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2019 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

12. The Economic War and the Pamphlet War

verfasst von : Aidan Beatty

Erschienen in: Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662–2016

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

In 1932, the Irish Free State became embroiled in an Economic War, when the newly elected de Valera government intentionally defaulted on annuities owed by Irish farmers to the British government under the terms of the 1891 – 1909 Land Acts. This ‘post-colonial wrangle’, as the economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda termed it, was one of the seminal elements of 1930s Irish politics; the debates and actions around the annuities issue helped to redefine the Treatyite divisions of 1920s Ireland into the economic divisions of a populist Fianna Fáil versus a conservative and quasi-fascist Fine Gael in the 1930s. This chapter studies the various pamphlets published in the 1920s and 1930s in which these politico-economic issues were debated, from the socialist writings of Peadar O’Donnell to works produced by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael ideologues.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Taxation and the Revolutionary Inheritance: Tax Proposals, Legitimacy, and the Irish Free State, 1922–32

Nächstes Kapitel The Irish Tax State and Historical Legacies: Slowly Converging Capacity, Persistent Unwillingness to Pay

‘Treaty Between Great Britain and Ireland’, 6 Dec. 1921, National Archives of Ireland (hereafter, NAI) TSCH/5 2002/5/1.

For the background to the negotiations, see Ronan Fanning, The Irish Department of Finance, 1922–58 (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1978), 155–74.

‘Heads of the Ultimate Financial Settlement between the British government and the government of the Irish Free State’, 19 Mar. 1926, in Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, ed. Ronan Fanning et al., http://www.difp.ie/docs/1926/Settlement-of-financial-obligations-between-Britain-and-the-Irish-Free-State/721.htm (accessed 27 July 2018).

Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 412.

Aidan Beatty, Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938 (London: Palgrave Macmillan), chap. 6.

Peadar O’Donnell For or Against the Ranchers? Irish Working Farmers in The Economic War (Westport: Mayo News, n.d.), 9.

As Mary Daly observes, Ireland did not produce ‘food’, it mainly produced unfattened cattle that were then exported to Britain where they were fattened, slaughtered, and processed, with the value added going to British producers instead of Irish farmers; Mary Daly, Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, 1922–1939 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 16.

Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Penguin Books, 2015); Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Jonathan Levy. Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

An important exception is Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), a perceptive study of race, class, and gender in late twentieth-century American consumer capitalism.

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013); Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016); Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015); Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).

Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, in The Politics of Thatcherism, ed. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), 19–39; David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (London: Routledge, 2001); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 1998); Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011).

See, for example, Cormac Ó Gráda, A Rocky Road: The Irish Economy since the 1920s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

For three exceptions, see: Mike Cronin, ‘Golden Dreams, Harsh Realities: Economics and Informal Empire in the Irish Free State’, in Ireland: The Politics of Independence, ed. Mike Cronin and John M. Regan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 144–63; Daly, Industrial Development; Trisha Kessler, ‘Rethinking Irish Protectionism: Jewish Refugee Factories and the Pursuit of an Irish-Ireland for Industry’, in Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture, ed. Aidan Beatty and Dan O’Brien (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018), 107–23.

Maurice Coakley, Ireland in the World Order: A History of Uneven Development (London: Pluto Press, 2012); Denis O’Hearn, The Atlantic Economy: Britain, the US and Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

Richard Dunphy The Making of Fianna Fáil Power in Ireland, 1923–48 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Peter O’Neill, The Famine Irish and the American Racial State (New York: Routledge, 2017). Both O’Neill and Dunphy make excellent use of the theories of the state of the Marxist sociologist Nicos Poulantzas.

See, for example, Kieran Allen, 1916: Ireland’s Revolutionary Tradition (London: Pluto Press, 2016).

Roediger, Wages; Hall Great Moving Right Show.

Michael McInerney, Peadar O’Donnell: Irish Social Rebel (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1974), 119; quoted in Timothy O’Neil, ‘Handing Away the Trump Card? Peadar O’Donnell, Fianna Fáil, and the Non-Payment of Land Annuities Campaign, 1926–32’, New Hibernia Review 12, no. 1 (2008): 27.

Richard English says that ‘the leitmotiv of O’Donnell’s political career was that social struggle and national struggle must be interwoven’; Richard English, ‘Green on Red: Two Case Studies in Early Twentieth-Century Irish Republican Thought’, in Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century, ed. D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan (London: Routledge, 1993), 175.

Peadar O’Donnell, There Will Be Another Day (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963), 38–39 and passim.

O’Neil, ‘Handing Away the Trump Card’, 23–24.

English, ‘Green on Red’, 179; O’Neil, ‘Handing Away the Trump Card’, 23–24.

English, ‘Green on Red’, 175.

Quoted in O’Donnell, There Will Be, 95; for information on Fahy, see Jim Madden, Fr. John Fahy, 1893–1969: Radical Republican and Agrarian Activist (Dublin: Columba Press, 2013).

An Phoblacht, 4 June 1926; quoted in Richard English, Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in Ireland, 1925–1937 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 90.

