The Same Age as the State by Maire Cruise O’Brien

This is a moving story of an extended family, as much as it is the story of the life of one remarkable woman.  Maire Cruise O’Brien devotes a great part of the book bringing to life the series of characters that made up the families of her parents – the Brownes and the McEntee’s.

Her father, Sean McEntee, one of the ablest members of the first Fianna Fail Government, emerges as a man whose principles led him strongly to oppose the pro-Nazi tendencies that were prevalent in Republican circles during the Second World War. In my view, he is unfairly overshadowed in histories of the period by Sean Lemass.

Sean McEntee’s father, on the other hand, was a rake – a gambler, of whom his wife feared that, if he was killed during the Troubles, he might meet his Maker with the smell of drink on his breath!

The most vivid description of all is of Maire’s maternal uncle, Fr. Paddy Browne. A Irish language revivalist, who became her second father, and with whom she stayed in the Dunquin Gaeltacht for long periods, spending much of the school year there. She relives his participation in cultural controversies of the 1940’s and recreates the harsh life of the west Kerry Gaeltacht of the time. There is a contrast between the convivial story-telling around her uncle’s fireside and a society where an unwed girl who got pregnant could disappear overnight without trace, and where a woman returned from America to a made-match, whose first baby, said to be black, was never seen again after the night of its birth.

Her mother, Margaret Browne, was one of the key figures in Michael Collins’ support network for the  “Twelve Apostles”, the gunmen who carried out Collins’ execution orders. But she differed so radically with Collins that, even before the Treaty was debated in the Dail, she cut him dead in the street.

The most warmhearted character to emerge in the whole book is her uncle Maurice, the Parish Priest of Baltinglass, who wrote “The Big Sycamore”, a fictionalized account of the Browne family.

Maire Cruise O’Brien is painfully honest about her own emotional life. She describes her love affairs and infatuations with great candour. She also gives an account of a nervous breakdown she suffered in her twenties, triggered by an unjust questioning of her thoroughness as an academic.

She evokes the atmosphere of pre-war Nazi Germany, which she visited as a schoolgirl on holiday. She also brings to life the hunger and excitement of post-War Paris, where she was a student.

Later, as a junior Irish diplomat in Franco’s Spain, she had the experience of being physically assaulted by a senior Spanish official because of the strength of her protests about the treatment of Irish potato exports to Spain.

Her love for her husband, Conor, is eloquently expressed throughout this book. She defends his decision to declare himself to be a Unionist as a “signal service to both communities on this island”. He showed himself to be, not so much a friend of the Union, as a friend of the Unionist people of Northern Ireland. Out of a sense of justice, he took the path that may prove to be the only one that will actually be to unity on this island, if that is what people really want.

The most moving passages in this book are, interestingly, descriptions of the deaths of people she loved. She sat through his last night on earth with her Uncle Paddy despite being told by the nurse that “you don’t want to hear the dreadful things these old priests say when they are dying”. The deaths of her mother and father are described equally movingly and she takes mischievous delight in the discomfiture of Charlie Haughey when he discovered that Jack Lynch, then in Fianna Fail disgrace, emerged unexpectedly to deliver Sean McEntee’s funeral oration.

This is a warm-hearted story, that carries the reader along with all the emotional pull of a good novel!

The Truth About Markets – Their genius, their limits, their follies by John Kay

John Kay is an academic economist of high quality but he writes for the general reader. He introduces economic theory through stories drawn from daily life. He draws on psychology, biology, and mathematics to explain economic behaviour. He does not advance one great economic theory that will be true for all time. As he sees it, the science of economics will always be a work in progress. The end of history will never arrive.  

Why do some countries get rich while others stay poor ? Now that communism has failed, should the state stay out of business altogether and allow competitive markets to allocate all resources between people ?  These are the sorts of questions he tackles.

The big economic problem for communism, according to John Kay, was not its lack of incentives. After all, the threat of being sent to the Gulag was a pretty powerful incentive. The problem of communism was the lack of reliable information about supply and demand for what one was producing. Centralised planning, relying on arbitrarily chosen and always out-of-date statistics, was and is ill-informed on the needs of complicated consumer markets. Free markets, which mobilize the constantly updated knowledge of millions of anonymous buyers and sellers, are usually a better guide for economic decisions.

Sometimes politically regulated markets get out of their depth too. The electricity blackouts in California happened because there was no voting system which could prevent the Californian electorate from simultaneously demanding low electricity prices, no new generating plants, and ever increasing amounts of electricity.

This is because markets will only work for things whose value you can measure in money, and it is difficult to agree the money value of not having  a power station at the end of your back garden! It is even  more difficult to put a current money cost on the pollution to be created by a new power generating station that may cause the summer temperature to rise in twenty years time, on the other side of the world.

This is where you cross the boundary between the science of economics to the art of political economy.

