A voice from our past - Whitaker - speaks out on TG4

MarchDub wrote: »

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/those-who-shouted-stop-were-ignored-whitaker-2473180.html

I think it should be interesting that we have a historic voice from the 1950s commentating on the current situation.

CDfm wrote: »

It has been years since I read up on this stuff -but the Scandinavian System and the Corporate State was one that Lemass and Whitaker were both highly influenced by.

Management of State-Owned Enterprise ownership policy
The manner in which SOEs shareholdings are managed by their shareholders is
constantly evolving. As the OECD identifies (Figure 1 below), the most recent
development in managing ownership policy is the delegation of shareholding
responsibilities to single organisational units. This system has traditionally been usedin the Nordic states, (where there is a strong tradition of state ownership and SOEs
form a large part of the national economy) but also within EU states such as Belgium,
Poland and Spain. What is of interest is the attraction towards this model not only by
countries more associated with strong statist tradition (France) but also by countries
with more fragmented administrative structures (UK, Australia).

http://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/publications/workingpapers/gearywp201040.pdf

The Cosgrave governments of 1922-32 never contemplated breaking the sterling link with Britain. Neither did breaking the link with sterling form any part of the agenda of Eamon de Valera's governments in 1932-38 despite his then revolutionising the constitutional relationship with Britain. And Sean MacBride, the former chief of staff of the IRA and then leader of Clann na Poblachta and Minister for External Affairs, was a voice vainly crying in the wilderness when he argued for dissociating Ireland from the British government's devaluation of sterling in 1949.
Sean Lemass was the first Taoiseach who articulated and best understood how the relationship between political sovereignty and fiscal policy might evolve in our own time. "A movement to [European] political confederation in some form is indeed a natural and logical development of economic integration," he told the Fianna Fail Ard Fheis in January 1962, when he proposed a motion approving his government's handling of the negotiations for Ireland's entry into what was then the European Economic Community (EEC). "Henceforth our national aims", said Lemass, "must conform to the emergence, in a political as well as in an economic sense, of a union of Western European states, not as a vague prospect of the distant future but as a living reality of our own times." Lemass's contempt for the Green Blanket Brigade was even more dramatically reflected in an interview he gave to The New York Times in July 1962, when he unequivocally declared that "a military commitment will be an inevitable consequence of our joining the Common Market and ultimately we would be prepared to yield even the technical label of neutrality. We are prepared to go into this integrated Europe without any reservation as to how far this will take us in the field of foreign policy and defence". That he had no reservations as to how far it might take us in the field of fiscal policy went without saying.
In the event, General de Gaulle's veto of the contemporaneous British application postponed Ireland's entry into Europe for over a decade. But it was a measure of Lemass's recognition of "living reality" when set against a mythical sovereignty that, once Britain's application failed, Ireland's application fell by association because the link with sterling and Ireland's inter-dependence with the British economy then remained sacrosanct. Although Lemass was already dead when Ireland and Britain finally joined the EEC on January 1, 1973, he was the founding father of Ireland's European initiative. His belated conversion to free trade, his early identification of the reality that Ireland's future lay in Europe and, not least, his success in enlisting the bipartisan support of Fine Gael ensured that Ireland's European enterprise became from the outset a truly national enterprise.
For it was the 1973-77 government led by a Fine Gael Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, with the next Fine Gael Taoiseach and that most ardent of Europhiles, Garret FitzGerald, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, who drove forward the national enterprise of ensuring Ireland was at the heart of Europe. Such were the foundations of the decision taken by Jack Lynch's government in December 1978 to join the European Monetary System (EMS), notwithstanding Britain's remaining outside. The establishment of the EMS, in March 1979, finally paved the way for breaking the connection between the Irish currency and the pound sterling which went all the way back to 1826.
So let's be blunt about it: Ireland's joining the EMS was never about going it alone in pursuit of some mythical conception of fiscal sovereignty. Ireland only abandoned sterling when an alternative European monetary safety net was in place. It was an assertion not of fiscal independence but of inter-dependence, an expression of that preference for the European connection as opposed to the British connection that has characterised Irish foreign policy since 1973. The same preference dictated Ireland's decision to become one of the 11 countries which initially comprised the eurozone when the euro was introduced in 1999.
The choice now facing us is stark. We can go on moaning and whining about affronts to Irish sovereignty, clinging to our green blankets as we wallow in the present pathetic orgy of self-pity and keening with Joan Burton that the country's banjanxed. Or we can face up to our responsibilities as a member of the eurozone and do what we can to repair the damage inflicted by our inadequately regulated bankers and property developers and by the ineptitude of a Department of Finance which is indeed no longer fit for purpose.

Towards a Corporate State?

