Just before his appointment as secretary to the Department of Finance in May 1956, TK Whitaker read a paper on capital investment to a Social and Statistical Inquiry Society of Ireland meeting. As a forerunner of his seminal economic development paper, this paper was significant. So, in other ways, was the meeting itself. In the audience was a 30-year-old statistics fanatic by the name of Garret FitzGerald.
As I interview him 50 years later, I hope he can rattle off some statistics to describe how miserable things were back then. But the personal anecdotes are more powerful: FitzGerald (right) recalls a tide of emigration so great that it disrupted his work as a young Aer Lingus executive.
"The airlines had introduced emigrant fares across the Atlantic. I was in Aer Lingus at the time and in March 1957 I had to lay on extra flights every day of the month from Dublin to Shannon for the Irish people in England who were leaving England to get to Shannon to get planes to America. Air France and Sabena put their flights into Shannon to pick up the vast numbers of people flying to America. You couldn't get seats out of Britain or Ireland at the time." Protectionism had crippled the economy, not only by stifling competition but also by quotas choking off the supply of vital inputs to industry.
"There was emigration on a massive scale and it wasn't just people who couldn't get jobs. They were leaving from jobs. My recollection is of people in banks and insurance companies leaving in groups because they could see no hope for their children," says FitzGerald.
He is keen to underline Fine Gael's contribution to reform and points out how Seán Lemass - now credited with implementing Whitaker's policies - once opposed the establishment of the IDA. Not for the last time, a Fianna Fáil leader was to steal Fine Gael policies, it seems. FitzGerald praises Lemass's contribution, but describes it as part of a gradual build-up of consensus for reform.
"The initiative really came from Alexis FitzGerald and Paddy Lynch through John A Costello. Nobody remembers that now. It was that, followed by Whitaker, followed by Lemass as a dynamic leader coming in and seeing that we must change. It was that sequence and the cumulative impact of that that mattered."
Some time later Lemass announced Ireland's application with Britain for EEC membership, in which FitzGerald played an informal role in gauging European opinion as a journalist in Brussels. He recalls when French president Charles De Gaulle rejected both applications. "One-third of the 13,000 civil servants at the time were studying French in preparation for membership. The rejection was very disappointing," he says. But it didn't stop the reform process. The subsequent boost in confidence lifted the economy out of recession and by the early 1960s it was growing strongly.
FitzGerald's career followed suit. In 1958 he left Aer Lingus to become an industrial economist. Foreseeing eventual EEC membership, FitzGerald began a survey of Irish industry, work which led to the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organisation in 1958. He became a freelance economic journalist with the Irish Independent and then The Irish Times before going into politics. FitzGerald became taoiseach almost exactly 25 years after Whitaker's appointment as head of the Department of Finance.