Free markets will only work at all if there is a state in existence that will enforce contracts, keep the peace, and ensure that some people do not become so rich or so powerful that the resulting social tensions or monopolies overwhelm the system.

This is how some countries went wrong. Argentina, one of the richest countries in the world a hundred years ago, has gone backwards because its property and political systems lacked a sense of legitimacy based on fairness. Newly Capitalist Russia is heading in the same direction because its distribution of wealth, based on faulty privatisations, lacks legitimacy and fairness.

John Kay also explores the recent dilemmas of American capitalism, where foolish stock option incentives for Chief Executives encouraged them to exaggerate paper earnings, and thus contributed to the recent stock market crash.

But then the trouble with trying to regulate all these problems by democratically ordained rules is that in a democratic system the transaction costs - the costs and delays in getting a decision or indeed of reversing a mistaken one - can be very high. Much higher than the costs and delays of buying and selling things in a free market !

As we try to get our present economic downturn into proportion, this is a very timely book.

A Few Bloody Noses – The American War of Independence by Robert Harvey

This is a very readable history written by a politician turned journalist, now a full-time historian.  Robert Harvey who lives in North Wales, was a Conservative MP in the 1980's and has authored historical works on the Latin American Revolution of the early nineteenth century, and the Portugese revolution of the mid-twentieth.

His family antecedents give him some sympathy with the losing British side in the American War of Independence. 

He is devastating in his criticism of the treatment of Native Americans by the American revolutionaries during the war.  One of their complaints against the British had concerned restrictions on expansion into Native lands to the west of the Appalachians.  Far from inhabiting wild prairies, the Native Americans there were settled and efficient farmers.    During the war one American Colonel ordered his troops to "cut up every Indian cornfield and burn every Indian town".  General George Clark, said that "to exceed them in barbarity, was and is, the only way to make war on Indians and gain a name among them".  The revolutionary state of Pennsylvania offered $1,000 for every Indian scalp, and some militiamen even dug up graves to scalp corpses.

Restrictions on westward expansion was not, however, the main reason for the revolution.

Britain's success in taking Canada from the French in 1760 was the key event.  It had been a financially expensive victory and led to British demands that Americans, un-represented at Westminster, nonetheless pay taxes for Imperial defence.  But, once the French threat to their north had been removed, the Americans saw little corresponding need for British military protection, and certainly did not want to have to pay for it.

The military tactics of the war are really well described by Robert Harvey, and each campaign is illuminated by good and simple maps.

Britain won most of the set piece battles.  Even when it had lost at Yorktown and was ready  to concede American independence, Britain still had two major armies in North America. It gave up because it was facing bankruptcy, and knew that, while it could command strongpoints, it could neither win over nor subdue the American countryside.

British public opinion had also turned against the war.  Whereas the Americans had finite war aims, the British could see no end to their endeavours.

The Transformation of Ireland 1900 - 2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

This is one of the most important books to be published this year. It is a comprehensive history, in one volume, of 20th-century Ireland. It is a history of what people felt, as well as of what happened to them. It draws together narrative political history alongside economics, women’s studies, culture and the arts.

It avoids becoming boringly analytic and does not spend too long on any topic.

It assesses different characters and movements in Irish history fairly. Diarmaid Ferriter does not fall into the fashionable trap of blaming everything on the Catholic Church, but rather accompanies his just criticisms with credit for the enormous work that the Church did in highlighting social problems, combating alcoholism, and providing care for the excluded.

In dealing with the War of Independence, Ferriter draws on official interviews with participants which had been withheld from public view until 2003 because they might have proved too controversial.

The death rate in Cork from political violence in the 1917-1923 period was one per 530 people, which exceeded the one per 1,200 death rate in Northern Ireland during the worst of the Troubles. Most of those killed by the IRA in Cork did “not die in armed combat but as a result of shootings of unarmed people”. The Kilmichael ambush involved the “deliberate killing of already surrendered soldiers”. In May 1922 “10 Protestants were shot dead in Cork in a single night”. These issues were “glossed over in the bluster of post-revolution memoirs”, he says.

Just as in 1995, it was Lloyd George’s decision to drop a precondition of arms being surrendered prior to the start of negotiation that led to the Truce and the end of the war.

One of the advantages of the 1921 Treaty, over what had already been won in Home Rule, was that the new State had the right to impose tariffs. But when these tariffs came to be imposed along the newly created border, they actually deepened partition. There was an unresolved tension between the objectives of unity and of separation from Britain.

One of the enduring themes of Irish 20th-century history was emigration. The £13m of emigrants’ remittances in 1961 almost equalled the amount the State paid in that year for primary and secondary education!

Paddy Lynch, an adviser to the first inter-party government, said that “emigration allowed those at home to maintain their standard of living”. This, of course, had been true in the 19th century too. Despite wholesale emigration, Irish incomes rose from 40% of the British level in 1840 to 60% by 1913, passing out countries like Finland, Italy and Portugal.

