Roy Foster: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we look at the economic history of Ireland from, say, the Republic now, 1920 through the 1970s, it seems there’s some bad trade policies, the economic gap with Britain widens, there’s not that much industrialization. What went wrong during that era in terms of policy, or culture, or whatever? Well, I think [Eamon] de Valera, the leader of independent Ireland from 1932/3, took protectionism to its limit. There was a trade war, an economic war with Britain, over the disagreement about outstanding payments for land reform. Incidentally, Tyler, as an economist, I think we’ve got to mention the extraordinary achievement of land reform in Ireland. When I went to live in England in the 1970s, I was amazed at how feudal the English land system was: the size of huge estates, the fact people in villages in Norfolk and Dorset didn’t own their own properties. This was so different from Ireland, where, thanks to the Land Acts from 1881 right through to 1909, with a great deal of government money, the Irish occupying tenantry were enabled to buy out their own holdings from the landlords, who were given enormous sweetener payments by the British government. This is one of the Irish revolutions that is less often mentioned. It created a very solid, conservative, small-property-owning rural petite bourgeoisie. In that one fact, in that one sentence, you have a large explanation for why the Irish revolution, when it did come, was politically radical in some ways but socially very conservative. You also have the reason for the (I have to use the word) backwardness or conservatism of Irish farming in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s. It was the small family farm and the absolute determination of the landholder to hold onto what he (or, more rarely, she) had fought in the land war of 1879–81 to get hold of. The stem system of inheritance, the ruthless emigration of redundant siblings to leave one inheritor for the farm — all this led to a fairly stagnant agricultural economy. There was also a stagnant industrial economy for much of the 20th century, until the 1950s, when a very brilliant civil servant called T. K. Whitaker brought in a whole new schedule of economically liberalizing measures and began to invite external investment into Ireland and set up an industrial development authority to work on Ireland’s resources. It did have resources. I’m not talking about turf in the bogs and endless winds to drive electricity, although this has now come to be the case. I’m really talking about the existence of a highly educated and quite disciplined and intelligent workforce, because Irish education has always punched above its weight. We’ve seen this in the years of the so-called Celtic Tiger as well. From the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, the Irish economy did expand in a way that it had never done under the years of de Valera (and you as an economist will know this), partly because I think the general tendency began to be to look outward and welcome influences coming in from the outside world. under the years of de Valera (and you as an economist will know this), partly because I think the general tendency began to be to look outward and welcome influences coming in from the outside world. Whereas de Valera had — and this goes back to the years of the Celtic Revival, in which he was immersed — de Valera had a vision of Ireland which was inward-looking, which was purist, which was anti-materialist, which was not going — he said this frequently in speeches — which was not going to privilege the creation of wealth and material comfort if it meant losing the essentials of what he conceived of as Irish identity.…

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