The hospitals in particular began to feel the pinch and eventually one of them petitioned the government to be allowed to run a sweepstake to raise funds. The idea was adopted, but control of the sweep was given to a private company, the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake, headed by a Cumann na nGaedheal politician who was to die a very wealthy man. The Sweep proved immensely popular in Irish communities abroad, where people believed that by investing in tickets they were genuinely helping Ireland and not lining the pockets of the likes of Cosgrave, Fitzgerald and O’Higgins. A lot more money than expected came in, and while funds were not distributed as fairly as they might have been, the private hospitals did benefit and so eventually did the public at large.
The country continued to produce far more doctors than it could employ and the bulk of medical graduates went abroad. The British Colonial Medical Service employed enormous numbers of them. In the Saorstát there was an upper echelon of practitioners of Protestant-Unionist origin who had a tight grip on the medical profession, controlling bodies like the Royal College of Surgeons. There were a few wealthy medicos like Oliver St. John Gogarty but the medical elite was impossible to break into unless one had private resources. The general public depended on the overworked and professionally despised dispensary doctors. And of course the medical establishment tried to rip off the Saorstát just as did other mutual-interest groups. When Dr. James Deeny took over as state Chief Medical Officer in 1944 he found that plans for a new children’s hospital at Cherry Orchard included the provision of a nine-hole golf course for the exclusive use of the consultants.
Once De Valera came to power improvements in public health were expected. Having little interest in the matter he did what politicians always do when they want to put something on the long finger: he set up a committee. The committee, chaired by Bishop Dignam of Clonfert, eventually reported in 1944. It proposed a scheme for general health insurance based on that of New Zealand, then recognised as the best in the world. The scheme, though carefully worked out and shown to be viable, was at once shot down by the Department of Finance: as usual on the grounds of cost.
In Britain itself meanwhile there was concern among the authorities at the very poor physical condition of recruits and it was soon realised that this was due to childhood malnutrition in the inter-war years. The influential Beveridge Report, which was to be regarded for decades as the last word on the subject in both Britain and Ireland, called for greater state involvement in health and welfare; including school meals, free medical and dental treatment for schoolchildren and regular body-building exercises in school - the hated ‘physical jerks’.
In Britain the Labour government decided, against fierce opposition from the medical profession, to nationalise the entire health sector and turn all doctors and dentists into civil servants, with all medical treatment provided free. It turned out to be an overambitious and ruinously expensive exercise but it was the subject of much praise in the Saorstát, and there were frequent calls for a similar service. Of course there was no chance that the impoverished Saorstát could replicate that, but there was an impetus to make some improvement. A separate Department of Health was set up, and the Sweepstake money started to come in again.
There were also new problems to deal with. Post-war mobility facilitated the spread of dangerous diseases; notably whooping cough and polio. The arrival of large numbers of men discharged from the British armed forces caused an epidemic of venereal disease which the establishment, either through prudishness or for fear of offending the British, chose to nothing about.
Fianna Fáil had been in power since 1932 and had won an election in 1944, but was running out of ideas. The appearance of Clann na Poblachta, which attracted diverse elements and was drawing off Fianna Fáil support, frightened De Valera into calling an election a year early. As he intended, Clann na Poblachta was caught on the hop: it was still evolving as a political entity and did not have much in the way of funds. A search began for candidates who could put up the £50 deposit out of their own resources. One of those recruited was a young TB specialist working in a sanatorium in the Wicklow mountains. So, Dr. Noel Browne joined Clann na Poblachta and six weeks later he was Minister for Health.
For a while things went very well. Browne set to work with great energy and enthusiasm to modernise public health. Every few days an initiative would be announced: a new sanatorium here, a hundred extra beds there, a campaign on this, a programme for that. Because funds were available from the Sweep, the minister unlike his cabinet colleagues did not have to keep going cap-in-hand to the Department of Finance. The minister himself toured the country, met patients, spoke on radio. His determination to do something about the scourge of TB made him widely popular. He was a rising star on the political horizon. Then suddenly everything came unstuck.