Apart from emigration, another strategy for dealing with surplus population seems to have been institutionalisation. The number of children committed to industrial schools in Ireland far exceeded the British level, and seven out of every 1,000 Irish people were in mental hospitals in 1963.

The Ireland of 1900 was a very different place from that of 2000. In 1900 there were only 322 people in prison, but there were 27,000 soldiers stationed here. In contrast, in 2000, there were almost 3,000 in prison in the Republic but only 9,747 soldiers.

Ireland did not grow economically during the first 50 years of independence because economic development was not really a priority. The priorities were to “revive the speaking of Irish, revive traditional music, and keep people on the farms”. Canon Hayes said that “rural Ireland is real Ireland, and rural Ireland is true to Christ”. De Valera went along with this anti-materialist reaction against the making of money, something he identified with an alien British and urban culture. There was a zero sum and static approach to economics, as shown in efforts to ration work by barring married women from government jobs and by rationing land by sub-dividing farms.

All changed during the 1970-2000 period. Material progress became the predominant value. There was a six-fold increase in higher education. Whereas only 2% of school-leavers went on to third level in 1950, almost 50% do today.

But there has been a price – a 41% increase in alcohol consumption in the last 10 years and a cultural superficiality evidenced by the increased media emphasis on lifestyle, celebrity and the journalist as a personality. Talk about celebrities has replaced gossip at the village pump!

Some issues remain too hot to handle. Back in 1968, the FitzGerald report recommended a rationalisation of our hospital services to provide top-class facilities. Almost 40 years later, the Government has yet to act on the more modest Hanley proposals. Localism still rules.

Certain professions that held a dominant position in the 1950s still hold it today. The late Senator Micheál Hayes said, of the Mother and Child controversy of the 1950s, that the Catholic bishops were really pulled along by the doctors who opposed Noel Browne’s proposals because they did not want “officials near their tax returns”!

Crime Lords by Paul Williams

This book names the names, and describes the deeds, of Irish gangsterdom. From ‘The General’ to ‘The Viper’, and from ‘Cotton Eye’ to the INLA, the gruesome beatings and agonizing deaths are set out in lurid detail.

A Garda report to Europol has recently said that there are 17 major organized crime gangs operating here. These gangs operate like businesses, seeking to protect and expand their markets, to collect their debts and to reinvest their profits. Many of the gang managers live in The Netherlands or in Spain, but their writ still runs on the streets of Dublin.

Amsterdam, it is claimed by this book, is the hub of organized crime in Western Europe. The Dutch police receive more requests for assistance in international criminal investigations than any other police force in the world. It is hardly coincidental that The Netherlands also has one of the most liberal drug consumption regimes in Europe.

Organised crime is a Europe-wide phenomenon, and it uses modern global communications to the full. It is surprising that the present Minister for Justice does not want to see the European Union given the right to take majority decisions on anti-crime measures, and that he wants all decisions taken by unanimity among all 25 E.U. countries.

Paul Williams’ book illustrates how the power of the gangs is used capriciously and for purposes that go beyond their ‘core business’. One eighteen year old, Paul Dempsey, was targetted because he had the nerve to got out with the younger sister of one of the “Westies”. Even minor road accidents involving gang members can escalate into bloody vendettas.

Witnesses withdrawing statements, and thereby aborting prosecutions, is not something new. The willingness of jurors to sit in cases involving major crime figures shows a strong and courageous public spirit. Jury trials can only be dispensed with, and gangland cases sent to the non-Jury Special Criminal Court, if the ‘ordinary courts are inadequate for the administration of criminal justice’. But this cannot be done, just because witnesses are willing to renege on their evidence.

Paul Williams’ book shows that the potential for intimidation of witnesses is enormous. And if witnesses can be intimidated, so too can jurors. Even Gardai and Prison Officres have been intimidated in their homes, so jurors must be vulnerable too.

Williams’ book tells a series of stories. It does not advocate any new policies or take on wider issues. It does not analyse the underlying causes of criminal behaviour – the disturbed families or the childhood abuse. Nor does it make comparisons between Ireland and other countries. 

The amount of gratuitous torture associated with Irish gangland killings deserves thought. The victims are going to die anyway. One would have thought that death alone would be a sufficient deterrent to whatever the killers want to discourage. But that does not seem to be enough for modern Irish gangs. Prolonged suffering prior to death is apparently needed too.

It is a pity that Paul Williams, a qualified criminologist as well as a courageous journalist, did not take the time to add a reflective chapter on wider questions like these. 

International Trade: Policy and Practice by MacDonnell and MacEvoy.

My reactions on reading this book were twofold. I was struck first of all, by the importance of international trade in the economic development of the human race, and secondly by the complexity of the mechanisms which underpin that development. One might not go all the way with the authors who argue that the Columbian adventure, which started with the quest for a new route to the spice producing lands to the East, was purely trade driven or that the industrial revolution in England was solely attributable to a trade embargo on imported cotton fabrics. Nevertheless there is no gainsaying the importance of trade in man’s history and its effect on a small economy like Ireland’s. Neither must we overlook the motive force of much of this trade, foreign direct investment.

