This article appeared in The Irish Times on Saturday. It is an excerpt from Seán Lemass: The Lost Memoir edited by Ronan McGreevy
If this excerpt is as good as the book surely it's a must read.
It is published by Ériu priced €23.99.
1. The public is never happy – but that’s okay. That’s divine dissatisfaction A government’s first duty is to eliminate endemic poverty, but its work is not done when that is achieved. Seán Lemass correctly prophesied that increasing affluence would not necessarily make people content with their governments; it would instead increase demands on the State. Hence the term “divine dissatisfaction”. He elaborated: “We could all retire into a monastery, but if you want to live in the world you have to be thinking in terms of future development.
“If ever a generation is born which says we are satisfied with all our fathers did for us, that is the end of progress; that nation would just wither and die.”
Have a plan that is uniquely yours It is not enough for the opposition to offer itself as an alternative to a sitting government, it must provide an alternative plan. This Lemass learned from Fianna Fáil’s experience in 1951 when it scraped back into power off the back of an unpopular inter-party government. When the same government returned to power in 1954, Lemass felt Fianna Fáil was complacent in believing it was enough to wait for that government to fail, so Lemass came up with an economic plan. When there were no takers, he drew up his own plan based on one drawn up for Italy.
“I believed that as an opposition party we had no chance whatsoever of success unless we could identify ourselves with some plan of action which would be regarded as exclusively ours.”
Fianna Fáil won an effective overall majority in 1957. A year later the First Programme for Economic Expansion was published – the first such plan in the history of the State.
The best politicians provoke strong emotions Lemass had no doubt when he took over as Taoiseach in 1959 that he had the ability and the experience to do the job, but he was worried about how the public would accept him after de Valera.
Lemass believed de Valera’s great strength was that he could “provoke amongst the people intense personal loyalty or intense personal hatred. Indeed, this is true of any really successful politician.”
Lemass was in awe of de Valera’s hold on the Irish public imagination, praising that “fervent honesty” which he put down to de Valera’s “simplicity – lack of sophistication, anyway”.
Lemass saw this as a strength, not a weakness. “Smartness in politics is a handicap. People will turn to the person who appears to be completely trustworthy, even if this trustworthiness arises from the fact that he is not clever enough to be crooked. I think probably I had that handicap.”
Lemass singled out his own son-in-law, Charles Haughey, as a politician who almost appeared to the public to be “too much on top of the job, too professional”.
The fact that a decision is taken matters more than what the decision is On July 16, 1960 Lemass was asked by the then UN secretary-general to provide peace-keeping troops for the newly independent nation Congo. Lemass told his cabinet that this was an “in or out” issue and that if they didn’t agree, they could leave the government. Within 11 days Irish troops were off to the Congo. Lemass said the mark of a good politician was someone who does what he or she “intends to do, as quickly as possible”.
Lemass often thought that “the taking of a decision was perhaps even more important than the soundness of the decision”.
This was in contrast to de Valera and Seán MacEntee who were constantly dithering. In the end, Lemass concluded that their decision-making was no better than his, for all the agonising that they did.
If you’re not annoying anyone, you’re doing something wrong Lemass detested the social element of politics. Politics is not about show, he believed. “Having power is no good, it is the exercise of power.”
The exercise of power will bring you into conflict with certain people and groups, but that is to welcomed. “In fact, at the Fianna Fáil ardfheis a couple of years ago we had a half dozen pickets outside. I felt that the party was dead if it could not provoke sufficient irritation to want to picket the ardfheis.
“I always regarded the picket as a status symbol and when some of the Fine Gael people would say something about it, I would say there is no danger of someone picketing your ardfheis – they don’t care.”
Even if the US president is an idiot, he’s still the most powerful person in the world Seán Lemass had dealings with two US presidents while in office – Dwight D Eisenhower and John F Kennedy. Eisenhower he saw as likeable, but not a politician of the first rank. Kennedy was more calculating and intellectually able.
“I was very conscious of the fact that I was talking to the most powerful man in the world. Even if he was an idiot, he was still the most powerful man in the world and on his decisions rested the fate of mankind.”
For that reason Lemass agreed with Charles de Gaulle that Europe needed to develop an independent defence and could not depend on the US into perpetuity.
“There is a great deal of sense in his contention that when the chips are down, America would not commit suicide for the sake of Europe.”
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