James MacPolin was County Medical Officer for Limerick: a post he had obtained through the patronage system, most likely because he had contacts in the Catholic hierarchy. Limerick became such a public health black spot that even the lethargic Department of Health had twice tried to have him removed. MacPolin also was strongly opposed to Browne’s innovations: he had his own crank theories about how public health should be run. He became a focus of opposition to Browne: he convinced the Irish Medical Association that Browne’s schemes would reduce doctors’ freedom, status and income. To the hierarchy he hinted that Browne’s schemes were ‘communistic’.
MacPolin soon won over the Archbishop of Dublin, Charles McQuaid, whose own father had been a dispensary doctor. McQuaid was and remains an enigmatic figure. He was not a Maynooth graduate, but had been a member of a religious order and before becoming Archbishop in 1940 had been the headmaster of a boarding school. His appointment was thought to have been due to the fact that he was friendly with De Valera, who had been a teacher at the same school. He proved a vigorous and hard-working prelate who reformed and revitalised the Catholic Church in Dublin. He was not without decency but he had a cold and forbidding personality and he never outgrew the instincts and attitudes of a fossilised schoolmaster. He also had an obsession with ‘hidden agendas’, and not entirely without reason.
Things came to a head in 1951 over the ‘Mother and Child Scheme’ which was a measure drawn up under the previous Fianna Fáil regime and revived by Browne. The dispute itself was trivial, it was the clash of wills that mattered: the irresistable force meeting the immovable object. Browne came off second best and had to resign.
Noel Browne was a political dyslexic. At first he was able to crash his way through all sorts of obstacles because he didn’t realise they were there. You can get away with that for a while, but you make enemies. Had he ever worked as a general practicioner, or had McQuaid ever been a parish priest, then they might each have developed a sensitivity towards the views of others, but hospital specialists do not negotiate with their patients, nor do headmasters negotiate with their pupils. Browne was to linger on in Leinster House for many years but he never achieved anything else and eventually became a sort of monument raised to himself. As often happens with a person of deprived background who has had too many lucky breaks, he entered politics with a distorted perception of reality which he was never able to escape from.
The State Chief Medical Officer at the time, James Deeny, wrote long afterwards: “Between the lot of them, they made a right mess of the Mother and Child scheme. The real tragedy of the debacle was that it set back public health in the country for years and opened up the way to the centralised, bureaucratic, politicised and authoritarian government which we now enjoy.”
Money is wasted in all sorts of ways. At the height of the AIDS scare some journalists were declaring that Dublin was ‘. . . the AIDS capital of Europe...’ and claiming that Irish AIDS victims were flooding into England and putting a strain on that country’s wonderful health service, and was this an English solution to an Irish problem? The pathetic Fitzgerald coalition was persuaded to fund a special AIDS clinic in London to which English hospitals could refer any Irish patients that came to them. It ran for seven years, cost well over a million sterling, and never had more than a handful of patients attending.
There remain many serious health problems. A great many derive from unhealthy lifestyle and diet, constantly promoted by reckless advertising campaigns.
To be fair, there have been achievements too. The Saorstát was the first to use the Salk polio vaccine. It has achieved very low levels of maternal and infant mortality. Also, of course, there can never be a total health service. Practically, there isn’t enough money in the world, nor enough trained personnel, to meet every need that exists.
However the Protestant minority exercised considerable social and economic power: Protestants owned half the land and almost all the industry, they were dominant in banking, in the legal and medical professions, and in many other areas.
Under the Stuarts the policy of ‘plantation’ was introduced, under which the native population was to be expelled from whole areas and replaced by colonists from Britain. It was a success only in parts of Ulster, where viable Protestant communities of Scottish origin were created. Elsewhere in Ireland the colonists evolved into a ruling class.
Thus the bulk of the native Irish remained stubbornly Catholic but were ruled by a Protestant elite that felt itself to belong to a superior English society. It is true that every generation of Protestants has produced important Irish patriots, but these have been very exceptional. The vast majority felt no loyalty to Ireland: they were in Ireland for what they could take.
There were all sorts of inducements held out, particularly to wealthier Catholics, to persuade persons to go over to the Protestant camp. For example a younger son could disinherit his older brothers by converting. This proved to be a double-edged sword: all sorts of miscreants took this step and there built up a degenerate element among the landed gentry. A bishop is said to have complained: “We only get what the Pope throws over the wall!”