The complexity arises from the fact that exporting involves moving from one jurisdiction – the domestic market - where the rules are familiar, to the relatively uncharted waters of export markets with their multiplicity of languages, business cultures, jurisprudence, religion, economic, social and political systems. This is where this book is at its most useful, taking the reader through the complex issues involved, setting out a modus operandi in order to minimise risks and comply with the requirements of the chosen market.

One of the most important issues for the exporter is currency value. Fluctuations in the exchange rate have three times the impact of a change in any of the major cost components – labour, raw materials, profits and overheads. It may come as a surprise to the reader to learn that, three years after the introduction of the euro, some sixty per cent of Ireland’s exports are priced and delivered in currencies other than the euro. When one considers that the $US has depreciated by 35% against the euro in less than two years, the importance of exchange risk management becomes obvious. The book helpfully outlines internal and external hedging mechanisms, which can be used.

I was also struck by some interesting statements contained in the chapter on the importance of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The Coca Cola brand was valued at US $68.9 billion in 2001, Microsoft at $65.1 billion and IBM $52.7 billion. While copyright issues may appear to be primarily matters of the modern age, with the USA complaining to China about software infringements, the authors quote a famous Irish case involving the unauthorised copying of St. Fintan’s bible by St. Colmcille. This gave rise to the High King’s judgement enshrining the dictum, “ to every cow its calf, to every book its copy”. Trade secrets or undisclosed information can now be protected as part of every company’s intellectual property. Apart from being a company asset, IPR can be a source of income by selling on or licensing its use to others. It was reported that Eli Lilly paid Sepracor $90 million for the rights to an improved version of Prozac; perhaps not unreasonable when measured against Prozac annual sales of over $3 billion.

There is an interesting chapter on trade policy, which reviews international efforts in recent times to liberalise trade and to provide a set of rules within the multilateral framework of the World Trade Organisation. The authors point out that there are always threats to free trade from national or regional interests. The disruptive element behind the Seattle debacle may not have been the dispossessed of the Southern hemisphere but rather US trade union interests who saw increasing free trade as a threat to their members’ interests. President Bush’s imposition of a 30% tariff on steel imports is clear evidence of this threat. In fact US trade policy must be causing sleepless nights to those who champion the liberal trade agenda, if we consider the recent US quotas imposed on textile products from China as well as the likelihood of protectionist retaliation by Europe, Japan and China, all coming on top of the breakdown of the Cancun talks.

It is worth digressing to note that these restrictions on imports are also causing serious damage to the US economy as evidenced by numerous complaints from America’s industrial steel users and consumers of imported textiles. It is sometimes forgotten that the classical economists viewed international trade as a means of importing products, which could be made more competitively elsewhere. The purpose of exports is to pay for these imports. The entire process allows a more efficient allocation of resources.

Of course the USA is running a current account deficit of over $500 billion, which may be influencing its foreign trade agenda. This is financed by East Asian bondholders who provide the capital inflow to keep American interest rates low, and whose exporters are supplying the USA with cheap imports. Asian exporters are in effect lending the Americans the money to pay for these imports. The USA lectures China meanwhile on its undervalued currency while Europe’s exporters are being squeezed out by the rising euro.

It may be considered that Ireland’s position within the European Union provides a welcome shelter against any disruptions, which would result from a trade war. We should not take too much comfort because, apart from any indirect impact, the share of our merchandise trade with countries outside the European Union had grown from 26% in 1973 to 40% of a much larger total by 2001.

International trade can flourish only in times of peace. Although we think of globalisation as a twentieth century phenomenon, the first phase commenced in the year 1870, when the Prussians finally emerged as victors within Europe, putting an end to centuries of war. The ensuing half-century of peace saw world trade double as a percentage of world production, huge British investment in infrastructure in the New World and a massive movement of economic migrants from Europe to America, North and South, Australia and New Zealand. This came to an end with the outbreak of World War I.

It was not until the end of World War II that new institutions with an economic remit played a role in the second wave of globalisation and the world recovered the impetus lost through wars and economic depression. Peter Sutherland’s Tacitus lecture, which is included as an appendix, quotes Cordell Hunt, later to become the US Secretary of State, advising Woodrow Wilson, “If goods do not pass frontiers, armies will”.

The significant feature of the third phase, which dates from the 1980s, has been the rise of the multinational corporation and the entry of suppliers in the developing world into the international supply chain. Manufactures and services, rather than the traditional minerals and raw materials, now dominate developing country exports.

Given the background of the authors, their advocacy of free trade is unsurprising. While recognising that the world is still far from perfect, they cite a recent World Bank report, which concludes that poor countries with some 3 billion people have broken into the global market for goods and services. The new globalisers have experienced large-scale poverty reduction in the 1990s. “The number of people who were poor declined by 120 million” Ireland provides an outstanding example of the benefits of internationalisation of trade and investment. As investment tends to move to lower cost environments, however, we must endeavour to get costs under control and encourage our industry to move up the value chain. Otherwise the benefits are in danger of being lost.

