When the Baltic States achieved independence after the First World War they were faced with massive problems. Their territories had been fought over and looted by rival armies, the only currencies in circulation were worthless scrip, they faced threats from powerful neighbours.
The Lithuanians had additional problems. The boundary between the German and Russian empires had passed through their country and both parties had deliberately left the area backward and underdeveloped, so that should the other side invade they would be hampered by poor roads, etc. Almost all the people lived by farming, using very primitive methods.
The country did not inherit a unified legal system. The region of Klaipeda had belonged to Germany and used German law. The region of Uznemune had been administered by the Tsars as part of Poland and used Polish law. The region of Palanga used Baltic law, which was of Swedish origin. The rest of the country used a Russian legal code: the Svod Zemstvo. Thus there were four different legal systems, written in four different languages, and each had a unique set of rules regarding land, property and inheritance.
This was reflected in a large variety of land-tenure systems. Most of the country used the Russian Mir which resembled the pre-Famine ‘Clachan-and-rundale’ arrangement in parts of Ireland. Under it the fields in a townland were reallocated each year in a lottery. This meant that as a family only had a field for a year they tried to get the most out of it while putting the least in. There was great reluctance to abandon this uneconomic practice because people saw it as ‘fair’.
When the Russian prime minister Stolypin tried to replace it with consolidation of holdings in 1911 he was promptly assassinated. In other areas there was a patchwork of tiny fields scattered higgledy-piggledy like the Congested Districts of the west of Ireland. In others there was strip-farming: with fields divided into narrow strips, each hardly wide enough for a potato ridge, The whole lot had over it landlords of German, Polish or Russian extraction.
In 1910 some priests set up an organisation called Artojas (‘The Ploughboy’) to buy out bankrupt landlords and redistribute their holdings. By the outbreak of war in 1914 about 5,000 hectares had been transferred.
In Lithuania the ‘Founding Seimas’ faced enormous tasks: the need to draw up a constitution, to establish a police and civil service, to organise a school system and so on. Land reform was but one task among many. About 2,500 landowners held between them half the land, while at the other end of the scale there were 40,000 families living on tiny holdings and about 60,000 landless rural families.
There was no consensus on what should be done. Some right-wing parties opposed any reform, claiming that large estates were more efficient. The urban-based Social Democrats advocated the nationalisation of all land and the creation of large state-owned agribusinesses. The Minister for Agriculture, Jonas Aleksa, started a rather cautious land redistribution program, involving about 8,000 hectares a year.
A Land Agency was established to broker land redistribution. It took control of all government lands and also all forests, swamps, peat-bogs, sand-dunes, rivers, lakes, beaches and uncultivated lands. The Land Agency confiscated certain private holdings:
[1] Lands belonging to persons who had enlisted in the armed forces of other states.
[2] Lands granted by the Tsar as a reward for helping in the suppression of the 1863 uprising.
Foreign nationals were not permitted to own land. All foreigners had within three years to take out citizenship or dispose of their holdings. An exception was made in the case of certain Swedish nationals who had bought farms in Lithuania in Tsarist times: it was recognised that these had made a valuable contribution by introducing modern farming practices, organising co-operatives and so on. (The man who was to take Lithuania out of the USSR, Professor Landsbergis, is of Swedish ancestry.)
The maximum amount of land one person could own was set at 75 hectares: a figure variously denounced as too big or too small. Where a holding exceeded 75 hectares the owner was allowed to select what part to retain and the Land Agency took over the rest. Compensation was paid for the first 75 hectares taken over on the basis of what Artojas would have paid for it before the war, no compensation was paid for any surplus above that.
Land was to be allocated in parcels of 8 to 20 hectares, depending on quality. Volunteers of the War of Liberation, and the families of dead volunteers, and families whose land had been confiscated under the Tsars for political reasons, were given first option and received their land free. Other recipients had to pay for their land over a 36-year period starting nine years after receiving it, and during that period land could not be sold or rented out. There was a scheme whereby civil servants could receive one hectare in certain isolated areas on condition they built themselves a holiday home and planted and maintained an orchard.