As in England, the Anglican church was the official state church and was funded by the tithe, a tax on crops. In the early 19th century there was so much unrest over the tithe that it was changed into a levy on the landlords. Later the Anglican church was formally ‘disestablished’ and the tithe abolished; though by then it had largely been converted into ground rents and investments.
The 19th century developments in transport made travel to England easier. Wealthy Protestants now sent their children to boarding schools there and travelled to London for ‘the season’ and the connection between them and the ruling elite in England became tighter, and Irish (and Scottish) landed gentry were an important component of the English aristocracy. Karl Marx came to the conclusion that the Irish Protestant Ascendancy was the key element of the British ruling class.
The landed gentry and the wealthier Protestants were mostly Anglicans. The descendants of the Scottish colonists, found mostly in Ulster, were Presbyterians. In Britain numerous other Protestant sects emerged over the centuries and these each produced an Irish offshoot: all competing for members.
There was no indigenous Irish Protestant sect, each looked to a parent church in Britain. The Anglicans were top dogs, and were for long the only ones entitled to call themselves ‘Protestants’, the others were officially known as ‘Dissenters’ and were looked down on. At first Dissenters could not join the Orange Order. With the passage of time the Anglicans adopted the Dissenters as a sort of subaltern class: not on the same level as Anglicans but superior to the Catholics.
Irish Protestants felt themselves to be superior beings because of their loyalty to the monarchy. Catholics were a lower species because it was felt that they would obey their priests and the Pope rather than the monarch and his government. It was constantly thundered from pulpits that Catholics were “DIS-LOYAL!!”
The Protestant churches threw themselves into the recruitment campaign when war broke out in 1914. Protestants enlisted in large numbers. Despite the efforts of John Redmond and the Irish Party, enlistment by Catholics fell short of what was desired, much to the annoyance of the authorities, and Protestants felt that their reservations about the Catholic Church had been justified by events.
Most Protestants sided with the British in the subsequent struggle and gave them assistance and encouragement. For their part the British attempted to portray the freedom struggle as a sectarian campaign directed against Protestants.
The establishment of the Saorstát was accepted by the bulk of Protestants with some reluctance, but they recognised that from their point of view things could have been much worse. For their part the leaders of the Saorstát courted the Protestant community both because they needed all the support they could get and because Protestants owned much of the land and resources.
The Protestants diverged into two camps. The landed gentry, once they were satisfied that their status and incomes were secure, began more or less to ignore the Saorstát and to continue on as if it had never been created. The brewers and distillers and the like had less freedom of action and had to keep on the right side of those now in power, who for their part solicited their support and gave them all sorts of concessions in the mistaken belief that their loyalty could be bought.
In the early years of the Saorstát Protestants enjoyed power out of proportion to their numbers. In the fields of law, medicine and the professions generally they were well entrenched and well organised through their secretive Masonic Order. They worked ceaselessly not so much against the interests of the Saorstát as in the interests of England.
In their scheme of things, God was in overall charge of the world as a sort of absentee landlord, with the day-to-day running deputised to the king of England and from him to the Westminster government, the British Empire, and especially the British armed forces. To criticise any of these institutions was therefore by implication to criticise God. Archbishop Gregg, primate for the first 30 years or so of the Saorstát, was once asked if the British government could ever do wrong and he answered with a horrified “NO!!”
Protestant services included prayers for the monarchy and concluded with the singing of the British national anthem. Churches themselves became so filled with imperialistic flags and insignia that they came to resemble militarist shrines.
Many hospitals were Protestant-controlled and employed only Protestant staff. A strange situation arose when the Sweepstake was banned by the British government. Several hospitals were pressured into refusing to accept Sweep money on the grounds it was in some way tainted. At the same time thousands of pounds every week went from the Saorstát to England to various football pools: which were run for private profit and not for charity, but since these were legal in England they were therefore not immoral.
Also, around that time the nominal head of the Protestant Ascendancy, the young Duke of Leinster, lost £11 million in a massive gambling spree at Monte Carlo. But nobody raised any objection: this was his money and he could do what he liked with it. The duke was the country’s biggest landlord and most of his income came from people who hadn’t enough to eat and couldn’t afford shoes for their children.
