Introduction

In 1950 the Korean War broke out, and the cold war situation became impossible. The student Left became increasingly isolated, and the Student Representative Council was taken over by destructive elements who abandoned it, so that student democracy in effect ceased to exist for the following decade. JJ retained a critical view of the US version of events; I recollect his publishing a letter, perhaps to the Irish Times, in which, with a quote from a credible US-based source, he suggested an alternative analysis of the situation.

RJ and the school-college transition

In my final year in St Columba's College, the Promethean group had been missing Paul O'Higgins, who had been expelled the previous summer, under circumstances which seemed to us to be discriminatory. (It was a matter of going down town at night; there were others involved, but Paul was singled out.) We kept in touch with him, calling to his parents' flat in 104 Lr Baggot St if ever we were in town. When he entered TCD to do medicine in October 1945 my father, at my suggestion, allowed him to lodge in his rooms in #36. We took up a collection for him among his friends in school, and he bought books with the money, each of which he labelled 'munus columbanensis'. Various meetings were organised, addressed by John de Courcy Ireland, RN Tweedy, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, Arnold Marsh and others. We used Deirdre MacDonagh's bookshop in Baggot St for Promethean meetings pre-TCD. We encountered Paul Keating and the TCD Fabians. We picked up contact with a floating population of disaffected critical intellectuals, such as John Jordan, Anthony Cronin, Arthur Reynolds, Rex Cathcart and others whom we identified as the raw material of an emergent Left.

Our early attempts to contact the remains of the old Left via New Books, the Pearse St bookshop run by Sean (Johnny) Nolan, and via Bill McCullough in the CPNI in Belfast, were not fruitful; they preferred to keep a low profile, and were somewhat suspicious of intellectuals. We did however support the Irish Review, the monthly paper edited by Sean Nolan and sold around the pubs by the handful of residual ex-Communist Party stalwarts. We contributed our first political writings to it, such as they were. I remember being told by Johnny Nolan, having submitted a manuscript, that 'the material had been treated editorially', which I suppose was a relatively civil put-down.

When I entered TCD in October 1946, and took up lodgings in JJ's rooms along with Paul O'Higgins, an ongoing role for the Promethean Society(1) took shape. It was defined as a Marxist 'think-tank', for sharpening up the ideas necessary for transforming the political situation. These we would promote in wider circles, and try to get people to agree with them, towards the achievement of various realisable democratic objectives, thus helping people to understand the essentials of the political process. Viewed in retrospect, our aspiration was similar to that of the young Marx, and a long way from the centralising Stalinist pathology which had gripped the international movement under the influence of the USSR. Our first step into the circle of wider politics was the Dublin University Fabian Society, but we also set our sights higher; we wanted to get broad-based student representative politics set up officially, by reforming the Student Representative Council.

We recruited to the Promethean Society mostly mature students with a British CP background; we attempted to develop a broad-based student politics based on principle. In this context we encountered C Desmond Greaves (CDG) who had earlier been in touch with de Courcy Ireland and the TCD Fabian Society; he was researching Irish left-wing politics on behalf of the international affairs committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), where he was emerging as the expert on the Irish situation. Greaves' role(2) in our political education was significant, though he did I think place too much reliance on a process of inducting us into the Marxist experience of the CPGB. We tended to accept this uncritically, although in retrospect it was mostly a valid transfer of relevant experience, not unduly dominated by the USSR; I am thinking of the historical analyses done by people like Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and TA Jackson to which we were exposed.

In some respects this CPGB contact, and implied USSR orientation, was however a negative factor, in that it soured our relationship with Owen Sheehy-Skeffington(3), and focused too much attention on what was going on in Eastern Europe. Justin Keating, who had joined us from UCD, and the present writer, however bucked this trend, and we tended to seek our contacts in Ireland, among the politicising ex-republicans who had been interned in the Curragh during the war.

Our political impact as the post-war 'student Left' led to the reconstitution of the Students Representative Council (SRC), and an attempt to revive the Irish Students Association(4), forerunner of Union of Students in Ireland. Our Marxism, which was based on Connolly, was rooted in bottom-up democracy. The role of the Promethean Society was as a sort of think-tank to study the situation and come up with a solution to a perceived problem, which the membership of the democratic movement would be likely to accept when it was put to them. This in retrospect was Marx's own approach to the 'leading role of the Party' rather than that which evolved in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin, though at the time we did not identify the extent to which the USSR Party had been degraded by Stalin's influence. This was the primary bone of contention between ourselves and OS-S.

