‘People may have to die in this country and may have to die through starvation.’
Aug 4th, 2010 by Conor McCabe
Not Trevelyan, I’m afraid, but Cumann Na nGaedheal.
I came across the quote today and, well, here’s the background.
In April 1924 the government passed a Housing Act which gave grants of between €60 to €100 per house to speculative builders and to middle class households to help them construct private houses. £250,000 was set aside for the scheme. In order to help fund this subsidy, the old-age pension was cut by 10 per cent, from 10 to 9 shillings a week.
Six months later the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Patrick McGilligan, told the Dáil that the government could do little to help the unemployed.
‘There are certain limited funds at our disposal’ he said. ‘People may have to die in this country and may have to die through starvation.’ [See paragraph 562 on this page.]
This was in response to the documented accounts of starvation which were coming in from around the country, and which were highlighted in the Dáil by Labour TDs.
There were, of course, other cases.
In January 1925 Dr. Brian B. Crichton, who had a long association with the Coombe and Rotunda hospitals, told the Dublin Rotary Club that ‘a child’s chances of life in the City of Dublin are worse than were the chances of a soldier in the trenches during the Great War.’** He said that women often came to him to the clinic but ‘instead of medicine, he often gave a note to some philanthropic organisation to enable them to get food.’
The same month the Clare Health Board was informed that a man and his wife who lived near Kilmikil had died of starvation and neglect. The relieving officer had found the woman ‘lying in a corner of a filthy and verminous room, covered only by a dirty rag. The man was also in a deplorable condition, weak and hungry.’
In another case a doctor visited a house in ‘New Hall, near Ennis, and found two old people living in a terrible condition of filth. They had been eating portions of the carcase of a calf, which was lying in the kitchen.’
In Longford two married women were charged with stealing potatoes from the mental asylum garden. ‘I took the potatoes for my children, who are starving at home’ said one of the women. The judge said that from his knowledge no-one need starve in Longford. When the defendants’ lawyer asked the judge had he read the report in the local newspapers about cases of starvation, the judge replied ‘yes: and I saw it contradicted.’
From 1924 to 1927 the income tax rate was cut by 40 per cent. In March 1927 the report of the death by starvation of the family of Daniel Sullivan in Cork was read out in the Dáil.
Mr. T.J. DONOVAN: I rise to bring to the notice of the House a terrible tragedy that has occurred in the extreme end of my constituency of West Cork and that resulted in the almost complete annihilation of a family through starvation. I refer to the family of Daniel Sullivan, of Adrigole.
A few years ago this family was living in comparatively good circumstances. At that time the British fleet was in Castletownbere Harbour, and these people were able to get a ready market for their butter, eggs and fowl, and were able to live in fairly good circumstances.
The information I have got is that on last Saturday morning a neighbour, seeing nobody around this house, visited it and found the mother of the family dead and the father and five children in a hopelessly weak condition, with no beds except hay, no bed-clothes and no food. The only food in the house was a few pounds of yellow meal and a half loaf of bread.
I do not think we have had such a calamitous state of affairs since ‘47. This neighbour immediately reported the matter to the medical officer of health and the Civic Guard and the family were removed as soon as possible to Castletownbere hospital.
On Tuesday two of them died, a boy of seventeen years of age and a girl of four. On Wednesday the father died without regaining his mental faculties which he lost on Monday.
Just before the Christmas adjournment Deputy Murphy made an eloquent and piteous appeal to the Minister for Local Government to enable home assistance to be given to these families. This is not an isolated case. There are seven, eight, ten or perhaps twenty in the same locality who are practically in the same circumstances, and because they hold small plots of land they have been deprived of home assistance. These people were well-off some years ago, but through false pride they prefer death to begging, borrowing or stealing.
I think that there must be something very much wrong with the Poor Law system when people such as these are deprived of home help. I was out there a month or two ago. There is room for the Land Commission to do a great deal in that district. They have roads which you could not call boreens; in fact they have no roads, and there is certainly room for the Land Commission to spend some money in that district.
I know that the Land Commission are doing a little, but I fear that they have got into the hands of some individuals who are interested in some particular district and that the works that are being carried on there have not tapped the right sources. I appeal to the Minister for Local Government to look into this matter, and I think it is his duty to see that the minutest inquiry is conducted to find out what was the cause of this terrible tragedy. I hope that there will be no recurrence of it and that immediate action will be taken to see that there will be no further development of this kind.
I may add that when I saw the Press report I thought it might be exaggerated and I wired to the clergyman there, Father Godly, to know if the report was true. His reply was: “Absolutely true. Father just dead also.” I hope I will get a definite pronouncement from the Minister that this state of affairs will not be allowed to continue in this locality.
