Ireland during the Second World War: Farewell to Plato’s Cave

By Bryce Evans

In the first book detailing the social and economic history of Ireland during the Second World War, Bryce Evans reveals the real story of the Irish emergency. Revealing just how precarious the Irish state’s economic position was at the time, the book examines the consequences of Winston Churchill’s economic war against neutral Ireland. It explores how the Irish government coped with the crisis and how ordinary Irish people reacted to emergency state control of the domestic marketplace. A hidden history of black markets, smugglers, rogues and rebels emerges, providing a fascinating slice of real life in Ireland during a crucial period in world history. As the first comparison of economic and social conditions in Ireland with those of the other European neutral states – Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal – the book will make essential reading for the informed general reader, students and academics alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526111302

Bryce Evans

Bryce Evans is Lecturer in Modern History at Liverpool Hope University

Book preview

1

Introduction: farewell to ‘Plato’s Cave’

And here Neutrality, harps, art exhibitions, reviews, libels, back-chat, high-tea, cold, no petrol, no light, no coal, no trains; Irish language, partition, propaganda, propaganda, propaganda, rumour, counter-rumour, flat Georgian facades, Guinness, double Irish, single Scotch, sherry, Censors, morals, rain home to all.

John Betjeman, 10 January 1941

The military and economic expansion of the state

At 11 am, on 3 September 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany. When the Irish government responded later that day, declaring the Emergency Powers Act, Ireland’s independence was just seventeen years old, its constitution two years old and its control of the strategic ports barely a year old. The Ireland that appeared in the letters of the poet John Betjeman, press attaché to the British delegation in Dublin during the war, was a place of charm but hardship, anxiously asserting its neutrality as Britain and Europe burned. The political and economic crisis of the Second World War not only provided the acid test of this fledgling independence. Just as significantly, the war marked the high point of centralised state intervention in Ireland.¹ The Emergency Powers Act – from which the Irish vernacular for the war originated – enabled the Fianna Fáil cabinet to pass orders without the need for specific legislation or detailed scrutiny in Dáil Éireann. In these extraordinary conditions, the government hastily formed a cabinet emergency committee, composed of Taoiseach Éamon de Valera and a handful of key ministers, streamlining decision-making and marking the transfer of power from local government to the executive.²

In taking these measures, the government’s immediate priority was security. In January 1939, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) declared itself at war with Britain and affirmed its non-recognition of the Irish state. On 19 January 1939, Neville Chamberlain’s son escaped a bomb attack in Tralee, County Kerry.³ Between then and March 1940, the IRA carried out a bombing campaign in Britain and just three months into the Emergency pulled off the audacious Magazine Fort arms raid.⁴ Moving quickly to neutralise the security threat, the government reintroduced internment and increased its surveillance of the IRA and suspected communist groups.⁵ The state also expanded its military capability. Under Frank Aiken, the new Minister for the Coordination of Defensive Measures, there was a massive growth in the armed forces. After the initial recruitment drive of September 1939, the number of men under arms in independent Ireland increased from 7,000 to 19,000.⁶ After the fall of France in June 1940, de Valera wrote in his diary: ‘Good to organise quickly. We try to avoid sacrifice’.⁷ There followed a steep rise in recruitment with 41,000 men in the army by March 1941 and a total of 180,000 in the twin auxiliary bodies the Local Security Force (LSF) and Local Defence Force (LDF) by October 1941.⁸ Domestic surveillance was assumed by the army’s intelligence wing ‘G2’, which cooperated closely with the Gardaí. An omnipresent slogan – ‘Step Together!’ – encouraged both recruitment to the Defence Forces and a wider unifying national élan.⁹

While the security of the Irish state during the Emergency has produced racy narratives complete with Nazi espionage,¹⁰ the economic and social history of the period sits rather timidly beside it. Yet the priority of economic survival was just as pressing for the nascent state as its security. The rushed exercise of state centralisation impacted hardest in the economic realm. The trade disruption that war threatened prompted the government to form a unique new arm of state: the Department of Supplies (1939–1945). Minister for Industry and Commerce Seán Lemass was appointed Minister for Supplies in September 1939, empowered to control the prices and import and export of all commodities, dictating the methods of ‘treatment, keeping, storage, movement, distribution, sale, purchase, use and consumption’ of all goods.¹¹ The state’s meticulous censorship network kept Supplies informed of profiteering and the evasion of ministerial orders¹² as this new department gradually assumed dominance over economic life.