The relationship between the Promethean Society, Fabian Society and Student Representative Council during the late 1940s is an example of how the development of the Marxist left, the broad left and the democratic movement was constrained and soured by the Stalinist influence on the Marxist left. We as the aspirant Marxist left understood the potentially positive role of broad-based student democracy, and we campaigned for a new constitution for the Student Representative Council. The old one had been dominated by the major College societies; we managed however to get direct elections in which all students could participate. In this context there emerged a leading group based on a loose alliance between the socialist elements and the Student Christian Movement. We set up useful services, like a book mart and a mass radiography against TB (then endemic).

In this forum however issues arose regarding international affiliations. A conservative group wanted to affiliate to the NUS in Britain, while we of the Left had set our sights on the International Union of Students (IUS) which had been set up post-war, had UN recognition, and could have been a source of travel opportunities. But the 'cold war' had begun, and the IUS was a battleground; the attitude to it split the Left. Then came the Korean War, in the summer of 1950, and in the subsequent SRC elections there was a right-wing landslide, electing a no-good do-nothing committee which in effect killed the SRC; it subsequently sank without trace, only re-emerging in the 1960s.

These cold-war issues also divided the Fabian Society(5); we attempted to get support for various peace initiatives in Western Europe which were attacked as 'Stalinist propaganda', and fell foul of OS-S, who had been Chairman of the Fabian Society; we voted him out. Had it not been for the heavy-handed role of the USSR and the 'international movement', in continually being seen to 'bring the Western European Marxist into line', a constructive relationship could have developed between independent-minded liberal socialists like OS-S and the rising generation of Irish Marxists who looked to build on Connolly. Such a relationship developed earlier between JJ and the Thomas Davis Society in the 1919-21 period, via Dermot MacManus(6). It also existed between RM Gwynn (in whose rooms in 1913 the Citizen Army was founded) and the Fabian Society founders in the 1930s, who included OS-S; they had the clout and understanding to be able to pull in people like Robert Lynd to be the honorary President. In our generation however the influence of the 'international movement' must in retrospect be assessed as having been largely destructive.

We made contact with the emerging Dublin-based working-class Left, which at that time was being reinforced with people who had been interned in the Curragh, and had become, after a fashion, politicised towards the left there. There was a sort of division of perspective within the PS, with Paul O'Higgins and others looking towards Eastern Europe, where the illusion was being rather effectively presented that the vision of the Left was in process of becoming reality, and on the other hand myself and Justin Keating (who was the only PS contact in UCD) looking towards Dublin and Ireland.

I remember increasingly finding it necessary to consider the science aspect as well as the political aspect; in JJ's case his politics and his career were intertwined in the natural course of things; in my case it became necessary to make the link between the science and the politics creatively, and the catalyst was JD Bernal's writings(7). There was also the question of nuclear weapons, and the peace movement, with which Bernal was associated. The relationship between the Western Left and the USSR was dominated by the need for the latter to use the former to slow down the arms race while they caught up with nuclear arms. In the atmosphere of cold-war politics the Stockholm Appeal caught the imagination of the visionaries of the Western Left. We supported it as best we could, in a hostile atmosphere.

JJ in the Seanad

On February 28 1946, debating the Rent Restrictions Bill 1944 (final stages) JJ likened the workings of the Act of 30 years previous to the workings of the Land Acts, in that the tenant was in effect awarded a share of the value of the house as the market appreciated. It became no longer advantageous for a landlord to let a house; it was better to sell it. He illustrated from his own experience of a tenancy in a house in Ranelagh between 1918 and 1921.

He went on to urge the development of housing associations, along the lines of Associated Properties ltd, which currently had some 1000 or so houses for rent in Dublin, at rents which were reasonable, and were not under threat from the Act. Such an enterprise could raise capital by mortgaging its property at rate of interest more favourable than an individual could obtain, and then use the capital so raised to build more houses for rent.

In March 1946 the Harbours Bill was debated; the question arose of what interests were to be represented on the Board. JJ urged that the livestock exporters be represented; he made the case that if the Federation of Irish Manufacturers had a place, despite their then minimal interest in exports, the livestock trade should a fortiori have one.