In the medical profession a great many general practitioners and hospital specialists were Protestants, while most Catholic medical graduates had to emigrate. However, the Second World War created a curious situation: many Protestant doctors went off to England to participate in the war and also the emigration routes for Catholic doctors became closed off. So many Catholic doctors became ‘locums’, standing in for Protestant ones. When the war ended these returned and took their jobs back and there was a lot of resentment generated.
There was also the curious situation of the Grammar Schools. Many of the larger Irish towns had a secondary school known as the Erasmus Smith School or the Grammar School, funded by a levy on businesses in the town. These schools were in theory non-denominational but in practice were Anglican-run and the headmaster was almost always a retired British officer and was quite often also a native of England. Such schools gradually faded out as the value of the levy, which was fixed, ceased to be sufficient to support them.
It also held that those of lower intelligence tend to have more children who in turn are of low intelligence and become a burden on society through their inability to provide for themselves. Therefore it was incumbent upon society, and upon doctors in particular, to try to prevent inferior people producing children.
In the version of eugenics popular in England, to which many Protestants in Ireland subscribed, the Irish were high on the list of those the world would probably be a better place without. Among the poorer classes of Protestant north of the border, this tied in with their favourite Bible chapter: Chapter 15 of the First Book of Samuel, in which God commands King Saul to massacre the Amalekites (Palestinians) ‘man and woman, child and suckling’, a passage frequently alluded to by half-demented preachers with hints that it constituted a licence to kill Catholics.
Eugenic theory ceased to be pushed as an entity after it was adopted by Hitler, who took it to its logical conclusion, but it remains an influence under various disguises. Queen’s University Belfast has always had a eugenicist or two on the faculty, usually disguised under some bland job-title such as Population Scientist.
In the Saorstát too doctors, and Protestant ones especially, were influenced by such ideas, and occasionally leading Protestants expressed concern about what they claimed was overpopulation of the state due to there being too high a birth rate. This has now almost disappeared: the last significant advocates, Dean Victor Griffin and Sir Basil Goulding, faded from the scene about 20 years ago.
He always claimed that the wording of Article 41 of de Valera’s 1937 constitution — later the subject of a lengthy bogus controversy — had been suggested by him.
In 1949 Gregg ordered the ending of the more ostentatious displays of loyalty to England in church services in the Saorstát, but the Anglican church continued to conduct annual ‘Poppy Day’ ceremonies and so on.
Protestants in the Saorstát began to heap praise on themselves on account of their liberalism, pluralism and whatever. It would be more accurate to say that they liked to pose as liberals in matters they considered to be of small consequence. It was only necessary to look north of the border to see what the whole of Ireland would presumably be like if they still had control over it.
The better off members, the landed gentry and the employers, were also members of Masonic lodges through which they manipulated the Order to their advantage. At a level above this lay the less formal country-house set of baronets and squires who actually ran the whole thing.
For 50 years it worked well. The Brookboroughs and the Chichester-Clarks and the rest of them were able to manipulate things so that they could go on playing the ‘White Settler’ indefinitely: while sniggering behind their elegant gloved hands at the fools in hard hats and sashes.
It is said that a greyhound has to be allowed to catch and kill a hare occasionally or it will lose interest in running after them. In the same way, there is not much point belonging to a Master Race if you can’t bash the natives around.
The Stormont junta was well aware of this and knew that it had to allow the occasional pogrom to retain the support of the ill-educated rabble making up the bulk of Unionists.
Only when the present troubles began did the Ascendancy decide it needed to broaden its base by bringing in the mercantile class, and Brian Faulkner came to power. He was to be the last Stormont premier: the London government abolished the Stormont parliament and commenced direct rule. This marked the end of the line for the landed gentry: they lost control of their political machine to the psychopaths they had previously nurtured.
The Anglican squirearchy who ran Stormont for half a century carry a far greater burden of guilt than do the ignorant preachers who eventually displaced them, because unlike the latter they knew better: they had had the benefit of a civilised upbringing and a decent education and they knew exactly what they were doing.
Under direct rule Dublin Castle paid scant attention to energy matters: everything was left to private initiative: the main interest being where possible to stimulate the use of English coal. As in England itself, coal-gas was preferred to electricity for public lighting and domestic use and privately-owned gas monopolies were established in Dublin and other cities. A coal-fired electricity generator was opened at the Pigeon House in Dublin in 1903.
