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”!