Peter Sutherland, under whose direction the World Trade Organisation became a reality, has written the foreword to this important and useful book.

2016, A New Proclamation for a New Generation

This book attempts to come up with a redraft, for 2016, of the 1916 Proclamation, which was read outside the GPO, at the beginning of the Easter rebellion.  As such, it attempts to sum up for the present time, as the  authors of the original document  purported to do for their time , what the  Irish people believe about themselves and  what they aspire to achieve by collective independent action.

 Gerard O Neill is well qualified to answer the first of these two questions. He is a leading market researcher, who makes his living using sophisticated techniques to find what  the Irish  people believe and want, or at least what they are prepared to  tell a researcher they believe and want.

Many things have changed since   1916. Before the rebellion in 1915, Padraig  Pearse wrote that

 “War is not more terrible that the evils it will end...war is a terrible thing but it is not an evil thing. It is the things that make war necessary that are evil”.

 The author does not say so, but I do not believe many Irish people today would agree with Pearse’s view of war, knowing as we now do many things about war that he may not have known in 1915. As far as Pearse’s belief that  war can  be used to end evil is concerned, it has  to be noted that the Irish  people did not then,  and do not even now, believe that  Ireland  could, or should, have  taken part in the  war against Hitler, notwithstanding the  obvious evil of his regime.

Ireland is immensely more prosperous than it was in 1916.

Irish incomes then were at about the Western European average.  Now, notwithstanding the recession, they are above the European average.

 9 out of 10 Irish people said in 2009 that they were satisfied with their lives, as against 8 out of 10 in the rest of the EU.

 Even allowing for inflation, Irish income per head is 24 times what it was in 1966. An amazing statistic, which put our present financial troubles into proportion.

O Neill questions whether Irish people will continue to be as obsessed, as they have been, with owning their own home.  There is 85% home ownership here as against 65% in the EU as a whole. He says, reasonably, that if a thing is scarce people will want to own one, rather than rent it. Homes will not be scarce in the Ireland of 2016, so people will increasingly tend to rent rather than buy.

The book also deals with the role of religion in Ireland. The original Proclamation said that the rebels were  acting “in the name of God and  of the  dead generations”.  He concludes that Ireland remains more religious than most countries and that  what is happening today is not so much a secularisation  as a” declericalisation” of the country.

He argues, rightly in my view, that many of the characteristics that make Ireland attractive, like tolerance and interest in other people, are derived from our Christian heritage, a heritage that teaches us to see other people as unique individuals rather than just as members of classes, races, nations or other such categories.  It would have been interesting if the author had explored whether a Christian inspired value system  can  survive a decline in  religious practice.

Gerard O Neill grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s among a nationalist community that, in his words,  saw the creation of Northern Ireland as “ unwarranted  compromise; a short term solution that  was unsustainable in the long  term”.

  He says the ratification of the Good Friday Agreement in both parts of Ireland has brought that argument to an end. Or has it?

 He himself speculates in this book about what might happen in the, to my mind unlikely, event that  the 2011 census in Northern Ireland shows there is a Catholic majority  in the population . Under the relevant legislation, the Northern Ireland Secretary may direct the holding of a poll to decide if a majority there want it to cease to be a part of the United Kingdom. There would also have to a poll in the Republic.

 One can imagine pressure developing in some quarters to hold a poll, if a census were to show a Catholic majority. Indeed if the UK Government failed to hold a poll it would open to the accusation of betraying the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement compromise.

 Having raised this scenario, Gerard O Neill then goes on to say that, in terms of practical planning, it is getting no thought at all in Dublin, Belfast, or London.   He fails to say whether he thinks this is wise or not.  One would expect, having raised an issue like this, that he would have teased it out a lot more.

Northern Ireland is still very heavily dependent on the British Exchequer and on public sector jobs. Meanwhile  the Republic has  moved , suddenly,  from being  a  country  with a  low  debt, to one  whose debt is heading  rapidly toward 100% of its GDP,  and which will have  to reduce the size of its  own  public sector. Britain has financial problems too and probably would not be able to help with transitional payments if a majority in Northern Ireland decided they wanted to leave the UK.

These realities are not explored at all in this book, which is surprising given that the author himself brought up the possibility of a poll for a United Ireland.  Nor does he explore likely reactions on this side of the border, if the financial situation remains as financially difficult as it is now.  It may not arise after the 2011 census, but it could happen after another census

In a sense, this is what is frustrating about this book. The author is well read, stimulating and original. He raises a lot of neglected questions, but then fails to follow them all to a full conclusion.

Book Review for the Irish Examiner.