Thomas McLaughlin had studied theoretical physics at UCD and had subsequently gone to Germany and joined the Siemens company and there trained as an electrical engineer. He was a strong supporter of the 1921 treaty and also knew personally many of the leaders of the new Free State, including the Minister for Industry and Commerce Patrick McGilligan.
In December 1923 McLaughlin approached Cosgrave with plans for a state-run generator plant on the river Shannon. He was turned down. A month later he approached again, accompanied by representatives of the Siemens company and with a well-prepared proposal.
After much lobbying the authorities set up a committee with two Swiss and two Swedish professors as advisers. They found the Shannon ideal because of a 30-metre drop over a short distance just above Limerick City and the presence of Lough Derg to act as a natural reservoir. The Erne and Bann schemes were now impractical because of Partition. The Liffey scheme was viable but costlier and should be put off until the Shannon had been fully utilised.
In answer to complaints that state construction of dams was ‘socialistic’ it was pointed out that the world’s greatest capitalist country, the United States, had no reservations about employing Army engineers to build dams on the Colorado and Tennessee rivers and that the main mover behind this was Herbert Hoover, who could hardly be called a socialist.
Finally, the committee recommended that the bid put in by Siemens be accepted. The Department of Finance would have preferred to see the job given to a British firm but it had been discovered that the British had a very poor reputation internationally as contractors. New Zealand, despite strong emotional attachment to England, had entrusted the development of its hydro-electric resources to a Swedish company.
The price was a give-away. German devaluation after the war may explain why it was so low. Possibly also Siemens hoped to open a market for their electrical goods and regarded it as a long-term market investment.
There was furious opposition from many quarters. The two main daily newspapers, the Irish Independent and the Irish Times, both fumed at the employment of ‘Huns’ and revived wartime British propaganda about the supposed treacherous nature of Germans. In Leinster House Sir John Keane and Major Bryan Cooper, who formed a Unionist rump, railed against it. In England there were bellows of rage from the press and from all shades of political opinion.
The Electricity Supply Board was set up in 1927 to manage the electrification of the State. Various private generating stations were taken over: full compensation was paid to the (mostly Unionist) owners but there was bitter resentment at the loss of status involved. The Department of Finance bureaucrats were opposed of course. To keep them quiet they were given complete control over the ESB: a grave mistake.
The Department of Finance had no idea how to run an enterprise of any kind. Former British and Free State Army officers were appointed to most management positions on the grounds that they were ‘accustomed to giving orders’. Professor McLaughlin, who had done so much work to get it all going, was elbowed out and went to live in Spain and never set foot in Ireland again.
Among those working for Siemens on the project was Freidrich Weckler, an accountant and a native of the Rhineland. He fell in love with Ireland and when the contract was finished he decided to stay on: taking out citizenship and accepting a much-reduced salary.
After De Valera came to power the ESB was removed from civil service control and established as a semi-state corporation. Fred Weckler took over the general running of the ESB under a politically-appointed chairman.
Weckler proved an able administrator who soon got the organization running efficiently, and his methods influenced the development of Bórd na Móna, CIE, the Sugar Company and many other semi-state bodies, and were admired and imitated abroad. To give but one example, Weckler insisted that the ESB use the metric system of measurements where possible, thereby greatly enhancing efficiency.
The ex-officer managers were shunted aside and persons of ability promoted, given precise objectives and set to work.
During the Second World War, Weckler suddenly found himself the target of personal abuse from certain quarters because of his German origins. He found these insults, coming from persons he had thought to be his friends, deeply disturbing. His health broke down as a result and in 1943 he died.
Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil had insisted that the Curragh Camp, which used imported coal, convert to turf. Use of turf as a fuel was urged on all government departments. This brought employment to rural areas and votes for Fianna Fáil: the coal importers who lost out had been mostly associated with the previous regime.