The Minister insisted that the largest estates be broken up first: he was of the opinion that the largest landowners were the least loyal to the Republic and the most inclined to conspire with her enemies.
Under Fr. Krupavicius the pace of land reform speeded up very much, to about 150,000 hectares a year, the main limiting factor being shortage of surveyors. Of course the gentry did not take this without protest: some Catholic ones denounced the minister to the Vatican as a Communist while some Protestant ones brought a case to the League of Nations alleging religious persecution.
Whenever an estate was broken up, former employees of it were allocated parcels of land, and land was often handed over to adjacent small holdings to bring them up to an economic size. Religious institutions such as convents were allowed to own up to 8 hectares and parishes could own up to that amount for use as church grounds, graveyards and the like.
However, land reform activity continued up until the Soviet invasion of 1940.
There was already a tradition of neighbourly co-operation in the performing of certain tasks, such as ploughing and harvesting, and also the bulk purchase of certain commodities such as seed and fertiliser. This was known as talka and was practised throughout the country, and it was relatively easy to formalise this tradition.
Many different types of co-operatives were formed. There were consumer co-operatives (‘Rochdale’ principle) whose members received dividends based on the amount of goods purchased. There were credit unions (‘Raiffeisen’ banks) for which the State put up the starting capital. A third type was the producer co-operative, which engaged in marketing.
The union of dairy farmer co-operatives, Pienocentras, organised the export of milk products and eggs. Linas, the union of flax-grower co-operatives, ran linen mills and marketed the produce. All these bodies combined under the umbrella of Lietukis, the Union of Rural Co-operatives. All sorts of other co-ops also existed: the Union of Teachers had one that produced school supplies, the Students Union ran canteens and college shops.
Courses in co-operative management were available at Dotnuva and at the University of Kaunas.
The co-operative movement allowed farmers to get optimum value both when they bought and when they sold, through the elimination of middle-men and profiteering.
When the Soviets occupied Lithuania in the summer of 1940 they were astonished to discover that agricultural output exceeded that of the Ukraine. Molotov, talking to the last premier Vincas Kreve, expressed amazement that ‘everything goes like clockwork’ yet nobody seemed to be in charge or giving orders.
The Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, who lived for a few years in Lithuania as a boy, writes in his autobiography:
...when I arrived at the end of the journey I found an earthly paradise. [...] Four years of German occupation had not changed anything in Lithuania. The days unfolded, just as they had for centuries, to the rhythm of work in the fields, Catholic feasts, solemn processions, and the rites of Christian-pagan magic. Except for relatively light shocks - one of these was the agricultural reforms, which affected the majority of landowners - the same rhythm persisted up until the Second World War. I entered into a stunning greenness, into choruses of birds, into orchards bent low with the weight of fruit, into the enchantment of my native river, so unlike the boundless dreary rivers of the eastern plains. Even today I feel grateful to the girls who took so much care twining garlands of leaves and flowers to decorate the church.
But the feudal elite also thereby excluded the emerging class of successful merchants from influence. Towards the end of the 17th century the Stuart monarchy was overthrown and William of Orange became king of England.
Part of the deal that brought William to the throne was an agreement with some wealthy private persons that William would give them a charter to set up a bank that would have a large number of privileges, including the right to lend money to the state without parliamentary permission and the right to issue currency notes.
Thus the Bank of England was born and the monarch, and thence in effect the government, had a source of loans and the emerging capitalist class received a licence to print money.
Dean Swift in particular was an outspoken opponent of the scheme, and of other similar attempts at monetary chicanery, while Bishop Berkeley said that if a Bank of Ireland were to be set up then it should be publicly and not privately owned.