Other government departments also undertook wide-ranging interventionist projects. The Department of Agriculture introduced an unprecedented degree of state control to Ireland’s agricultural sector, evicting unproductive farmers from their land. A huge effort to produce domestic fuel through turf took place under the Department of Local Government and Public Health and later the Department of Supplies. The Customs Service dealt with the increase in volume of items smuggled across Ireland’s frontiers. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice and the Gardaí, assisted by the LSF and LDF and a cohort of Department of Supplies Inspectors, addressed the upsurge in crime and black marketing that accompanied the introduction of rationing in Ireland.

The narrative of absence

Despite this, the social and economic history of the Emergency is the subject of a largely deficient historiography which provides little indication of the manner in which Irish people survived the shortages wrought by war. Much responsibility for this rests with one of Ireland’s great historians: F.S.L. Lyons. In his majestic Ireland Since the Famine (1973), Lyons used Plato’s allegory of the cave to claim that Emergency Ireland was ‘almost totally isolated from the rest of mankind’.¹³ Ireland as ‘Plato’s Cave’ was born: Lyons’s lapidarian, sweeping analogy supplanting the short edited collection on the Emergency published by Kevin B. Nowlan and T. Desmond Williams in 1969.¹⁴ Lyons’s synopsis of the Irish Emergency echoed accounts of neutrality elsewhere. British diplomat Clifford Norton, stationed in Berne during the conflict, compared the Swiss people to ‘passengers on an air-conditioned ocean liner’: they ‘could see through the portholes the storm and stress of the weather or the heat of the tropics’ but failed to appreciate ‘the conditions which the captain and crew were facing and by which they were hardened and influenced’.¹⁵ Lyons’s invocation of the archetypal cave was a slicker articulation of the neutral condition. The analogy heavily influenced the historiography which followed it.

A noticeable historiographical tendency subsequently took shape in works about the Emergency written in the 1970s and 1980s. These works focused on the diplomatic construction of neutrality, exploring the realpolitik that underlay de Valera’s diplomacy. Considerations of everyday life and the state’s increased domestic presence were placed to one side as the release of state papers illuminated the neutrality debate. Even the best general survey of the Emergency (published a decade after Lyons) extended ‘Plato’s Cave’ backwards to the 1920s and 1930s, describing independent Ireland as suffering a ‘postcolonial blackout’.¹⁶ In this study, Robert Fisk’s excellent In Time of War (1983), the focus remained almost unfalteringly on political elites. In other publications from this period, any thoroughgoing analysis of Irish economy and society was conspicuous by its absence.¹⁷

Outside the minutiae of the neutrality debate, Irish society was described in rather puritanical, isolationist terms. Invariably, the widespread popular support for neutrality was presented as indicative of a mute ‘bottom-up’ consensus in Irish society. The first perceptible charge out of ‘Plato’s Cave’ was signalled by Bernard Share who, in his The Emergency: Neutral Ireland, 1939–45 (1978), argued that Lyons had exaggerated the stagnation of Irish society.¹⁸ Yet in this study, as in other early histories of the period, the mass of the Irish people appeared in a narrative that was, as Clair Wills puts it, ‘all about absence – of conflict, of supplies, of social dynamism, of contact with the outside world’.¹⁹ If Share displayed recognition of the poverty of ‘the narrative of absence’, he offered little by way of alternative analysis.

By the late 1980s, the historiography of the Emergency was starting to edge away from the marble halls of high political accounts towards ‘bottom-up’ considerations of life in Ireland. But these early revisions of ‘Plato’s Cave’ tended to dilute the economic impulses driving government action and its impacts by trivialising the narrative of absence. During the Emergency, the widely quoted Myles na gCopaleen contributed some of his most biting satire in the column ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ in the Irish Times, but his references to the ‘plain people of Ireland’ sat too long as a waggish substitute for an analysis of social and economic conditions at the time. Leaning heavily on the golden age of Dublin journalism, much of Tony Gray’s The Lost Years (1988) substituted diplomatic history with semi-whimsical reminiscence.²⁰ By the late 1980s, the narrative of absence had gained acceptance at the popular level, offering a survey of social life akin in its depiction of boredom to Patrick Kavanagh’s Maguire, subject of his 1942 poem The Great Hunger, whose only antidote to the tedium of rural life was to occasionally ‘sin’ over the warm ashes of the cottage fire. The Irish people of the Emergency, when mentioned at all, resembled the inhabitants of Plato’s Cave: metaphorically, they were placed closer to Maguire’s cottage fire than ‘the fire of life’.