Sean Lemass and the Realignment of Interest Groups in the Policy Process 1948-1964


Abstract:
This paper analyses the transformation of Irish economic policy formulation from the formation of the first inter-party government in 1948 to the breakdown of Ireland’s application to join the EEC in 1963. It shows that the influence of trade unions, employers’ groups and farmers’ organisations on policy making in the period marked the inception of a corporatist style approach to national policy making. This period saw a general evolution in the process of the formulation of public policy towards a more conscious and overt tripartite set of arrangements. There was a gradual maturation of relations between the emerging interest groups and the government in the policy realm. The formalisation of these interest groups wherein they played a role in the long term policy planning process is emphasised. While their various representatives made strenuous efforts to advance their members’ sectional interests, all groups were able to take a strikingly dispassionate and long term view of the country’s economic prospects. This paper stresses the importance of Sean Lemass both in opposition and in government and argues that he was the key player in moving the country from a policy of protectionism to one where interdependence with other economies was assumed. By pointing out explicitly to the various economic actors in the Irish body politic that ideological change was needed in the formulation of economic policy, the Fianna Fail government of 1957-1961 was able to set out a concrete agenda for the development of the Irish economy by the early 1960s. Export-led industrialisation and economic co-operation with Europe were at the heart of theses new methods. Ultimately Irish economic policy formulation had moved dramatically in an ideological sense in the fifteen years since 1948: the new ideology was a formalised proto corporatist style social democracy which involved all the key players collectively in responsible decision making.


http://www.dcu.ie/dcubs/research_papers/no23.html

It is in these terms that one can see Lemass’s courtship of the various economic interest groups in the period. It was his view that the development of the country in economic terms necessarily revolved around a corporatist style arrangement with the government leading these groups in a new economic partnership. For that to happen, Lemass realised that government in its political form would have to be the hegemonic player in the policy making system. Of even more importance was that he be at the head of such a system and for that to happen he would have to devise a long term economic strategy that would return Fianna Fáil to government. While he bemoaned the fact that civil servants did not do enough independent thinking, he was firmly of the belief that it was political government which should lead. It is in that context that one can see the evolution in the process of the formulation of public policy towards a more conscious and overtly corporatist set of arrangements. Within these parameters, the political interests, particularly in the form of Lemass, would lead, but it was intrinsic on individual interest groups, farmers, employers and trade unions to play a full and active role in a modernising coalition of sorts. But of course Lemass had to be in power to enact any significant policy change.
It can be a bit of a caricature to portray Lemass as the saviour of modern Ireland. The second inter-party government while it undoubtedly made significant mistakes, perhaps principally in 1956 by prolonging the fiscal crisis, was not without its own ideas regarding Ireland’s future.9 The package of grants and reliefs to expand production which were to become the hallmark of the new system of foreign-led industrialisation under free trade, were first mooted by this government in September 1956. It also initiated the Irish application for membership of the International Monetary Fund and of the World Bank. And probably most importantly of all, it was this government’s Minister for Finance Gerald Sweetman who oversaw the process of T.K. Whitaker becoming Secretary of the Department of Finance over traditional civil service promotional norms. Implementing policy is, however, about being in government and politics is about winning elections. In that context the second inter-party government had too much of the aura of bad news about it and lost the 1957 election leaving Fianna Fáil and Lemass to push the modernisation drive.






http://www.lemass.ie/papers

Sean Lemass had sought to introduce a series of measures that would eventually become features of social partnership, according to Bill Roche, Professor of Industrial Relations and Human Resources in the UCD School of Business. Delivering the 2008 Countess Markievicz Memorial Lecture, ‘Social Partnership from Lemass to Cowen’, at Trinity College Dublin recently, Prof. Roche described Lemass, long-serving Fianna Fail Minister and Taoiseach between 1959 and 1966, as a corporatist visionary and pragmatist, who had sought to transform industrial relations in Ireland on the model of the small European corporatist democracies, in particular, the Netherlands and Sweden. Lemass had sought permanently to centralise pay bargaining in Ireland and to align pay determination with government economic priorities. He had also favoured involving unions in aspects of industrial and workplace governance. When tripartite bargaining between the state, employers and unions, first became a feature of Irish industrial relations during what Prof. Roche described as the ‘Lynch-O’Donoghue Keynesian Interlude’ of the late 1970s, the result, he said, was near economic and industrial relations anarchy. It would take the deep and prolonged economic and social crisis of the 1980s to bring about the changes in the posture of governments, employers and unions that permitted social partnership to function in the broad manner Lemass had envisaged. While Charles Haughey has been viewed either as the supreme champion of social partnership, or as a monetarist in corporatist ‘drag’, Professor Roche said that the record revealed him more as a political opportunist, who had embraced social partnership largely for reasons of realpolitik.
The social partnership paradigm had been extended in the mid 1990s, by Labour’s Dick Spring and Fine Gael’s John Bruton, when in government they invited civil society groups in the voluntary and community sector to become party to social partnership institutions and agreements. This they had done in response to the continuing political significance of persistently high unemployment and poverty, but their initiatives also reflected concerns in both political parties’ about the accountability and exclusionary proclivities of agreements reached under social partnership.







Prof. Roche described Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s posture towards social partnership as considerably more instrumental than Ahern’s and more focused on the achievement of short- and medium-term economic, financial and political results. Cowen’s continued sponsorship of a process that is less central to his political identity and reputation is likely to depend on its results in these areas in times of unprecedented challenge, concluded Professor Roche


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