POLITICS/BARRY ANDREWSreviews
Seán MacEntee: A Political LifeBy Tom Feeney
Irish Academic Press, 258pp. €
39.95
SEÁN MacENTEE was one of a handful of Fianna Fáil grandees who dominated the first 40 years of the party’s history. He served in every single Fianna Fáil cabinet from 1932 to April 1965. Tom Feeney’s scholarly work demonstrates MacEntee’s maverick qualities within the party, attributable in part to his Belfast roots and his rivalry with Seán Lemass.
MacEntee came from a middle-class family in Belfast, and his father’s fondness for high tailoring and gold watch chains was inherited by the son. My grandfather, Todd Andrews, noted how MacEntee liked “dandified dress”, good food and good wine. The self-denial of that generation of Republicans could be extreme. “We disapproved of any one who took an interest in food. We ate our meals in the same spirit of detachment with which we dressed and shaved each day,” said Andrews. Lemass’s penchant for fine dress also regularly drew comment.
In many ways, MacEntee was, as Feeney points out, a non-conformist, not only in his habits but in being at the forefront of policy debate within Fianna Fáil. He could be spitefully partisan on the floor of Dáil Éireann but he counted many Fine Gael men as friends, in defiance of an early edict from de Valera not to fraternise with the opposition.
Feeney challenges the commonly held view that MacEntee and Lemass were constantly at odds; the former characterised as a Department of Finance runner, the latter a crusader against bureaucratic inertia. It is perhaps a false dichotomy that presumes there must be a good guy and a bad guy. Nevertheless, there certainly was tension between the two. The difference between the revolutionary generation and the one to follow was that men like Lemass and MacEntee dealt with disagreements behind closed doors. As Feeney notes, “the lack of any public dissent can be attributed to a more acute sense that politics was less about personal ambition than about the serious business of nation-building”.
Though often pitted against each other, Lemass and MacEntee sometimes found themselves as unlikely allies. John Horgan in his biography of Sean Lemass wrote that when addressing the issue of ministerial pay in 1927, Lemass and MacEntee found themselves in a minority of two when the Fianna Fáil National Executive took a decision that a maximum of £1,000 should also apply to ministerial and civil service salaries.
Upon taking up office as Minister for Finance in May 1932, MacEntee proposed that civil and public servants with a £600 salary should carry a 2% pay cut and anyone with a salary in excess of £1000 should endure a 20% pay cut. The difficult choices facing MacEntee and the 1932 Government owed much to the Great Depression. While these proposals did not get very far, they underline the fact that then, as now, a recession need not be an excuse to abandon the pursuit of a fairer society.
The 1952 budget stands out as a career defining moment for MacEntee. Then, as now, economic circumstances were not favourable. Total current expenditure stood at £101.7 million, while revenue was estimated to come in at £86.6 million.
MacEntee’s prescription was simple: “This can be closed only in two ways; by cutting down expenditure and by putting on additional taxation”.
The diagnosis proved to be partially correct (resulting in a sharp correction in the Balance of Payments); although the patient clearly didn’t enjoy the medicine (MacEntee barely held his seat in the 1954 election). And yet the budgets of the 1950s and the 1952 budget, in particular, marked a turning point in economic planning. These budgets were the prelude to the 1958 Programme for Economic Expansion, which put Ireland firmly on the road to economic development.
Relieved of the burden of high office in 1965, the veil dropped somewhat when MacEntee made a stinging attack on Lemass, claiming the timing of his decision to step down as Taoiseach would damage the country and the party. My father, David Andrews, then a first-term TD attending the meeting, recalls being shocked that these two icons would be in such open dispute but also recalls how Lemass did not flinch throughout MacEntee’s broadside.
MacEntee’s position on the North was remarkably consistent throughout his public life. Growing up in Belfast in the early 1900s afforded him an insight that was denied many of his colleagues in Leinster House. Belfast was riddled with the politics of sectarianism. The young MacEntee attended lectures given by James Connolly, Bulmer Hobson and James Larkin. His non-doctrinaire approach to politics, which was a feature throughout his life, was evident in his reluctance to commit himself to one or other of the prevailing views of nationalism.
If his father’s association with Redmond’s party exercised some gravitational pull on the young MacEntee, the events of the day seemed to swing him towards more radical nationalism. In particular, the mobilisation of the UVF convinced many in Ulster that Nationalists should not be found wanting in resorting to direct action. It was on reading TD Sullivan’s Speeches from the Dock that he started down the revolutionary path that resulted in him being sentenced to death by a British Court Martial in 1916.
In the Treaty debates of Christmas 1921, MacEntee was, as Feeney notes, almost a lone voice in raising the issue of partition as a reason for opposing the Treaty. As MacEntee said, “I am voting against it because I believe it will be a final settlement, and it is the terrible finality of this settlement that appals me”. In MacEntee’s view, the Government’s negotiating position on the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938 was objectionable in that it was tantamount to the coercion of Northern Unionists – an orthodox view today that was heretical south of the border in the late 1930s.
BY THE LATE 1960s, as the North descended into sectarian violence, he once again counselled against the firebrands within Fianna Fáil, who advocated intervention north of the border. He distinguished the IRA of the 1970s from the men and women of 1916, describing the former as “assassins and murderers”. He demonstrated his vision in advocating a revision of Article 3 of Bunreacht na hÉireann.
Of disappointment to the amateur historian will be the fact that Feeney’s book skims over the period 1918 to 1926. The book firmly focuses on the political life of MacEntee to the almost complete exclusion of his private life. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine this work being surpassed as the definitive account of the public life of this courageous and selfless politician.
Barry Andrewsis Minister of State for Children and Youth Affairs and a TD for Dún Laoghaire