Just to reiterate, Cumann Na nGaedheal were giving grants of up to £100 to middle-class households to enable them to build their own homes, and had cut the old-age pension to help fund it. They then went ahead and cut the income tax rate by 40 per cent at a time when income tax was only paid by around 60,000 people with middle to high incomes.
During their time in office, the TDs of Cumann Na nGaedheal used government to protect their own class interests. Everyone else could, quite literally, starve.
** This was not the hyperpole it seems. The death-rate among childen under one year in the city was 116 per 1,000, or 11.6 per cent. With regard to children born to mothers covered by the Coombe clinic, Dr. Crichton found the death-rate to be around 193 per 1,000, or 19.3 per cent. The death rate in the trenches in World War One was around 10 per cent.
Batt O’Keefe goes around the country announcing job starts even as his Government pursues policies which cut them. No such illogic from our Patrick McGilligan. Not only did he contemplate mass starvation in the ditches up and down the country, he also stated that it was not the job of Government to create jobs. And, sure enough, our Patrick didn’t lift a finger. And he was Minister for Industry and job creation. Now that’s conviction politics.
Denounce Cumann Na nGaedheal all you want. But these were hard men for hard times - practicing economic tough-love without the love. Free education? Bolshevism. Free medical care? Free-masonry. Industrial planning? Bolshevism and Free-masonry squared. These men called a spade a spade and then bludgeoned everyone else with it.
But what I’ll mostly miss is the laughter.
There are undoubtedly people hungry in Ireland today, some of them middle class. People are waiting months for benefits and in the case of self employed individuals are often refused.
There are also returned emigrants being refused all benefits.
At the same time, obscene salaries are being paid out in NAMA.
I’ll be linking this blog for discussion at Political World.
[…] Ag labhairt d? sa D?il i 1924 faoi m?id daoine a bh? ag f?il bh?is ? ocras d?irt an tAire Tr?d?la ? Chumann na nGael: "There are certain limited funds at our disposal. People may have to die in this country and may have to die through starvation" Bu?ochas le Tuairim Baile ?tha Cliath, tuilleadh faoin aicmeachas i gceist agus neamhionannas "na Poblachta" le l?amh th?os: Dublin Opinion Blog Archive ‘People may have to die in this country and may have to die throug… […]
I put Regan’s ‘The Irish Counter-Revolution’ to one side last year, after getting half-way through it. This will motivate me to continue with it.
My own opinion is that the first Cumann Na nGaedheal regime basically set the tenor for State/Citizen interactions for ‘independen’ Ireland; and that was one of unremitting harshness towards anyone who wasn’t comfortably inside the middle-classes, coupled with all sorts of assistance to the those same middle classes. That harshness and mean-spiritedness was kept alive the likes of Sean McEntee in 40’s, and other prominent Fianna Failers who opposed the Children’s Allowance. Furthermore, the spirit of McGilligan lives in current social welfare and health cuts, mass unemployment, mass emigration AND massive state subsidies for private pensions. Bruton, Creighton and Varadkar seem determined to keep McGilligan’s spirit alive. Not a pleasant thought.
Great post, Conor.
What a proud heritage Fine Gael have - CnaG and the Blueshirts.
thanks Mark. Wait till the book comes out , you haven’t read the half of it yet.
Regan’s book is well worth a read even if one may disagree with some of the points he departs from. But in light of what Conor reveals above re the subsidy I think you’re spot on CMK. This was the foundation stone of how the Irish state was ‘meant’ to operate, minimal provision for those who most needed it, half-hidden or subtle provisions for those who needed it somewhat less. And of course a strong echo or restatement of that is evident in Sean Fitzpatricks ‘thoughts’ on welfare etc a few months after the first funding tranche of state monies to Anglo-Irish and some months before the true extent of his own dealings became evident.
I’m starting to come to the conclusion that although the human race is quite creative, it is not especially original - or rather, originality comes in bursts, after which the way people think stays the same for a long time. We are creative within those parameters, but that’s really it. spacecraft are still fancy rockets and all that. Looking back at Ireland in the 1920s it’s striking how many of the assumptions about human nature which were held then are still held today - especially the primacy of free trade and the markets, and how here welfare means poverty, whereas in Europe, even today, Welfare is still a compound noun, with -state after it.
I suppose what I’m saying is that it has been a long, long time since we had an original thought in Ireland. Mainly, we’ve just been creative with the old ones.