Private research into the utilisation of peat bogs was already going on. There was a wealthy engineer of Welsh origin, Sir John Purser-Griffith, who had retired to Ireland and had become interested in the possibilities of using turf as an energy source. He bought a bog at Turraun, County Offaly, and began the large-scale production of turf using machines imported from Germany. The turf was shipped to Dublin on the Grand Canal and found a ready market. He also produced peat-moss and began work on the design of an electricity generator. In 1936 Sir John, now over 90 years old, offered the entire undertaking to the State as a gift. The Department of Finance howled, saying it was a white elephant, but the offer was accepted and B7#243;rd na Móna was the eventual outcome.
The State was fortunate to have Ardnacrusha and the beginnings of a turf industry. In the teeth of civil service obstruction, Bórd na Móna was expanded until it was producing sufficient fuel to keep the country going: and also incidentally providing much-needed employment. Trains were run successfully on turf and firewood. Professor Drumm of UCD devised a gigantic electric battery that was able to power a regular train service between Limerick and Dublin.
There was also during the war period a shortage of engineering materials which inhibited development work.
The government had assumed that England would be able and willing to supply the Saorstát’s coal requirements. In fact because of problems associated with the nationalisation of the mines, plus the demands caused by a series of exceptionally bad winters, England had no coal to spare. The only coal available on world markets was low-grade American ‘steam coal’ which turned out to be pretty nearly unburnable.
The outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 caused a minor fuel crisis due to shortage of shipping. In the 1950’s the Arigna power station, using native anthracite, and an oil-fired station at the North Wall were opened.
The discovery of natural gas off Kinsale helped ease matters, and after 1975 oil prices began to fall off. But the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979 sparked another crisis: this time exacerbated by a rise in the value of the American dollar, in which oil is traded internationally.
A proposal was made that a nuclear power plant be constructed, and a site was even purchased at Carnsore Point. Certain politicians embraced the proposal at a suspicious level of enthusiasm, and it was assumed that the plant would be built by British contractors. Nuclear plants were known to be tricky and unreliable and potentially very dangerous and there was serious public concern.
Nuclear power stations are only economic if built on a very large scale, and a single plant would have exceeded the entire requirements of the Saorstát. Enthusiasts said that it would supply the six counties as well, and export the surplus to Britain. Already in Britain there were several such plants, mostly in Scotland and Wales, but there were strong ‘not in my back yard’ objections to the construction of any more and it became suspected that the Carnsore Point proposal was an attempt by the British to build another nuclear plant: on Irish soil at Irish expense.
Eventually the proposal was scrapped. Instead efforts were concentrated on improving efficiency of energy use, reversing the wasteful policies of the past. Attention turned again to native resources, and to such potential sources as wind power.
In most countries there is a patriotic core element in politics and the civil service. In a neo-colonial society this core is excluded. One result is an absence of long-term planning in matters of national interest. In the Saorstát a consequence of much chopping and changing and mismanagement and the tendency to install permanent solutions to temporary problems is that the ESB does have a large variety of generating plants and has built up considerable skill resources which have in recent years been marketed abroad with some success. The lesson that it is a mistake to let the State become totally dependent on any single external source of energy is slowly sinking in.
The main raw energy resource was bog peat and peat-fired power stations were constructed. In Estonia by 1940 there was a generating capacity of 200 Megawatts provided by three turf-fired stations, one hydroelectric plant and one station fired by native shale oil. The electrification of the railway network was begun. A peat briquette factory was built to provide an alternative to timber as domestic fuel.
Under Soviet rule (1940-1990) energy policy was centralised in Moscow and the three states integrated with Russia. When Lithuania broke away in 1991, Gorbachev cut off supplies of oil to that country. However the city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again) defied the embargo and shipped oil to Lithuania.
At the present moment Lithuania has a massive energy headache: it depends for electricity on a single Chernobyl-era nuclear plant manned entirely by Russian technicians - whole town of them. It also still relies on Russia for all hydro-carbon fuels.
From this base Radio Éireann evolved. Apart from the news and weather forecasts very little of importance was broadcast. Long dreary plays written by the Abbey Theatre element were a constant feature. For many years there was a vocal pressure group calling for the establishment of a symphony orchestra by the station and bewailing the lack of it as a sign of cultural backwardness.