On March 21 1946 on the Central Fund Bill JJ attempted an analysis of post-war inflation. It was not due to increased wages or salaries, or to expanded bank credit. It was due to our exporting more than we imported. The people who got paid for their exports regarded the revenue as income. The existence of the quota system of import control limited what this income could be spent on. Prices in Britain were some 35% above the 1939 level, while in Ireland they were 70%.

He went on to urge the development of procedures for converting the banks' deposits held abroad into capital goods for the development of both industry and agriculture (reiterating his 1934 arguments). He welcomed the Beveridge Report 'Full Employment in a Free Society', though warned against its uncritical application in the Irish context. He mentioned Arnold Marsh's 'Full Employment in Ireland'(8)., which however he regarded as containing serious defects in analysis. He urged putting full employment on the agenda, but declared himself unable to come up with any comprehensive policy, though he was aware of many ways in which public expenditure could be used in the promotion of enterprise. He urged the Minister to call a conference of those in a position to make a useful contribution.

In April 3 1946 there was a Proposed New Ministries motion proposed by Sir John Keane, to enable the Seanad to have a critical look at the Departments of Health and Local Government. It was formally seconded by James Douglas, and then JJ came in immediately, developing arguments about the relationship between central and local government, and calling for a White Paper for discussion in depth, cross-party, before the Government legislated.

JJ argued against over-centralised control of local government, as being inimical to local public spirit and initiative. He questioned the county system, as set up 300 years earlier; the units were both too large and too small, nor do they coincide with any natural social or economic regions. He called for groupings of counties to match the scale of the older divisions such as Ossory or Oriel. The authorities of such regions should be able to relate to the government as a whole, rather than with one department dedicated to Local Government.

The present writer has since developed these arguments; they have made a contribution to the policies of the Green party(9).

Then on April 10 1946 on the Forestry Bill 1945 JJ objected to putting an artificial limit on the price of land to be purchased for forestry, mentioning the impossibility of accurately foretelling the value of timber in 30 or 40 years time, but expressing the view that given world trends the value of forest products was likely to be upwards. He was critical of the low target of 10,000 acres annually set by the Minister, and the low overall target of 6-700,000 acres. He urged increasing the planting rate by a factor of 10, and making use of the available winter labour surplus.

He went on to urge the development of deals with individual farmers for planting on private land, with the option of either the farmer or the State to own the resulting timber harvest when the time came. (Later, on May 8 in the Committee stage, the Minister Moylan 'did not think well of it' but did not elaborate.) JJ finished by urging the planting of a proportion of broad-leaf rather than total concentration on conifers, and remarked that we would have got through the Emergency more easily if we had had this policy 20 years earlier.

This has in the end become the policy of Coillte, the State agency concerned.

On April 11 1946 in the debate on the Turf Development Bill it emerged that the target production figure was 1M tons annually, and the amount of coal imports when imports were unconstrained was 2.5M tons of coal. JJ questioned the suggested equivalence between a ton of coal and 2 tons of turf, suggesting that for the type of turf they had been getting in Dublin it was more like 4 tons. The quality of turf delivered to the towns in the emergency filled him with loathing, as compared to 'country turf', for which he had nothing but admiration.

The cause of this was the imposition of regulations insisting on sale in towns by weight, which motivated merchants to cut the necessary drying stage short. Turf in the country was sold by the 'load', the volume that could be taken in a standard horse-drawn cart. I am surprised JJ was not on to this.

He went on to adduce continental experience, from Germany, Russia and Sweden, listing the various organic polymer products which could be extracted from turf as by-products of the carbonisation process, and urged that this should be the objective of scientific research based on the turf industry.

On May 1 1946 Land Bill 1945 was discussed; the purpose of this Bill was to set up procedures for getting rid of people who had been allotted land but were not working it. It was proposed to insist that someone allotted land should live in the house provided. JJ proposed an amendment which would re-direct the pressure along economic lines, adjusting the annuity. The value in capital terms to the allottee of the land, in adjusted annuity subsidised by the State, was of the order of £1000.

It is worth remarking that this allocation of land individually to landless people in rural areas was the way in which Fianna Fail in the 1930s purchased votes using public money, generating the pathological political culture in which subsequently corruption has flourished.