Deprivation and periodisation: the exceptionality of the Emergency

Terence Brown’s Ireland: A Social and Cultural History (1985) briefly considers whether Irish people were conscious of the cultural stagnation portrayed in much literature of the period. Instead of advancing the more abstract judgments of cultural history, Brown finds ‘the economic depredations of the war years all too evident’.²¹ Even for those like John Betjeman, who moved in elite literary circles, Dublin may have been gossipy fun, but it was also painfully ‘cold, no petrol, no light, no coal, no trains’.²² But by the turn of the twenty-first century and with the growth of the Celtic Tiger, recounting the extremities of deprivation in twee auld Ireland had become almost hackneyed.²³ This book does not dwell on hardship, therefore, but concentrates instead on the social impact of the war economy. In doing so, it reflects a shift in the broader historiography of war, where a focus on military histories in which ‘armies and navies come or go, commanded by greater or lesser figures deciding momentous historical issues’ has given way to a focus on productive forces.²⁴

The material challenges of wartime represent a common thread in human experience. The clear similarities between Ireland and the other neutral European states defy the sometimes stultifying narrative of Irish exceptionalism. On the other hand, there were important differences in the wartime experience of the European neutrals. Therefore, in the following pages, life in neutral Ireland is compared to that in Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal. These countries, like Ireland, were all ‘long haul’ neutrals, remaining outside the conflict for its duration.²⁵ Far from the bliss of life on a neutral ‘air-conditioned ocean liner’ or the obliviousness of Plato’s Cave, each country was subjected to economic bullying by their larger combatant neighbours. This group of five can thus be divided into two, based on the dominant sphere of economic influence they found themselves a part of. For Sweden and Switzerland, it was the continental sphere of Axis dominance. For Portugal, Spain and Ireland, it was the Atlantic sphere of Allied power.

In rejecting the idea that wartime neutrality represented a snug unconsciousness about outside pressures, this study rests on the social and economic singularity of the period. The war brought great disruption to daily routines, life experiences and long-term aspirations. This is hidden from overviews of twentieth-century Irish history, where a politico-centric historiography has tended to place the Emergency in the middle of the period of Fianna Fáil ascendancy between 1932 and 1948. After all, the party won two elections within a year of each other, in June 1943 and May 1944. In keeping with this tendency, the Emergency has been reduced to either an adjunct to the economic ‘revolution’ of the 1930s or a prelude to the victory of the Inter-party government in 1948.²⁶

This trend, witnessed in most general surveys of twentieth-century Ireland, rests on the continuity between Fianna Fáil’s protectionist economic programme of the 1930s and that of the 1940s. The political and economic ‘break’ signified by Fianna Fáil’s coming to power in 1932 has been overstated.²⁷ Even so, by 1939, the party had established itself as more interventionist in power than Cumann na nGaedheal. With the same man (Seán Lemass) at the helm, the centralised, bureaucratic and regulationist ethos of the Department of Industry and Commerce in the 1930s found its natural continuation in the Department of Supplies in the Emergency. Lemass assumed much broader powers during the early 1940s, however. This is obscured by a sixteen-year periodisation which focuses on the political transitions of 1932 and 1948 while underplaying the fact that the scope and influence of the state in everyday life was patently greatest during the Emergency. It is argued here that through the constant issuing of Emergency Powers Orders, state interventionism was accelerated to an exceptional extent. What John Horgan describes as ‘the high-water mark of Irish interventionism’ was unique to the war years.²⁸

In strictly quantitative terms, the exceptionality of the Emergency is less obvious. According to the Department of Industry and Commerce’s annually produced Statistical Abstract, the average yearly number of people on the live register of unemployment was 73,900 during the Emergency years (from 1939 to 1945).²⁹ According to data compiled by the Department of Supplies, this figure (for the years 1939 to 1944) was 96,500, reaching an average of 105,000 during the years of the worst shortages (1940 to 1942).³⁰ The exceptionality of the Emergency era is not obvious from these statistics because the yearly average on the live register between 1935 and 1938 was similarly high: 97,311 according to the Statistical Abstract.³¹ Similarly, the net passenger movement in and out of independent Ireland during the Emergency was minus 10,903.³² This figure was actually higher in the pre-war years between 1933 and 1938, when the yearly average was minus 15,498.³³ But these figures cloak the atypical mixture of sociopolitical events attached to economic privation in this six-year period.