Radio was heavily censored and the station did not dare offend the British in any way. During the 1939-1945 war censorship was increased dramatically. Archbishop McQuaid was not allowed to broadcast an appeal for funds to support the families of those interned by Stormont, and announcers covering sporting events were strictly forbidden to make any mention of the state of the weather or the direction of the wind or anything like that in case it would supply weather information to the Germans. After the war ended, tight government control was maintained.
Before long a demand arose that the Saorstát have a television service of its own. The chief impetus came from the retailers, who had discovered that the sale of television equipment could be very profitable, and it was largely prodding from commercial interests that led to the establishment of RTÉ.
There was a further complication. There were two picture standards in use in different areas of Britain, ‘405-line’ and ‘625-line’, and in Ireland some of the receiving sets used one standard and some used the other. Rather than adopt one standard and leave dealers stuck with unsaleable sets tuned to the other, it was decided to cover the entire state with broadcasts on both standards: thus doubling the cost of setting up the service. It was a classic example of the way being a neo-colonial entity wastes resources: the Saorstát got one television service for the price of two.
With RTÉ unable to offer the salaries and opportunities available in Britain, it turned out that there were only two types of person interested. Firstly there were those whose careers had not progressed as well as they thought merited by their abilities, and secondly there were those who saw in RTÉ an opportunity to re-model Irish society in some way.
Of the latter, there were two waves. The First Wave consisted mainly of persons of impoverished background who had gone to England and had there happened to get into television and made moderately successful careers for themselves. They were mostly presenters, so their faces were familiar to the public, which tended to attach importance to their utterances and opinions.
The first chairman of the RTÉ Authority, Mr. Éamon Andrews, was a notable example while the indestructible Mr Gay Byrne is a lone survivor. This group naturally enough felt that Ireland would be a better place if it were more like England, but the England that was their model was England as it had been when they left it in the late 1950’s in the calm autumn of an already fading Empire: the country of Royal Occasions, Poppy Day, the aristocracy, the Boat Race, and the rest.
The Second Wave was made up mostly of people involved in the production side of television. They tended to be better educated and many had been through the UCD history department in the era of the Dudleys and the Edwardses. They too wanted to make Ireland resemble England more closely, but their model was England as it had been in the 1960s when they left it. They looked back to the London of the ‘swinging sixties’, of Carnaby Street and the Beatles, of the ‘permissive society’ and The Pill and a porn-shop on the corner.
Thus there were two pressure groups in RTÉ from the beginning: both ambitious to use television to change Irish society, but with quite different end-products in mind. What they were agreed on was that they disliked all those features of Irish society that had not originated in Britain. The main targets were: Catholicism, the Irish language, the 1937 Constitution, the GAA and Fianna Fáil. (At the time the Republican movement had been rendered ineffectual by Stalinist meddlers and was not taken seriously.)
The RTÉ studios at Montrose became the focal point of a new and powerful force within the Saorstát. Leinster House had hoped to use television as a tool to promote its own policies, but was soon outflanked and lost control. However, since those calling the tune at Montrose were basically not interested in the internal politics of the Saorstát, clashes were rare. The British Embassy carefully monitored RTÉ though it seems their main concern was that no disparaging remarks about the British monarchy be permitted. In the foyer of Montrose itself there stood a kiosk manned by the Special Branch from which all comings and goings were monitored.
The Irish language was the first target attacked. When Éamon Andrews, first chairman of the RTÉ Authority, resigned in 1966 in order to resume his career in Britain he gave the excessive number of Irish-language programmes being broadcast as the formal reason for his leaving. This excuse was greeted with derision: there were almost no programmes in Irish on RTÉ.
Around that time a well-funded organisation called the Language Freedom Movement appeared on the scene, dedicated to the complete banishment of Irish from the airwaves, the schools and the country at large. Though its membership is believed never to have exceeded 20 people it was allowed almost unlimited broadcast time to propagate its views and it soon emerged that it had a secondary agenda: to promote loyalty to England and in particular to the British monarchy. On one occasion RTÉ broadcast an Italian film with Irish sub-titles and the LFM kicked up such a fuss that the experiment was never repeated.
Members of the First Wave tended to identify with Fine Gael, many of whose leading lights were closet monarchists, but did not move directly into politics. The attention of the Second Wave eventually lighted on the moribund Labour Party. Labour had degenerated into a neo-colonial offshoot of the British Labour Party, which was in and out of power at the time, and was in some degree comprehensible to the Second Wave people; who however for the most part had little interest in Socialism.