Finally in 1783 the Bank of Ireland was established by ‘Royal Charter’. It had the same function as the Bank of England had in England: to allow the government to borrow money without the consent of parliament. Among the shareholders were Robert Emmet’s father, Wolfe Tone’s grandfather and Lord Kilwarden.
As with the Bank of England, members of the Huguenot community were prominent in the running of the bank. All Bank of Ireland employees were required to take an oath denouncing the Roman Catholic religion as superstition, thus excluding Catholics. Irish Quakers, out of respect for their Catholic fellow-countrymen, also refused to take this oath and, as was said ‘thus excluded themselves’. The oath was abolished in 1845 but until very recent times the Bank of Ireland did not employ Catholics other than in menial positions.
The Bank of Ireland was the official government bank, but after the Act of Union of 1800 it lost a lot of its official status. In 1803 the bank bought the old ‘Irish Parliament’ buildings at College Green and established its head office there.
In the late 19th century the Bank of Ireland began a policy of lending money at quite generous rates of interest to Catholic institutions. The motive appears to have been to make the church authorities indebted to the Unionist interests that owned the bank.The Irish Banks Standing Committee (IBSC) was organised, making banking in Ireland into a cartel. In practice the IBSC followed whatever lead was given by the Bank of Ireland.
In the summer of 1920 Dublin Castle ordered the Irish banks, other than the Belfast-based Ulster and Northern Banks, to deliver all their bullion holdings into the custody of the Bank of Ireland’s head office at College Green ‘for safe-keeping’. On the night of the August 31, 1920 the whole lot was seized by the British government and shipped off to England under military escort.
This operation netted the British about seventeen tons of gold, and left the future Free State denuded of bullion. The next meeting of the governors of the Bank of Ireland voted the sum of five pounds to buy a round of drinks for the porters at the College Green branch, in recognition of their co-operation in the matter.
For many years Dublin Castle had been claiming that if ever Home Rule was introduced then the buildings at College Green would be taken over for use as a parliament again. No assurances by nationalists would convince the Governors that this was not so: they believed what the British told them. The Bank of Ireland actually had written into the 1920 Government of Ireland Act that the College Green buildings would not be requisitioned.
In March of 1923 the Saorstát approached the IBSC for an urgent loan of two million pounds. The reply was that where the IBSC was concerned the Saorstát was not the government, the real government was in London and the Saorstát was just another customer. A loan would be forthcoming only if underwritten by Westminster. The IBSC were then told that the money was needed because the Civil War was in stalemate, the Saorstát had no funds left to pay troops and purchase supplies and there was a real danger that the war would be lost. The IBSC paid up.
The following June Cosgrave sent J.J.McElligott to the banks to ask for a further £7 million. He was told to raise the money by floating a stock issue: he was reminded that the banks did not own the money they held, it belonged to their depositors. The banks could hardly lend their depositors’ money to the Saorstát without consulting them.
When McElligott reminded them that the banks lent money to the British government all the time without consulting their depositors there came the spluttering response that the British government’s credit-worthiness was the highest in the world “...with the possible exception of the United States of America.”
Next day Cosgrave himself came looking for the loan. He said that the Saorstát had no money left and if it couldn’t pay the army and police then the armed guards on bank premises would have to be withdrawn. Also, the payment of compensation claims awarded by the Shaw Tribunal would have to be delayed indefinitely. No doubt Cosgrave was well aware that the chairman of the Bank of Ireland, Lord Henry Guinness, had just been awarded a large sum by Lord Shaw. After some haggling, the loan was forthcoming.
The bulk of the country’s wealth was still being siphoned off to England. For example in 1929, a year in which the Saorstát reduced the already miserly old age pension, the Bank of Ireland reported holding over £100 million in British government stock: this would be like £100 billion today.
The Bank of Ireland Act of 1929 greatly enlarged the discretionary powers of that bank’s governors regarding what they did with money entrusted to them.
The coming to power of de Valera made little difference except that the Bank of Ireland’s immunity from Corporation Tax was withdrawn in 1932. Neither the new constitution nor the labours of the Banking Commission brought any significant change.