Title;    2016,   A New Proclamation for a New Generation

Author;    Gerard O Neill

Publisher;    Mercier Press

The Reluctant Taoiseach; A biography of John A Costello

John A Costello was the pioneer of Inter Party or coalition Government in Ireland.   His modest and endearing personality was crucial in making his two Governments work. His first Government consisted of five parties, and relied for support on a number of independent TDs as well.  His second consisted of only two parties, but it relied for support on a third party and also on numerous independents.

  Although a combative advocate in public, he had a remarkable lack of partisanship in his personal relations. He was considerate toward colleagues, some of whom were difficult people.

He had taken no part in the War of Independence, and was thus relatively unaffected by the Civil War split. This enabled him to work with people like Sean McBride, who came from the anti Treaty side.

 As a lawyer during the 1930s, he had represented trade union interests, and as a TD he had defended the pension and other rights of civil servants transferred from the British service into that of the Free State. Both activities involved close cooperation with the man who was later to become his Tanaiste , Bill Norton.  Their mutual respect held two Governments together.

 The involvement of Labour in his first Government was not to be taken for granted. Labour had, after all, supported Fianna Fail in 1932, and because of a split in the trade union movement, there were two Labour parties in 1948.

John A Costello was a native of Phibsboro and the son of a civil servant in the Registry of Deeds, whose family came from Clare. He was educated in O Connells School, the same school as Sean Lemass and Sean T O Kelly attended. He attended UCD and, like James Joyce, he tried and failed to become   Auditor of the L and H.

When he qualified as a barrister in 1914, he had no family legal connections.  He made up for this with hard work and a talent for appealing to the feelings of juries. He was so successful that he was invited to become Attorney General in WT Cosgrave’s Government in 1926, at the age of 35.

He was first elected to the Dail in 1933, and remained a member until 1969. Except when he was Taoiseach, he combined Dail service with an active career as a barrister.  This led to criticism of his Dail attendance, but it enriched the quality his contributions to debates, especially on the 1937 Constitution. His legal reputation was such that de Valera offered him the post of Chief Justice at one time.

 This biography by David McCullagh, RTEs political correspondent, is an original contribution to the writing of modern Irish history. It is authoritative in its judgements and careful in its research. It is sympathetic even affectionate, towards its subject. The book is easy to follow and the author draws on his own intimate knowledge of current politics to place Costello in a context relevant to modern Ireland. It is also full of colourful detail about the politics of the time.

Costello’s economic record comes in for some criticism. The Irish economy fell behind during the 1950s. Growth   was less than in other European countries. Costello wanted to open Ireland to foreign investment as early as the late 1940s, but this was opposed at the time by the Labour party, Fianna Fail, the Department of Industry and Commerce and the Federation of Irish Industries. He  did not push the issue.

 It took the severe balance of payments crisis of 1955/6 for Costello to be able to win approval for a repeal  Of the Control of Manufacturers Act  which put on the restrictions on foreign investment , and  for  a zero or low corporation tax policy to promote exports.  This imaginative  tax policy, which provides the basis for Irish policy to attract overseas investment  up to this day, was put in place by Costello’s Minister for Finance, Gerry Sweetman  in 1956.  The restrictions on investment, though agreed in principle under Costello, were not removed until 1958 when he had lost office. 

Divisions on economic policy crossed party lines.   Both Costello and Lemass favoured Keynesian style stimulus of the economy through capital  spending funded by borrowing.  Both Ministers for Finance of the period, Fine Gael’s Gerry Sweetman and Fianna Fail’s Sean McEntee, believed  that balancing the budget and restraining consumption  was  the better  way to release  funds for investment. 

 Food subsidies, an untargeted and expensive form of Government spending, were favoured by  Costello and Norton,  but were opposed by Sweetman.  These differences on economic policy between Labour and Gerry Sweetman remained an obstacle to a renewed Fine Gael/Labour  Coalition as late as 1970.

 David McCullagh  clarifies John A Costello’s role in the Mother and Child  controversy is.  He was influenced much more by the views and interests of the medical profession than he was  by those of Archbishop McQuaid. His hands off management style, helpful most of the time in defusing inter party tensions, did not serve him at all well in this case. But it was not Noel Browne’s resignation over the Mother and Child question that brought Costello’s first Government down in  1951. It was the Minister for Agriculture, James Dillon’s refusal to grant dairy farmers a milk price increase!

 The book shows that John A Costello  did not at all foresee the effects of his  impromptu  answer to a question at a  press conference in Canada in 1949, when he said that   his Governments planned  to  declare Ireland  a Republic , and  consequently  to withdraw from the Commonwealth.

  In fact, Ireland had not been participating in the Commonwealth since 1936, and his Government had already   agreed informally to declare a Republic and   withdraw fully  from the Commonwealth.

  But the consequences had not been teased out through diplomatic channels with the British Government. They were taken by surprise. They reacted by passing the unnecessary Government of Ireland Act to reassure Unionists. This Act appeared to nationalist opinion at the time entrench partition, because of the mistaken nationalist assumption that it was really British laws, not  Unionist people, who were keeping partition in place.    