Richard Bruton seems to have forgotten this sort of thinking. Yeah right.
http://richardbruton.ie/2010/08/04/building-a-republic-that-reflects-the-ideals-and-ambitions-of-its-founders-2/
WbS, that tendency that you’ve discussed is ‘hardwired’ into the Irish state, the media, the governing classes and the civil service. Will it ever fade or will some, more drastic, events be necessary to displace it with a more humane dispensation? We’ll get some indication of whether it can be moved electorally after the next election if, as I believe they will, Labour support FG’s austerity measures in exchange for some nice liberal legislative trinkets.
Conor, if this a taster for the book, I’m looking forward to it.
Thanks CMK. It is indeed part of a book, about NAMA would you believe, but one which looks at NAMA from a historical perspective. There are five chapters to it:
1. Housing
2. Cattle, Agriculture, and the Irish economy
3. Foreign Direct Investment
4. Banks and Domestic Industry
5. Class
This week I’m working on the chapter on cattle, which is how I came to be writing about the quote above.
It’s due to be in by the end of September, so as long as I meet the deadlines it should be out some time next year.
My grandmother still brings this up to defend her last-ditch Fianna Fail-ery. She will be 90 in September, the old dear, so she ought not to remember it, but guess it was a trope of FF rhetoric in her formative years.
Fianna Fáil did more for the urban and rural working class up to the 1960s than Labour ever did, if only because any time Labour was in power, it was in power with Fine Gael, who have been consistently right-wing since the formation of the state.
From the 1960s onwards, Fianna Fail just screws everyone below them and their friends, but that legacy of jobs and housing ran deep, as the experience of your grandmother shows, and did until very recently.
Maybe if Labour had merged with FF in the late ’20s, it would have become a genuinely social democratic party? Or perhaps not.
Quick question: did the housing subsidy scheme referred to above have the goal of creating a class of people ‘with a stake in the country’ who could provide a new social base for the new Free State regime?
Speaking of which, it’s a commonplace to speak of ‘the Stormont regime’ when referring to the North, yet we never speak of ‘the Leinster House regime’ in relation to down here. Maybe we should.
You pretty much nailed it there, Dr. X. Cumann Na nGaedheal were quite explicit that they were promoting home ownership as a way of ‘civilising’ the population. I’ve found some great quotes about how owning a home turns a man away from Communism. The Catholic Church even wanted fences with spikes around the houses in the Marino Scheme of the 1920s as it would increase the idea that a man was protecting his property.
One of the things about the history of the Irish working class in the 26 counties is the very real split in the Labour movement between Labour and Fianna Fail. It’s hard to say whether a formal merger would have created a social democratic political system, but it certainly would have given it a fighting chance.
It’s for another day and another post but the ideological heartbeat of the southern working class was (and probably still is) Republicanism. Fianna Fáil, and James Connolly, understood this, and Fianna Fail gain power in 1932 with the type of combination which historians like Richard English claim is impossible - that is, labour/left-republicanism. One could argue that the history of the Irish Labour Party is an example of what happens to a trade union party in Ireland which rejects republicanism - it ends up sucking blueshirt c**k.
mind you, the Irish Labour Party is on the verge of rejecting trade unionism so maybe it should just merge with FG and be done with it.
I think there is an element of dishonesty in the article above - the Dáil debates show clearly that McGilligan was absolutely not in favour of people starving. Perhaps one should look at the question of why the budget situation was so difficult in 1924 - the answer is that there was a large military expenditure left over from defending democracy against dissident republicans in the civil war. Truly, de Valera was the Seánie Fitzpatrick of 1924 and the IRA were his Anglo-Irish bank.
The Marino scheme is mentioned in passing above - hardly an example of the Free State subsidisng middle-class housing. Nor should the Shannon Scheme be forgotten, the most successful development project in the history of the state.
“The Marino scheme is mentioned in passing above - hardly an example of the Free State subsidisng middle-class housing.”
Really? Are you sure about that? Tell me what you know about the Marino scheme. what was the criteria for selection?
how much did one have to have saved to qualify? and where did this income criteria fall within the working class wage scale of 1924?
how much did the houses cost, and where did this cost fall in relation to the working class wage scale of 1924?
you tell me about the Marino scheme and where it fell in relation to the wage levels of the Dublin working classes.
go for it. Show me how much you know about the Marino scheme.
Conor,
you can find the wage rates and house costs from the Dáil debate here:-
http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0018/D.0018.192702150034.html
Typical. I ask for analysis and I get a google search. The intellectuals of politics.ie just keep on slouching towards Bethlehem, don’t they?
CDG, I don’t need to find them, I already know them, and I know how they fit in with the wage rates in Dublin at the time.
what I find funny is the idea that you have that Marino “was hardly an example of the Free State subsidising middle class housing” - which contradicts the work of people like Dr. Ruth McManus of DCU and Professor Murray Fraser of the University of Westminster, who have written extensively on the issue of Irish working class and middle class housing.
