Preparing for the launch of the digitisation of the Richard Mulcahy papers in UCD last month brought me back to the cabinet room of the early 1920s. It was sparsely populated, in contrast to the bloated ministerial ranks today. When the head of government, formally titled the president of the executive council, WT Cosgrave, proposed his senior ministerial nominations to the Dáil in September 1923, there were just six in addition to himself, taking charge of what were considered the pillars of government: home affairs, finance, defence, industry and commerce, external affairs and education.
Government members then viewed power through the lens of conflict. There was a grim starkness and raw legacy to pain inflicted and endured arising from the Civil War. Kevin O’Higgins, minister for home affairs, made much of the feeling of a government the previous year under siege, engaged in moral and social as well as political and military battles. There were cabinet discussions about the powers to order executions and Mulcahy played a pivotal role in those as both Commander in Chief of the national army and minister for defence.
Always a meticulous keeper of records, not unrelated to his earlier job in the post office, Mulcahy carefully curated his archive as one of the survivors of the upheaval, living until 1971. His papers are indispensable to historians of the revolution and his and his family’s decision, more than 50 years ago, to donate his papers to UCD represented the foundation block of what became an archive of the founders and builders of the State from both sides of the divide, many of them sworn enemies.
One of Mulcahy’s Fine Gael contemporaries, Michael Hayes, kept notes of a conversation with Mulcahy in the 1960s on “the difficulties of disentangling relationships and status between 1919 and 1922″. That remains a challenge, but the UCD papers also illuminate much about the wider evolution of our political culture. The recent preoccupation with the swelling of ministerial ranks has roots in an excessive concentration of power at the centre of government that was a legacy of the attitude of politicians on either side of the Civil War. It was summed up in a memorandum authored by Seán Lemass in 1944; the Irish needed exceptionally strong central government, he averred, because of their “fissiparous tendencies”. That observation, and admonishment, partly explains the pungent observation of political scientist Tom Garvin on the degree to which that generation of politicians were “sceptical of the public spiritedness of the population it was to rule”.
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Why the long road from streamlined cabinet a century ago to the extra large size today? Partly, of course, because of profound change of context, policy challenges, expanded population, social and economic shifts and coalition government. But also because of the continuity of the centralising impulse. If there is a challenging area today, throw as many ministers at it as possible which has the added advantage for a government of stitching many in to its survival.
But surely more ministers are likely to lead to less effectiveness given the clogging and extra internal bureaucratic infrastructure such expansion creates? Former minister for housing Eoghan Murphy’s recent memoir, Running from Office, is partly about Civil Service squeeze. He writes of the “permanent government” stifling ministerial ambition and creativity. While acknowledging his own mistakes, he makes much of constant internal “pushback”.
That power has been long standing; at the foundation of the State, the existing Civil Service was seen as a great administrative advantage given the fragility of so much else and only had to be supplemented with a combination of, between them, a little more than 200 pre-Treaty Dáil civil servants and ex-officials dismissed by the British government. The senior officials had exceptional power as do their contemporary equivalents.
Does that enduring power explain why today, numerous ex-ministers only speak frankly after they have left government and highlight the extent of the barriers put in their way while in office? It suggests the ongoing relevance of the observation of another political scientist, Richard Finnegan, who wrote of “the cognitive maps held by the elites” in the earlier decades of Irish State building that “set the boundaries of what was ‘natural’ in the way of thinking and acting”.
The experiences of the likes of Murphy and indeed Leo Varadkar suggest a younger generation of politicians are concluding there is little to be gained and much to be lost by becoming a “lifer” in politics, unlike so many of the Civil War generation who, psychologically, were scarred by what they went through, but also driven by those experiences to hang on to central control. That may have generated stability, but it also, in the long run, guaranteed excessive deference in relation to areas where boldness was needed. That problem remains, and will not be solved by ministerial overload.