The Economic War of the 1930s brought increasing prosperity to Ireland’s urban centres, where cheaper food and better job prospects won Fianna Fáil much working class support.³⁴ The dietary standards of Ireland’s urban population also improved during that decade.³⁵ By 1939, Ireland still lacked a significant industrial base. Since 1932, however, Fianna Fáil had expanded infrastructure and established a number of consumption goods industries behind protective tariffs. In contrast to the social conservatism of William T. Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal administrations, Fianna Fáil’s welfare expenditure in the 1930s was considerable as well. The party increased unemployment benefits (1933) and pension schemes (1935).

The Emergency marked a clear break with this trend as prices and unemployment rose and food supplies waned. Despite the strong political consensus at the time that national unity was needed,³⁶ the role of the government reflected anxieties arising from material conditions. J.J. Lee notes that the post-independence expansion of the state’s house-building programme resulted in the proportion of families living in one- or two-room dwellings falling from 50% to 25% in Dublin alone between 1926 and 1946.³⁷ Lee’s twenty-year periodisation obscures the fact that the pace that house building and slum clearance had gathered in the 1930s slowed to a virtual standstill by 1941.³⁸ The Irish economy limped rather than strode out of the Anglo-Irish Economic War in April 1938, entering the Emergency already scarred by the outflow of young people, meagre growth and industrial stagnation.³⁹

The impairments worsened after the fall of France to Nazi Germany in June 1940. Thereafter, Britain’s attitude to Irish neutrality hardened. Ireland suffered a crippling supply squeeze from late 1940. The priority of Irish self-sufficiency was underlined by the extensive sinking of merchant ships in the Battle of the Atlantic. As the supply of fertiliser, feed and fuel withered, the country reverted to burning turf and to travel by horse and cart or bicycle. The crisis year of 1941 was heralded when petrol pumps across the state ran dry at Christmas 1940 after Britain cut fuel supplies. It was compounded later that year when German bombs fell on the country, a devastating foot-and-mouth outbreak occurred and Dublin Castle was ravaged by fire. Due to the absence of raw materials, industrial production fell steeply. Meanwhile, the response of organised labour to government restrictions was resoundingly negative. James Larkin’s burning of the Trade Union Bill in June 1941 signified the worst crisis in government-trade union relations since independence.⁴⁰ For the Irish government, 1941 truly was an annus horribilis.

Irish agricultural exports, which had thrived during the First World War, were crippled in the Second by British price controls and farming communities struggled to cope with the loss of this market. In 1940, Ireland imported 74,000 tons of fertiliser, a figure below the peace time level but still sufficient to meet demand. By 1941 – the year in which the British attitude hardened – this figure had dropped to 7,000, and for the rest of the Emergency, it sat at zero. Similarly, the 1940 figure for feeding stuffs was six million tons, falling to one million in 1941 and zero thereafter.⁴¹ The reduction in feeding stuffs and the foot-and-mouth outbreak ensured that livestock numbers in Ireland fell dramatically during the war. There were three million sheep in the country in 1940; by 1943, there were half a million less.⁴²

Crime also rose. 1945’s Statistical Abstract noted that ‘criminal proceedings have shown a very serious increase generally since the outbreak of war’.⁴³ Convictions for theft in neutral Ireland trebled from 1,160 in 1939 to 3,395 by 1943.⁴⁴ In 1941, the total number of people summoned for indictable offences stood at 8,196; by 1943, it was 10,735. It was not until the end of 1944 that the first decline in the daily average number of people in custody since 1939 occurred.⁴⁵ This rise can be linked to the increase in the number of offences listed as criminal under emergency legislation. The contemporary political and religious establishment, however, inclined to blame such trends on moral failings. Surveying the situation at home, an influential vein of opinion in middle-class Ireland held that material shortages caused by the Emergency had led to the sort of moral degeneracy many associated with the British metropolis.⁴⁶