The letter informed the manager that the IBSC had agreed that any bank employee wishing to enlist in the British armed forces was to be granted unlimited leave-of-absence. If asked about this by ‘government officials’ the manager was instructed to admit that such a scheme existed but was to decline to give any further information on grounds of ‘confidentiality’.
In 1942 the chairman of the Bank of Ireland, Lord Glenavy, approached de Valera in search of some favour or other. Questioned about the scheme, Glenavy gave vague replies but admitted it existed. Asked why there was no similar scheme for bank employees wishing to join the Saorstát’s own defence forces, Glenavy huffily replied that it was intended only for persons ‘going on active service’.
In 1942 the Royal Mint ordered the withdrawal of all silver coins circulating in the Saorstát and their replacement with ones made of cupro-nickel, the silver bullion being needed to pay off oil-sheikhs. The Irish banks complied, and the mail-boats that carried poverty-stricken Irish workers over to Britain to work in factories and on farms also carried crates of coins for melting down.
In 1945 the war ended. The new Labour government in London began an ambitious programme of social reform and floated a loan for this purpose, one in which the Irish banks invested heavily. Dev’s finance minister, Frank Aiken, launched a similar loan at the same rate of interest and the banks ignored it. The infuriated Aiken called in the IBSC and threatened to nationalise the entire banking sector if the entire offer wasn’t taken up.
Throughout the history of the Saorstát the banking sector has operated outside the control of, and largely against the interests of, the country as a whole, and has been a mechanism for siphoning away the wealth of the country. A nationalisation of the banks might not have been that successful within the neo-colonial environment of the Saorstát: given the strongly pro-British outlook of the Department of Finance.
However, it was always within the power of the politicians, had they been interested, to have curbed the freedom of the banks to act against the national interest: for example by requiring them to invest at least as much within the country as overseas or by prohibiting the holding of more than a certain proportion of their assets in foreign government stock.
There was no Stock Exchange in Dublin until a branch office of the London Stock Exchange was opened in 1974. The link with London was officially broken in 1995, but seems to have continued on an informal basis.
Anglo-Irish literature was largely the creation of one man, an English literary agent called Edward Garnett. Before the days of television people read a lot more than they do nowadays, and in particular there were plenty of monthly and weekly magazines on sale, usually containing a few short stories as well as other material. Ireland’s Own is the last surviving remnant of this once extensive fleet of publications.
There existed in England similar publications, which had of course much wider circulation and could pay more for contributions. Here is where Garnett came in: he talent-scouted Irish magazines and selected individual writers and secured them introductions to London publishers. It was natural that he preferred to promote individuals whose views he found sympathetic, and the writers he ‘discovered’ tended to share his own rather cynical outlook on life and were also, very often, womanisers.
They wrote mainly for London periodicals, in which they also reviewed each others’ books and galloped their various hobby-horses.
There were two main streams in this elite. The first was of people of Protestant Ascendancy background, mostly only partially reconciled to the loss of status that the foundation of the Free State had caused them. The other consisted of persons who had grown up in police barracks. These too had been reared in hostile isolation from Irish society, and brought up to have a jaundiced view of everything Irish coupled with an admiration for the English; who always knew best and did things the right way.
Eventually this group founded their own magazine, The Bell, dedicated to narcissistic mutual admiration coupled with disdain for, and despair at, Irish society in general.
An intellegensia, it is said, is a nation’s conscience. As far as that goes, the Anglo-Irish literary establishment was very much a one-tune band. The only issue within Ireland that they showed any interest in was the accusation, repeated ad nauseum, that the Saorstát, in alliance with the Catholic Church, was persecuting lechers.
One story, invented by Ms Honor Tracey and circulated thereafter by her associates, will suffice as a typical example of the sort of stuff they came out with. She asserted that throughout Ireland groups of Catholic priests regularly patrolled the country lanes armed with walking sticks, poking the hedgerows on search of courting couples.