This is a great biography of a neglected but central figure in modern Irish history, and deserves to widely read.  His record, in making coalitions work in difficult economic times, has many valuable lessons for his party today.  

Book Review for the “Irish Times” by John Bruton.

The book is to be published on 15 October and publishers request that no review appear before that date.

..............................................................................................................................................................

The Reluctant Taoiseach; A biography of John A Costello

By David McCullagh

Gill and Macmillan

27.99 euros/ 24.99 stg.

Saving Iraq - Rebuilding a Broken Nation

Nemir Kirdar was brought up in Iraq and comes from a family that served in the Ottoman Parliament before the First World War.  He fled Iraq in 1958 when the Hashemite Royal Family, which had held the Iraqi throne from 1921, was overthrown on the first of a series of military coups that eventually brought Saddam Hussein to power.  Kirdar was a childhood friend of the last King, Faisal II, murdered in the coup.

Kirdar presents a very favourable view of pre-1958 Iraq.  He stresses the heavy investment in education and in physical infrastructure.  He claims that the Kingdom of Iraq was successfully integrating the different ethnic and religious groups in a single Iraqi nation, and blames Saddam for starting a process of disintegration by offering privileged autonomy to the Kurds, a policy he subsequently brutally reversed.  He also says that the Ottoman rulers and the British showed bias in favour of the Sunnis.

He criticises Saddam for building an overlarge bureaucracy, leading a position in 1991 that 40% of the populace were dependent on the state for their income.

He condemns the United States' approach management of Iraq after its successful invasion in 2002.  He says the laying off of all Baath Party members from their government jobs, and the dissolution of the Iraqi army, led to the insurgency and civil war which peaked in 2006.  The 2005 electoral system, which offered voters choices among national lists of candidates rather than representatives of local constituencies, aggravated the sectarianization of Iraqi politics.

He also talks of the corruption under the American occupation, and of the "massive ongoing theft of U.S. and Iraqi funds", over which he claims there was virtually no U.S. Congressional oversight.

He now worries that Iraq will not remain a single country.  The Kurdish regional government has its own armed forces and banned the flying of the Iraqi flag in its territory in 2006.  Disputes remain unsolved about ownership of oil and gas and the status of Kirkuk.

His prescriptions for the future of Iraq suffer from the fact that he has spent most of his life outside the country – running a very successful company which channeled Gulf oil money into investments in Western countries.  He lists the many leaders and experts he has spoken to, but none of those are currently living in Iraq either.

Most of his prescriptions are fairly standard, a strong central Government, separation of powers, a fair tax system, and a new petroleum law.  He makes a very convincing case for the revival of Iraqi agriculture, pointing out that the country in which agriculture was first invented was able to export food before 1958, but now cannot feed itself.  But some of his suggestions seem fanciful and extravagant, like building a new national capital to replace Baghdad.

This book argues for a single, non sectarian, Iraqi state.  To those coping with the daily realities of Iraq today, this may seem quite unrealistic.  But it should not be forgotten that there is such a thing as Iraqi patriotism.  It was shown during the Iran/Iraq war and, most recently, in the support the current Iraqi Prime Minister is getting for his determination that the Iraqi army replace the Americans as completely and as quickly as possible.

The Best Intentions – Kofi Annan and the U.N. in the era of American Power

This book provides a good narrative history of most of the major international crises since Kofi Annan came to prominence in the United Nations, first as Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping in 1993, and then as Secretary General from 1997. It covers Bosnia, Rwanda, the Congo, Iraq, Darfur, Sierra Leone, East Timor and the oil-for-food affair.

Kofi Annan originally came to the Secretary Generalship as a U.S. backed candidate, but was later to conflict with the U.S. over Iraq. Coming from a semi aristocratic and politically moderate background in Ghana, he had spent his working life with United Nations bodies, starting with the World Health Organization in 1962. Self protective, silent and modest, he was a contrast to his brilliant but status conscious predecessor, Boutros Boutros Ghali. Kofi Annan is described by Traub as having the political reactions of a “high minded and progressive” European, and of having “a horror of violence that made him prone to find interlocutors where there were none”. This characteristic is blamed for his supposed mishandling of Saddam Hussein in the run in to the Iraq war.

Annan revised U.N. doctrines to justify armed intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states to prevent crimes against humanity. Although there was no U.N. Resolution to approve the 1998 NATO action against Serbia over Kosovo, Annan was seen to have justified it later in a speech to the General Assembly where he said there was a right to intervene in such cases but that it must be “fairly and consistently applied”. He later had the concept of a “right to protect” accepted as part of the U.N. reforms of 2005.