These social concerns were not without their quantitative complement. Urban unemployment figures began to rise in 1938, and by the first six months of 1939, the number of people registered as unemployed in cities and urban districts was 8% higher than in the preceding year. This figure rose steadily during the years of the worst shortages – 1941 and 1942. Rural unemployment displayed similar trends. The number of men out of work in rural Ireland stood at just over 530,000 in 1939. This figure rose to 555,601 in 1941 and in 1942 was well over the 540,000 mark.⁴⁷ Alongside the socio-economic ‘push factors’ underlying migration, the higher waged jobs of the British war economy provided a compelling ‘pull factor’. The number of travel permits to Britain and Northern Ireland issued in 1940 was just under 26,000, but rose to 35,000 in 1941 and reached 52,000 in 1942.⁴⁸ In 1941, both governments agreed that Britain would effectively control emigration by the issuing of permit cards in Ireland and work visas in Britain. This trend continued throughout the Emergency, with Irish employment exchanges effectively transformed into offshore branches of the British Ministry of Labour, which paid the travel costs of migrant workers.⁴⁹

The British war economy absorbed many young Irishmen and women at this time, but wartime employment opportunities in Britain were not so pronounced that (as Frank McCourt claimed) the working class ‘thanked God for Hitler because if he hadn’t marched all over Europe the men of Ireland would still be at home scratching their arses on the queue at the Labour Exchange’.⁵⁰ In Ireland, the real measure of wartime adversity was the fall in wages in real terms and the rise in the cost of living. In marked contrast to the 1930s, conditions for workers during the Emergency were exacerbated by the Wages Standstill Order, in effect from May 1941, which outlawed strikes for greater pay. Wartime inflation compounded these hard times. According to a conservative estimate of price inflation at the time, wages increased by one third during the Emergency, while the cost of living rose by two thirds.⁵¹ According to a less conservative estimate, these proportions were a staggering 13% and 70%, respectively.⁵² Indeed, the Irish cost of living index for all items displayed a rise from 173 in February 1938 to 298 in November 1945.⁵³ This rise was so steep that an interdepartmental committee was established in November 1943 to discuss ways to alleviate the poverty that was its result.⁵⁴ The dramatic rise in the cost of living during the Emergency is illustrated in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Cost of living in independent Ireland by quarter, 1936–1944 (Source: Irish Statistical Abstracts, 1936–1946)

Dismantling the narrative of absence

It was not until the turn of this century that histories of the Emergency underwent a fundamental shift, reflecting the social and economic exceptionality of the period outlined above. This transition was telling of the changes taking place in Irish historiography in general. There was a recognition that the ‘age of de Valera’ interpretation, an approach which often looked little further than the leader for the roots of stagnation, inhibited a fuller understanding of Ireland in the last century.⁵⁵ Similarly, histories with diverse narrative teloi were challenging the emphasis of competing nationalist and revisionist narratives on state seizure and state building.⁵⁶ In line with these developments, Emergency historiography underwent change as well. The older, familiar neutrality narrative was supplanted by what Geoff Roberts terms ‘a new narrative which better encompasses the complexities, contradictions and ambivalences of Ireland’s war’.⁵⁷

Gerard Fee’s 1996 doctoral thesis provided a harbinger of developments to come. Fee paints a detailed picture of the roles of the church, the state and common people in the management of shortages of food, fuel and clothing in Dublin’s low-income areas.⁵⁸ Contrary to the passivity found in versions of ‘Plato’s Cave’, Fee demonstrated that Irish people’s experience of absence led to greater public engagement with the government. In 2010, Peter Rigney applied a similar focus on the economic role of Ireland’s railways amidst Emergency fuel shortages.⁵⁹

The best recent survey of the Emergency was Clair Wills’s 2007 That Neutral Island. Although professedly a cultural history, Wills struck an admirable balance between economic hardship and cultural experience. Like earlier writers, Wills concluded that Fianna Fáil enjoyed support for neutrality so resounding that it did much to override still-lingering civil war animosities. The situation of Wills’s history within the ‘new wave’ of Emergency historiography was marked, though. She concluded that economic and social regulation played an important part in consolidating the power of government during the period.⁶⁰ Her focus, however, was predominately literary and did not extend to an appraisal of the broader significance of state action and popular reaction in the spheres of production and consumption.