O’Donnell, There Will Be, 34.

An Phoblacht, 25 Mar. 1927; quoted in English, Radicals, 82.

Quoted in Donal Ó Drisceoil, ‘When Dev Defaulted: The Land Annuities Dispute, 1926–38’, History Ireland 19, no. 3 (2011). The Young Irelander James Fintan Lalor (1807–1849) was a recurring reference point for not only O’Donnell but for socialist republicans more broadly. Lalor was assumed to be a progenitor for the synthesis of separatism and leftist economics, though ironically, as Richard English points out, he held to an essentially bourgeois economics; English, ‘Green on Red’, 178–80.

Terence Brown, for example, has said that implicit in O’Donnell’s work was ‘a sense that Gaelic Ireland in the west is the authentic heroic Ireland in a way that confirms rather than contradicts the conventional image of the west as “certain set apart”. The power of this conventional image was perhaps so great that it affected as intelligent a social commentator as Peadar O’Donnell’; Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–85, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana, 1985), 94; English, Radicals, 83. See also Charles Travis, ‘“Rotting Townlands”: Peadar O’Donnell, the West of Ireland, and the Politics of Representation in Saorstát na hÉireann (Irish Free State), 1929–1933’, Historical Geography 36 (2008): 208–24.

Peadar O’Donnell, For or Against the Ranchers, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9.

Land Annuities: Non-Payment Campaign, 1928–31, Confidential Memorandum from Garda Superintendent, Kinsale, 17 May 1928, NAI TAOIS/S 8336; Land Annuities: Non-Payment Campaign, 1928–31, Secret Memorandum from Garda Chief Superintendent, Letterkenny, 12 Feb. 1929, NAI TAOIS/S 8336.

As an anti-Treatyite he refused to recognise the court’s right to prosecute him. He told the jury that he would recognise them but not the ‘lad in the wig’; O’Neil ‘Handing Away the Trump Card’, 27.

Ó Drisceoil, ‘When Dev Defaulted’.

O’Neil, ‘Handing Away the Trump Card’, 26.

Kieran Allen, Fianna Fáil and Irish Labour: 1926 to the Present (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 21. It is unfair, though, to label this vision of ‘sturdy, self-sufficient farmer[s]’ as something vague, as Allen does. It was a vision of Irish life that, for rural Irish men, drew on familiar and strongly felt economic experiences.

O’Neil, ‘Handing Away the Trump Card’, 29.

Dunphy, Fianna Fáil Power, 125.

Terence Dooley, The Land for the People: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin: UCD Press, 2004), 3–4.

Dunphy, Fianna Fáil Power, 41, 31.

Indeed, O’Donnell sought Fianna Fáil’s support for the campaign whilst also, incongruously, linking the campaign to the work of the Comintern’s Peasant International, Krestintern; O’Neil, ‘Handing Away the Trump Card’.

On Moore, see Marie Coleman, ‘Moore, Maurice George (1854–1939)’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2002, ed. James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

It is not clear how Moore reached the calculation that the annuities accounted for one-fifth of the Free State’s revenues. While his claim is inaccurate, it does point to the emotiveness of Ireland’s economic ‘tribute’ to the UK Treasury!

Moore asserted that it was ‘universally recognised that the duty of a Negotiator on behalf of a State is to claim all he can and come back with the best terms he can get out of the rival State’. Thus, Cumann na nGaedheal were failing in one of the basic duties of statecraft!

So as to make this claim, he seemed to have collapsed the annuities (which were essentially state-backed mortgages) into the overall tax bill. Moore included Irish government payments for the imperial debt as part of his calculations, which included payments for war pensions and debts accrued during the Great War; Maurice Moore, British Plunder and Irish Blunder: The Story of the Land Purchase Annuities (Dublin: Gaelic Press, 1928), 22.

Ibid., 4, 9, 10–11, 20, 23–24, 27.

Owen McGee, ‘Harrison, Henry (1867–1954)’, Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Henry Harrison, The Strange Case of the Land Purchase Annuities (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1932), 5. Most of the rest of Harrison’s 1932 pamphlet was a summation of the British position that the Free State was strictly bound to hand over the annuities, as well as a historical background to the annuities issue.

Henry Harrison, Spotlights on the Anglo-Irish Financial Quarrel (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1934), 3.

In the pamphlet, Harrison also pointed out the irony that the people who had been hurt by the Economic War—large cattle farmers—were the ones who were strongest advocates for a close trading partnership between Ireland and the United Kingdom. This had strengthened the hand of nationalists, by which he primarily meant Fianna Fáil.

Henry Harrison, The Game of ‘Beggar-My-Neighbour’: Who Wins? (London: Irish News and Information Bureau, 1934), 3–5, 7–8, 22–23.

Cóiriú Fhianna Fáil [Constitution of Fianna Fáil], National Library of Ireland (hereafter, NLI) LO P103.

