'Fianna Fail & Irish Labour: 1926 to the Present' By Kieran Allen (Pluto Press 1997) £13.99 Reviewed by David Coon WHEN, ONE evening in 1995, Ben Dunne, the joint owner of Dunne's Stores (the Irish equivalent of Marks & Spencers) climbed out onto the window ledge of a hotel room high above Las Vegas and had to be talked down by the police, his sister and partner, Margaret, was not impressed.
Public frolics with cocaine and prostitutes were very unseemly to a devout Catholic like herself. Out of the ensuing row and the recent public enquiry came the disclosure that Dunne had paid £3 million to Charles Haughey, Fianna Fail leader from Fianna Fail was founded by Eamon de Valera in 1926 after a split from that section of Sinn Fein which had opposed the 1921 Treaty with Britain and fought the Civil War. De Valera led Fianna Fail into government in 1932 and they stayed there for all but 7 of 41 years. Fianna Fail's base came , from small farmers, particularly in the west and south of the country, from small town businesses and most notably from workers.
Allen looks at the ways in which Fianna Fail has consistently dominated working class politics in Ireland despite its pro-capitalist politics. The book's strengths deMost writers on Southern Irish politics deny or fail to find its class roots and the so-called "revisionists" of recent years deny or downplay the role of imperialism in the development of Ireland.
For Allen, the hold of Fianna Fail over he 16 Const working class is based on its =an i Brash colons. Mara wrole in was little industry of any account outside of Belfast and what was based on agriculture. Guinness's Brewery in Dublin was the largest industrial employer in the South of Ireland at that time. The Civil War which followed the Treaty was a fight between the large farming and banking interests who were opposed to any break with Britain and the smaller business and farmers who were continually squeezed by the banks and Britain's cheap food policy.
Tariff wals
Fianna Fail governments between 1932 and 1958 attempted to build native industry behind high tariff barriers and Allen draws a comparison with populist governments in South America at the time. In an economy dominated by cattle production this had the effect of creating jobs.
Another basis of Fianna Fail's appeal to workers in the Free State was its opposition to the fascist Blueshirts, a Catholic inspired For all the talk about the "Celtic Tiger" they are still as tied politically to the British as they were before independence. organisation set up in 1932 to stop what the larger farmers considered was the drift to communism following Fianna Fail's election victory.
By the late 1940s the limitation of Fianna Fail's industrialisation policies were clear. Exports were uncompetitive and industries folded.
Having been neutral in the War the South received little Marshall aid.
Emigration rose, particularly to Britain. No amount of scapegoating could cover the failure. Many in the ruling class questioned whether an independent Irish state was viable Some looked back nostalgicalls to the are independence tires I: 5a I: is sme they decided to throw open the economy to foreign capital and to allow native capitalists to try their fortunes on world markets. De Valera was replaced as leader by Sean Lemass and the new buzz words became "export led growth". The reasons for this reversal of policy have been much debated and throw some light on the nature of the Dublin ruling class.
One reason was the fact that getting some Marshall Aid meant adopting the free trade policies of the US. Another was that the South was up to its borrowing limits and the World Bank demanded changes to the economy. The main reason was that independent industrialisation following the pattern of the earliest capitalist economies was simply not In making the change Fianna Fail seemed to abandon part of their base to a new role as agents and suppliers to the transnational capitalists who were attracted by the tax holidays and grants. But this was simply a recognition of the real situation. In the global economy, Irish capitalists would anyway be agents and gofers looking for niches and cracks in which to insert themMore debts than Mexic The switch in policy meant using the Southern State and the tax revenue from the PAYE sector to sweeten the pill, to attract transnational capital but also to help native capitalists in servicing them. This became much easier after they plugged into the EEC grary train in 1973. Even so, in the early 1980s the per capita national debt was higher than that of Mexico - a country I= 1979, too rears after a Fianna Fail andslide, there was a huge revolt by workers on PAYE and Charles Haughey ousted In return for small or no wage increases workers were promised more jobs and greater government spending on education and health. Haughey also put his hawkish reputation on the national question to good use to try to hold his shaky political alliance Fianna Fail under Haughey never achieved an overall majority in the Dail, and haven't since. The ruling class feared that his nationalist rhetoric would whip up anti-British sentiment and strengthen Sinn Fein. They considered his borrowing reckless but most of all feared that the national question would combine with the economic crisis of the early 1980s to destabilise the Numerical weakness is only part of the reason for Fianna Fail's domination of the working class in the South. To these must be added the party's ability to use its alliance with the Catholic Church to witchunt militants and its use of the national quesMore recently (and oddly since corporatism is so out of favour) the "social partnership" has been effective in reducing Another major weakness is the willingness of the Labour Party to form coalitions with both the main bourgeois parties. Though Fianna Fail has steadily lost its working class support, this has been mainly to a disparate group of independents who provide no clear alternative for the working Bringing about socialism in Ireland requires the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, North & South. Neither has any desire for Irish unity as it would take away their main political prop. Standing behind both is the British ruling class and here is the big weakness of Allen's approach because "opposing the state fashioned by Fianna Fail out of partition" means ending partition.
He rightly point out that the republicans cannot rely on the Dublin ruling class to help with this but opposition to partition will always bring socialists up against the British State. Allen has argued elsewhere that the South has somehow escaped its former neo-colonial status and that therefore the Southern Irish bourgeoisie is almost as big an obstacle to socialism as the But for all the talk about the "Celtic Tiger" they are still as tied politically to the British as they were pre-independence. In that sense their political development and that of the labour movement in the South, as well as the North, will be shaped by the continuing decline of the British State. Fianna Fail's rhetoric on the national question is declining. The labour movement, North and South, still must resolve it.
Kieran Allen's book is a valuable contribution to that debate.
IRBLAND IS