepared to commit the Bank of England by promising to come to the assistance of the Bank of Ireland in an emergency of the nature under discussion. As an ordinary banking transaction there would be no question whatever about making an advance to the Bank, but in an emergency situation there was an important principal (sic) involved. The Bank of England looked upon Eire as a Dominion… Mr. Norman stressed the view that the Bank whose centre of gravity was in Eire‘ should look to their own Treasury or the Currency Commission to help them over difficult periods. Sir John [Keane, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ireland] pointed out that the position in Eire did not admit of a solution in that way, as the Treasury came to the Bank when it was short of funds, and the Currency Commission was not a lender of the last resort. Mr. Norman then urged that as Eire was a separate political entity it should have a Central Bank of its own.

(in Ó Gráda ‘Five Crises’ delivered as Central Bank of Ireland, TK Whitaker Lecture 2011 – available on irisheconomy.ie)

Being told by the central banker of the former colonial power, nearly 20 years after independence, that it was possibly time to take over the management of your own treasury, must have smarted ever so slightly.
The absence of a Central Bank had of course been noted before, and ignored: it didn’t suit the commercial banks to submit to the oversight of such an institution, and that, for two decades, was that.
As Conor notes, writing about the position in the thirties:
It was a testimony to the power of the (commercial) banks in the Free State that, after 16 years, two commissions, and one international financial crisis, their ability to dictate the pace and direction of Irish economic growth to suit their own business agenda to the detriment of almost all other aspects of Irish economic and social life remained undaunted. (McCabe 133)

You could, of course, substitute ‘90’ for ‘16’ in that sentence without any great sacrifice in accuracy.