Fianna Fáil: Clár an Chéad Árd Fheis, 24 Nov. 1926, 25 Nov 1926, NLI LO P103. The two proposed amendments came, respectively, from the Ballinalough Branch and the Fintan Lalor Branch, Dublin, of the party.

Fianna Fáil pamphlet, The Wheels are Moving (n.p, n.d. [1933?]), NLI LO P111, item 10.

Open Letter from Oscar Traynor, To Each Elector of North Dublin (n.p., n.d. [1932?]), NLI LO P111, item 19; see also Fianna Fáil pamphlet, The Men for North City (n.p., n.d. [1933]), NLI LO P111, item 20.

Dunphy, Fianna Fáil Power, 39–40.

Ibid., 97.

English, Radicals, 117.

Memorandum from the Minister for Finance, Land Annuities: Relief for Annuitants, 1932–34, 11 Nov. 1932, NAI TAOIS S/2888.

Beatty, Masculinity, chap. 6.

John M. Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution: Treatyite Politics and Settlement in Independent Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999), 213. Emphasis added.

Daly, Industrial Development, 35–36.

Regan, Counter-Revolution, 210–11.

R. M. Douglas, Architects of the Resurrection: Ailtirí na hAiséirghe and the Fascist ‘New Order’ in Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 7–8. As Douglas has said, this was ‘perhaps the most asinine statement ever made by an Irish public representative’.

Ó Gráda, Rocky Road, 5.

Eoin O’Duffy, An Outline of the Political, Social and Economic Policy of Fine Gael (Dublin: United Ireland, 1934), 4, 7, 10. This pamphlet was a transcript of the opening address delivered at the First Annual Ard-Fheis of Fine Gael in the Mansion House, Dublin, 8 Feb. 1934.

Eoin O’Duffy, The Labour Policy of Fine Gael (Dublin: Fine Gael/Browne and Nolan, 1934), 4, 5, 9. These are transcripts from two speeches by Eoin O’Duffy in February and March 1934. In an echo of the claims of horseshoe theory, corporatist economics was also presented as the antidote to ‘socialist extremism’ as well as ‘conservative old curmudgeons’ and ‘plutocratic extremists’ who derived ‘pleasure’ form ‘keep[ing] the workers in … their place’; idem, 11. O’Duffy’s fascist corporatism was on fuller display in Why I Resigned From Fine Gael (Blueshirt Series: Pamphlet No. 1) (Dublin: League of Youth, 1934), which, as the title suggests, marked his break from the more conventionally conservative ideas of Fine Gael.

O’Duffy, Outline, 4.

Regan, Counter-Revolution, 364.

Ibid., 347.

Ciara Meehan, The Cosgrave Party: A History of Cumann na nGaedheal (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2010), 146.

Jason Knirck, ‘A Cult of No Personality: W. T. Cosgrave and the Election of 1933’, Éire-Ireland 47, nos. 3–4 (2012): 65, 75, 82.

Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long? (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2004), 2.

Allen, Fianna Fáil, 42.

The looming threat of Hitler was perhaps the motivating factor for Britain in ending this ‘war’. As one commentator observed in the New Statesman whilst simultaneously hinting at Irish nationalist concerns, ‘The bully remains a bully until he is frightened by a bigger bully’; New Statesman and Nation, 20 Aug. 1938, quoted in Ó Gráda, New Economic History, 416.

Cronin, ‘Golden Dreams, Harsh Realities’, 162.

Mary Daly, The First Department: A History of the Department of Agriculture (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2002), 196–97.

Daly, Industrial Development, 170.

As Dooley argues ‘Clann na Talmhan did best in areas where Fianna Fáil had failed to deliver upon its earlier election promises of more land acquisition and division’; Dooley, Land for the People, 208.

Daly, Industrial Development, 170.

Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke has said that little about the Economic War, or the history of Irish economic planning, was surprising; Ireland acted in the manner of other peripheral European states—such as Portugal, Greece, and Spain—that sought to catch up to the industrialised core. O’Rourke thus gives short shrift to any of kind of insular or nationalist explanations; Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke, ‘Independent Ireland in Comparative Perspective’, Irish Economic and Social History 44, no. 1 (2017): 19–45. I would add, however, that the legitimising ideologies presented in the various pamphlets discussed here are specifically Irish, even insular.

Bryce Evans provides some intimate details of the divisions within Fianna Fáil between Lemass, whose economics leaned towards industrialisation, and Sean MacEntee, who was cut from agrarian cloth; Bryce Evans, Seán Lemass: Democratic Dictator (Cork: Collins Press, 2011), 71–110.

Ó Gráda, Rocky Road, 146.

This is part of what Regan has aptly called ‘The Consensus of Irish Nationalist Politics’; Regan, Counter-Revolution, 373–83.

O’Donnell, There Will Be, 132; see also Aidan Beatty, ‘An Irish Revolution Without a Revolution’, Journal of World-Systems Research 22, no. 1 (2016): 54–76.

Titel: The Economic War and the Pamphlet War
verfasst von: Aidan Beatty
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662–2016
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04308-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-04309-4

Copyright-Jahr: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04309-4_12