Under the Saorstát of course one group alone were consistently persecuted from the day the State was founded: the Republicans. For them there were special laws, special courts, special prisons and indeed the Special Branch. But it was impossible to get a cheep out of the intellectuals about this: any approach on the matter tended to bring a furious response about the ban on Playboy magazine or some matter of similar significance.
Journalists also ideally should act as a public conscience, but in the colonial situation their freedom of action tends to be curtailed.
A young person starting a career in journalism often would have the ambition of one day working for a London tabloid, where wages and benefits were sky-high compared with anything available in Ireland. An older journalist might have another concern; that one day he or she might be out of work and be obliged to emigrate to England and seek employment there.
Some also might wish to emulate the career of Fergal Keane, son of the actor Éamon Keane, who began work as a journalist on the Limerick Leader, moved on to the Irish Press, then to RTÉ and finally to the BBC and who recently received the Order of the British Empire. (Even Tony O’Reilly hasn’t got one of those!)
So, journalists preferred to join the London-based journalists’ union and also had to be careful what they wrote. An examination of old files of Irish national and provincial newspapers will reveal sports pages given over to masses of purple prose describing the activities of a usually underachieving local soccer team, with Gaelic games very much in second place. Reporting soccer was and is a marketable skill outside Ireland, reporting GAA is not. Also, journalists had to watch what they wrote about national questions, because of the existence of black lists.
When he was in charge of RTÉ, Conor Cruise O’Brien admitted keeping a black list of persons who had written things he thought anti-British, and when later on he was made editor of the London Observer he straight away fired Mary Holland, a columnist who had just written an article sympathetic towards the inhabitants of Bogside: whom he described as “...con-men and con-women.”
More recently, the spectacle of some of the country’s best-paid journalists scouring the jungles of South America in search of the absconded Bishop Casey illustrates what sort of thing the owners of our newspapers consider important.
Several well-known writers actually went to England to concoct propaganda for the British ‘Ministry of Information’. The poet Patrick Kavanagh in desperation approached the British Embassy and offered his services as a spy: naively unaware that the British had all the spies they needed prepared to work for them for nothing.
After the war ended the old pattern of cultural dependency soon revived, and continues to this day albeit with signs of decline.
Any writer or journalist harbouring a grudge about Ireland and the Irish can readily find space to air grievances in London right-wing publications, whose editors seem to assume that hatred of Ireland implies love of England.
Though writers of fiction tend publicity-wise to hold the high ground among the intelligencia it is interesting to note that of the four Irish winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature two were dramatists and two were poets and no novelist is included.
For example the Black and Tans get three references, the Gaelic Athletic Association gets two, the Guildford Four get three. But in contrast there is Divorce (15), Censorship (14), Contraception (17). Bobby Sands gets two entries while a Mr. Alan Paton, who was prosecuted for obscenity, merits three.
The Australian poet (and republican) Les Murray recently said: “The entire cultural elite in Australia is violently anti-Australian.” He added that they took nothing seriously unless it came from London or New York. One can well believe it: it is a typical example of the state of any culture under colonialism and neo-colonialism.
In India also Indian-born writers like VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie are widely disliked as painting a false portrait of their native land. But those writers do not care: they do not depend on India for their livelihood, they write for the Anglo-American publishing market.
Intellectuals also took part in public life, especially as diplomats. The Lithuanian ambassador in Moscow from 1920 to 1938 was Jurgis Baltrusaitis who was a distinguished poet and the translator of Yeats and Wilde into Lithuanian. The last Lithuanian premier, Vincas Kreve, was a poet and dramatist and an expert on Caucasian languages.
In the Saorstát there has been only one example of an intellectual becoming active in public affairs: Conor Cruise O’Brien. The consequences are too well known to need repeating here: if he is typical of the rest, then we should be thankful they remained aloof.