Donal Ó Drisceoil’s Censorship in Ireland exhibited a similarly nuanced exit from ‘Plato’s Cave’, examining the political effects of Emergency censorship outside a narrative of parties, parliaments and diplomacy.⁶¹ Ireland underwent the strict construction of ‘negative propaganda’ whereby, unlike other neutral countries, the state attempted to relay the war ‘impartially’. Ó Drisceoil depicted such censorship as pursued with ‘the sort of puritanical ardour normally applied to matters sexual’. He termed the phenomenon ‘moral neutrality’. Censorship, he claimed, was constructed around the notion that Ireland, as a spiritual nation, was aloof from the destructive material conflict taking place in the outside world. A key objective for censorship officials was to define neutrality in relation to moral questions arising from the war. The overriding message was that Ireland had to keep out of the conflict, not just physically, but morally also.⁶² This propaganda characterised the Irish people as exceptional, not by virtue of Ireland’s neutrality alone, but because this neutrality was indicative of a spirituality absent in other nations.⁶³ This work extends Ó Drisceoil’s conceptualisation of Irish neutrality as ‘moral’ into the economic realm.

Moral neutrality/moral economy

In 2006, Brian Girvin’s The Emergency: Neutral Ireland, 1939–45 subjected Irish neutrality to reappraisal. In 2012, Fine Gael Justice Minister Alan Shatter went further, describing Ireland’s wartime neutrality as ‘a principle of moral bankruptcy’. Diarmaid Ferriter responded by accusing Shatter of ‘reading history backwards’.⁶⁴ The spat illustrated the continuity of the ‘moral’ status of the Emergency in public discourse. Ferriter’s rejoinder attacked the intellectual laziness of much condemnation of the ‘De Val-era’ as a longue durée of misery and stagnation. De Valera’s 1943 St Patrick’s Day speech is a case in point. The address has heavily coloured popular historical memory of both the Emergency era and the Irish political elite of the time. In the Taoiseach’s dream of Ireland, her countryside would be ‘bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sound of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, and the laughter of happy maidens’.⁶⁵ The tone of the speech has since been roundly derided. In the words of one commentator, the speech exemplified a reversion to ‘primordial’ or ‘retro-nationalism’.⁶⁶ For Tom Garvin, such rhetoric typified the yearning of de Valerite conservatives towards an Ireland ‘pious, disciplined and folksy’, ‘a real-life version of The Quiet Man’.⁶⁷

Green dreams aside, the temper of the speech addressed the unique conditions of the Emergency. The speech may belong to de Valera, but the frugal idiom attached to economic hardship was not exclusively his. The view that Ireland belonged out of a war that was ‘the fruit of statesmen’s follies and human greed’⁶⁸ was common. More significantly, a rustic tone characterised much justification of hardship during the war, particularly in combatant nations. In early 1941, with Britain’s position in the war appearing increasingly precarious, George Bernard Shaw wrote in the London Catholic Times ‘Irish ports must be occupied and defended by the British empire, the United States or both’. Prominent Catholic intellectual Alfred O’Rahilly replied by affirming Ireland’s right to stay out of ‘a competition in atrocity in which victory goes to the competitor who kills and destroys most’.⁶⁹ Similarly, rustic sentiments appeared frequently in Irish newspapers at the time. A report from the same year in the Irish Press described mourners at the funeral of three women killed by German bombs in County Carlow: ‘Men, smoking, not talking – mountainy men, whose feet are on the earth, to whom planes and bombs and calibres of guns are strange language.’⁷⁰

While challenging the staid portrayal of Emergency Ireland has been the distinguishing feature of the recent strides in Emergency historiography, the period is still marked by the absence of accounts offering a critical analysis of changed social and economic conditions in the context of the expansion of state power. The same historiographical advances have exposed Ireland’s splendid isolation during the Emergency as myth. The most striking example of shared experience between people in Ireland and those in Europe and beyond at this time was, firstly, scarcity of supplies (particularly food) and, secondly, the effect of state efforts to overcome scarcity and improve productivity. As in every other European nation, the expansion of Ireland’s Defence Forces was rapid and pronounced. But, unlike combatant nations, in Ireland government planning and regulation ensured that manpower for the armed services never assumed priority over manpower for economic production.⁷¹

Tom Garvin has amplified the suitability of the Fianna Fáil hierarchy to the hiatus from the post-agrarian and urban march of modernity that the Emergency provided, arguing that the ‘Victorian horse-and-cart economy’⁷² caused by shortages sat comfortably with the feudalism of the Catholic Church and the protectionism and clientelism of Fianna Fail.⁷³ Yet during the Emergency, the Irish government resorted to fundamentally illiberal state-driven measures in order to increase productivity. In a 1948 election address, de Valera famously conceded that on the problem of