Seems that you’re good at googling, why don’t you google their names and see what you’re up against when you claim that Marino “was hardly an example of the Free State subsidising middle class housing”?
you could try reading their books as well. Just a thought.
To quote Ruth McManus “The first large working-class estates on the edges of Irish cities were built by local authorities in the 1920s as at Dublin’s Marino, Drumcondra and Cabra”.
The above was from ‘Blue Collars, “Red Forts” and Green Fields: Working Class Housing in Ireland in the Twentieth Century’.
Marino may only have been affordable by the most well paid of the working-class but that is not the issue here.
I await your book with interest.
No you don’t, because if you’ve read Ruth McManus’ work and if you think that quote is representative of what she has to say about housing in Dublin in the 1920s, and the attitude of Cumann Na nGaedheal to working class housing in the 1920s, then I doubt you have absolutely any interest of reading anything written by me which doesn’t already conform to your Fine Gael view of the world.
Because, if you think Ruth McManus believes that ‘Marino may only have been affordable by the most well paid of the working-class but that is not the issue here’ when the issue we are talking about is Cumann Na nGaedheal and how it approached the working class in the 1920s, then you’re able to read your view-point into anything.
“Marino may only have been affordable by the most well paid of the working-class but that is not the issue here.”
Yeah. That’s what Red Forts says alright. That’s the kernel there. A clear and concise reading of that article.
Fuck me. “Marino may only have been affordable by the most well paid of the working-class but that is not the issue here.”
I dunno. I despair for our youth. I ask for an alternative analysis - one that counters mine - and I get a weblink and a cut and paste from a PDF I put up on the web in the first place. The motorskills of undergrads these days. At least you haven’t given us wikipedia. yet.
In point 16 above I simply pointed out that Marino was “hardly an example of subsidised middle-class housing”, a remark to which you seem to have taken great offence. Now, maybe you think it was subsidised middle-class housing, though McManus obviously doesn’t since she refers to it as “working-class”. I get the impression you will not be satisfied until we are all living in “workers’ flats in fields of soyabeans” or, in your preferred dialect, “fucking workers’ flats in fields of fucking soyabeans”.
I am not saying Cumann na nGaedhael were perfect and cutting the pension was perhaps excessive (I am sure you have done your research on the effects of the cut) and no doubt you can link Ernest Blythe’s cut to Michael Noonan’s attempt to limit the costs to the state of the Hepatitis C debacle. But, how much better would we be if the country had been run by people like Blythe and Noonan for the last 15 years?
You’re still not engaging with the issues, and you certainly haven’t a clue as to what McManus is talking about with relation to housing policy in Ireland in the 1920s - I mean, the fact that McManus uses the word ‘working class’ is enough for you, no understanding whatsoever as to what she means by that term, how she sometimes uses it in the plural (and there are reasons for that as well, but you certainly don’t know them) and how she uses those terms in relation to local authority housing policy in the 1920s.
And now, instead of engaging with where I was being ‘dishonest’ in your view, you’re throwing in strawmen about Noonan and Hepatitis C.
Fuck me CDG. Here. Let me do you a favour.
Have a read of Mary E. Daly’s ‘Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, 1922-1939′. It’s not on the web so you can’t google it, so you’re going to have to go off and find it in a library and read it.
In it, Daly makes the argument - and quite a strong one it is too - that despite all of Cumann Na nGaedheal’s faults, they were pragmatists - and for her that’s the bottom line.
Joe Lee, in his book, Ireland 1912-1985, is a lot more critical of Cumann Na nGaedheal, yet he also falls on the side of ‘well they were pragmatists’.
Now, maybe you’ll find it easier to engage with scholarly work which already reflects your world-view, I don’t know, but at least if you’ve read them, you’ll have an actual analysis based on a reading of the facts, instead of this dribble about Noonan and hepatitis, and how Marino was “hardly an examploe of subsidised middle-class housing”, and what you think I may or may not think. Oh, and soyabeans for some reason. (flats and soyabeans? WTF?)
“maybe you think it was subsidised middle-class housing, though McManus obviously doesn’t since she refers to it as “working-class”.”
Ugh! you haven’t even read McManus’ article. I dunno.
Yeah, listen, there’s some really good ammo in Daly AND Lee. Their summation of Cumann Na nGaedheal’s tenure in office is a lot closer to where you are coming from, and, unlike you, they’ve done the work to argue the case they are making.
forget about McManus. The fact that she uses the phrase “working-class” is obviously causing your brain to short-circuit. Go with Lee and Daly instead. you’ll like them because you already agree with them.
Any chance you can do that, CDG? Any chance you can raise your game and actually engage with the reality of Ireland in the 1920s based on a critical analysis of the facts?