The Blessings of Liberty: 1950s Ireland

The champions of Irish independence attained their penultimate* goal, the establishment of the Irish Republic, in 1949, nearly three decades after the end of the independence war. Political freedom rarely brings immediate material happiness, and this became obvious enough in Eire during the following decade. The 1950s, an era of rapid economic recovery and growing prosperity throughout Europe, was for Ireland a “lost decade” of stagnation and decay. The economy remained agricultural and undercapitalized. Many rural households lacked electricity and running water. Few young people received more than a grammar-school education, there being no jobs at home for the better-trained. Dispirited teachers told their students that their only employment choices were “the collar or the dollar:” taking religious orders or moving to the United States. Emigration grew to a scandalous height: one of every six Irishmen and women left the country by 1960. Of all the nations of Europe, only two suffered a net loss of population in the Fifties: Ireland and East Germany.

Irish Emigrants to Britain, ca. 1950

Those who left the German Democratic Republic did so for both economic and ideological reasons. Some of those who fled Ireland must have found their homeland nearly as oppressive as the Eastern Bloc. The Catholic Church served as an arm of the Irish state, controlling many of the nation’s schools and much of its public-school curriculum, and imprisoning thousands of unmarried mothers in the slave-labor camps known as “Magdalene Laundries.” Birth control, abortion, and divorce all remained illegal. Under the bishops' direction, the Republic comprehensively censored movies and books - Edna O’Brien, today one of Ireland’s most celebrated authors, had her first novels banned in the early Sixties. City-dwellers could perhaps afford to watch a Western movie, or catch an uncensored radio broadcast from elsewhere in Europe. Farmers and their dependents lacked even those narrow avenues of escape, so long as they remained in Eire.

John McQuaid, Prince of Ireland (1940-71)

Ireland's two principal political parties, Fine Gael (successors of Cumann na nGaedheal) and Fianna Fail, swapped control of the Dail (parliament) throughout the decade. Both remained wedded to a romantic, pre-war vision of a self-sufficient Ireland, and crafted economic policy accordingly. Both kept tariffs high and industry in the hands of licensed national monopolies. Thanks to this protectionist program and an increasingly unfavorable trade balance, the Irish endured both rising prices and rising unemployment in the first postwar decade. Credit the Irish government, at least, with discovering stagflation more than two decades before the rest of the world. 

Let us also credit one of the ruling parties, Fianna Fail, with realizing that it had to abandon its dogmas to prevent more young people from voting with their feet. Following the 1957 elections the serpentine Eamon de Valera and his chief deputy, Sean Lemass, decided their nation needed foreign capital more than "frugal comfort." The new economic program of 1958-63 lowered tariffs and provided tax credits to foreign companies (chiefly West German, at first) willing to build factories in the Republic. The Sixties was no golden age, but Ireland's economy and population did resume growing, and television helped dissolve the island's cultural conservatism and isolation.


Sources: Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future (Gill and Macmillan, 2004); idem, News from a New Republic (Gill Books, 2011).


* The ultimate goal was the reunification of the island in a 32-county republic. The IRA attempted to do just that in Operation Harvest (1956-62), which failed to do more than get most of its operatives arrested or killed.