(The fact that the party received regular funding through a compulsory levy on trades union members may also have been an attraction.) Offers to stand as candidates for the party were eagerly accepted. It didn’t quite work out as expected: after the next Leinster House election (1969) Labour actually was down four seats.
Within Labour the leadership was soon elbowed aside by the newcomers, who diverted the party to pursuit of their own agendas. In their favourite metaphor they were going “...to drag Ireland kicking and screaming into the 20th century!”
There were two main proposals on the table. The French SECAM, which had the support of Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal and the German PAL, supported by the Dutch and the Scandinavian countries. (It was noted that the division was between the Catholic countries and the Protestant ones.) The British put up a system of their own called NTSC. It was widely accepted that SECAM was the best of the three, with PAL a close second. The British NTSC was rated a very poor third (it was an engineers’ joke that NTSC meant Never Twice the Same Colour) but the British were convinced that because they were proposing it, it would win. Of course the real objective of the conference was not to select the best system: it was more to do with patents and licensing and grubby matters like that.
In practice only the Saorstát backed the British proposal and it looked like the French would win. So, London and Dublin switched support to the German PAL, which was adopted. The British did this purely to spite the French who were blocking their entry to the Common Market.
It is said that RTÉ had already invested heavily in NTSC technology, and Irish retailers had warehouses full of NTSC sets.
The three waves had little in common with each other as to what they were for, but they were in agreement as to what they were against. In programme after programme the defects of Irish society were exposed in sombre colours and tut-tutted over and then compared with the parallel situation in England: always shown in the best possible light and discussed with suitable reverence.
The political and social eruption in the six counties took the pundits of RTÉ completely by surprise. In theory it just could not happen: under Stormont the minority community was supposed to be perfectly happy, enjoying the benefits of England’s welfare state generosity: the envy the rest of the country.
The dividing line came on 30th January 1972: Bloody Sunday. With the British Embassy in Dublin attacked and burned by an infuriated crowd, the penny finally dropped that open praise of England and defence of England’s policies were no longer practical and it was time to fall back to damage limitation.
So, RTÉ cameramen were forbidden to cross the border: in future all material from within the Six Counties was to be taken from London. Severe censorship was imposed at Montrose: nobody opposed to British policies towards Ireland could be quoted or interviewed. In contrast pro-British elements were allowed free rein.
Over-exposure on RTÉ probably did those elements more harm than good. Supercilious upper-crust English politicians and officers were unable to conceal their contempt for the Irish, while most Unionists came across as raving lunatics. The SDLP, itself largely a media invention, was allowed unlimited air-time and emerged from a virtual reality propelled by nothing but wind-power. Then people were to witness a mad-eyed Margaret Thatcher imperiously calling Saorstát politicians to heel.
In current affairs programmes, England ceased to be held up as an example. Instead some third country in which practices happened to be similar to those current in Britain (usually either Holland or Denmark) would be mentioned as a place where things were done ‘properly’.
Leinster House retained overall control of RTÉ but did not interfere much as long as hatred of Republicanism was at the top of the agenda. On one occasion the entire RTÉ Authority was dismissed by the government, because a programme judged to be pro-Republican was screened. The lowest point was reached during the rule of the Cosgrave coalition, when Conor Cruise O’Brien was in charge of broadcasting.
In the Dublin 4 environment original objectives have faded into the past. The British monarchy has long been a laughing-stock, Swinging London crumbled under Thatcherism and the Soviet Union is gone and discredited. The only thing that remains to prop up ageing egos is the feeling of still being superior to the rest of the citizenship. Increasingly attention is being turned towards the black-and-white world of the 1950’s, setting of innumerable RTÉ plays and documentares: a time when England was still powerful and confident and the Saorstát backward and supine.
Producers in RTÉ constantly trawl through the past, hunting for evidence of Irish sins, for anti-Semitism, or racism or sexual misdemeanours.
Hatred of Republicanism remains a prime motivator, even to the extent of re-transmitting British anti-Republican propaganda manufactured for home consumption often produced in total ignorance of Ireland and Irish conditions.