Annan’s term was dogged by investigations into past U.N. failings. Genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the corruption in the U.N. Oil for Food programme in Iraq were the subject of rigorous public enquiries and Annan found himself defending the indefensible. The problem was that these inquiries had full access to the U.N.’s own papers, but not to the decision-making records of member states, particularly those on the Security Council. This structural bias did no favours to the United Nations.

Mandates of U.N. peacekeeping operations are set by the Security Council, not by the Secretary-General. Peacekeepers need clear, credible and achievable mandates, but do not always get them. Units within U.N. forces often took their instructions from their home capitals, rather than from the U.N. Commander on the spot. At one point, only 32 officials in New York were supervising 27,365 peacekeepers in different parts of the world. That combination of large mandates and insufficient staffing creates conditions in which after-the-event blame fests are inevitable.

The great tragedy of Annan’s tenure occurred on 19 August 2003 when 22 United Nations personnel, including the immensely talented Sergio Vieira de Mello, were blown up by suicide bombers in Baghdad. Many U.N. staff blamed Annan for having sent them there in the first place and believed he had done so to please the United States, although he himself had described their invasion of Iraq as ‘illegal”.

This is a worthwhile book. The author had continuing access to Annan over four years and observed him in moments of both triumph and despair. The book deals with so many parallel crises that it is at times hard to follow, and would have been benefited from a chronology of events at the end of the text.

Kofi Annan will be seen by history as the Secretary-General who attempted the most comprehensive reform of the United Nations since its foundation, and who set up a Peacebuilding Commission and a Human Rights Council, streamlined management and won agreement to the principle of humanitarian intervention.

He could have achieved more if energy had not been exhausted in ultimately futile arguments about who should be on the Security Council, where the World War Two victors hung onto their archaic privileges.

In international organisations fundamental changes can only take place by unanimous agreement, and that requires exceptional levels of farsightedness and generosity, characteristics which were missing at the end of the day.

Half Gone – Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis

This is one of a crop of recent books looking at what will happen when the world wakes up to the fact that the annual production of oil cannot go on increasing forever.

Oil, being liquid and easily transportable, really is a wonderful fuel. It does not need an electricity grid for its distribution. When used in private motor cars, oil responds to a deep human need for instant freedom of movement, something for which those who can afford it are willing to pay a high price.

President Bush said in his State of the Union address this year that America was addicted to oil. He could have added that the middle-class lifestyle to which much of the rest of the world aspires is also based on high oil consumption.  Low-density housing developments in Ireland assume that oil prices will not rise to $100 a barrel because these developments are incompatible with anything but the private car-based lifestyle. The burgeoning middle classes of India and China will also want to have cars, so the demand for oil will not tail off just because supply is no longer increasing.

The problem is one of timing. Will we have substitutes for oil in place before the crunch comes, or will the transition be sudden and nasty?

The answer to that question depends on when the peak of oil production is reached. If, as Jeremy Leggett believes, the peak was reached last year, then the sudden and nasty scenario is almost upon us, because substitutes like hydrogen fuel and biodiesel will take 10 years or more to roll out. The car fleet is normally replaced over a 10-year cycle so a sudden switch to new fuels would be exceptionally disruptive and costly. No infrastructure of stations exists to distribute the new fuels, and people will not buy a car for which convenient fuel is not available everywhere they might want to use it.

Others, like Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), believe oil production will increase substantially up to 2015 and that peak production will not be reached until around 2030 or later. They expect Saudi Arabia to be able to increase its daily production by a further 20% by 2015, and see additional supplies coming from Libya, West Africa, Angola, the Caspian Sea, Angola and Brazil.

Matthew Simmons, the oil geologist who wrote ‘Twilight in the Desert’, believes the direct opposite. He claims Saudi production will peak very soon. He says Saudi oil reserve figures are exaggerated and unreliable. They are not broken down field by field and have not been independently audited. As a ‘swing producer’, sharply increasing or decreasing production to counter shortages or gluts, Saudi Arabia has reduced the long-term potential of its oil fields.

Like Simmons, Jeremy Leggett is an oil geologist who has left the oil business. He runs a consultancy which is promoting alternatives to oil, like solar power and hydrogen. He says no really big oil field has been found in the last 25 years and most areas with suitable geology are already explored.

He says that some alternatives to oil have big downsides. Hydrogen fuel requires natural gas for its production. Coal burning produces even more global warming than oil. This could be countered by carbon sequestration which involves burying the carbon in caverns rather than burning it off into the air. But here are a limited number of caverns and they could leak.

Leggett’s preferred solution is a decentralized system of energy production based on solar panels which would heat or cool homes and produce surplus electrical energy that could be fed into a localized grid. It is not clear how this would be enough to power the world’s motor cars.

Whether oil production peaked in 2005, or will peak in 2030, nobody denies that it will eventually run down.  Ireland’s decision to meet its 1990s housing shortage in a dispersed way has made itself dependent on the unlikely scenario of a seamless transition from oil to an equally convenient substitute.

That substitute is simply not yet available. One can only hope that the oil peak will be in 2030, and was not in 2005!