The effect of JJ's amendment would be that non-farming allottees of land who had decided to sell up should not be able to cash in on the State bounty in giving them land. He went on '..another objectionable feature is that some of these tenants get this land, pay the nominal annuity and let the land on the 11 month system, becoming in fact a kind of 18th century landlord on a small scale and profiting on the land to the amount of the difference between the annuity they pay and what they get from the lettings on the 11-month system. The margin ... is very wide indeed...£5 or £6 an acre..'.

On July 9 1946 on the Appropriations Bill JJ argued for special salary arrangements for high-grade specialist Civil Servants, using the arguments of a Report which had been prepared by Professor Duncan of TCD, assisted by Louden Ryan. 'If we want the best brains in the Civil Service or elsewhere we shall have to pay for them'.

He then went on to propose a model for a public-private hybrid enterprise, based on the experience of the War Agricultural Executive Committees in England, which owned and managed machinery pools in support of farmers' needs. Such co-operative machinery contractors here could usefully supply the needs of drainage and land reclamation, using heavy machinery.

On July 24 1946 on the Industrial Research and Standards Bill JJ warned against a blinkered sub-division of research into industrial and agricultural categories, and urged that if and when agricultural research were to come on the agenda, the interface between whatever agency were to emerge and the IIRS should be dynamic.

This warning was unheeded; the Agricultural Research Institute did not come into existence until over a decade later, and when it did, the gulf between it and the IIRS was considerable. I had occasion to comment on this in my Irish Times column in the 1970s.

On November 13 1946 in the Seanad the Economic Price for Fat Cattle Bill gave JJ an opportunity to develop definitively his arguments around what he regarded as the central issue in Anglo-Irish relations, taking up 6 pages of the Seanad report doing it, from his standpoint of having serviced the Committee on Post-Emergency Agricultural Policy. He began by suggesting that in their negotiations with the British they had not been aggressive enough in seeking a consistent price on the British market whatever the origin of the animal.

Stall-feeding of cattle in winter for beef had been killed for the previous 14 years by the British differential price, which favoured the export from Ireland of 'forward store' cattle for finishing in Britain. This had restricted the supply of manure, and this had reflected itself into the declining yields of wheat, oats and barley. Total cattle had remained constant, but output had declined, because cattle inadequately fed in winter take longer to mature.

He then went on at length to the effects of the British taxpayer subsidising British food producers on the prices available to Irish producers. He read into the Seanad record an extensive paper which he had tried and failed to get accepted in the Report. The conclusion of his analysis was '..We are strongly of the opinion that equal prices for equal qualities of produce, sold in the UK, is the policy which would best facilitate agricultural production in, and export from, our country. We recommend that a joint conference be held to see if the problem can be solved in a manner that will be compatible with the national interests of both countries.'

Turning then to the dead meat trade, he made use of correspondence with a British meat trade expert, Thomas Shaw, who had recently contributed an article to Studies(10) on the importance of the dead meat trade to Ireland. He hoped, by promoting a public understanding of the situation, using the expertise of Mr Shaw and his interactions with the Minister in a public meeting scheduled for the TCD Commerce Society on December 3, to develop political pressure for a top-level approach by the Government to John Strachey, the then British Minister for Food.

The 'win-win' situation JJ had in mind was that if the Irish were allowed to upgrade their beef production by finishing cattle in Ireland and exporting as meat, the British would get more of what was still a rationed commodity, and the Irish agricultural production system would be transformed by improved winter feeding practice. He had been making this case again and again during the 'emergency', with first-hand comparative knowledge of agricultural practice North and South. He wanted the UK agricultural environment extended to include the whole of Ireland, to the benefit of both Ireland and Britain.

On December 12 1946 the Industrial Alcohol (Amendment) Bill 1946, second stage was debated; JJ supported industrial scientific research, and approved of the idea of having a pilot plant to explore the feasibility of chemical production processes, this being provided for in the Bill. He then went on to compare Denmark industrially, remarking that Danish industrial strength was a result of having put their agricultural development first. In contrast the Irish industrial experience had been parasitic on agriculture, with the value of the latter being reduced. He then went on to measure things by the consumption of phosphates, with seven lean years 1932-39, followed by seven absolute starvation years of the war, leading to an overall phosphate deficiency of 2M tons. He was critical of dependence on nitrogen in the form of ammonium sulphate, and urged greater dependence on clover, and on proper management of the farmyard manure-heap.

The contemporary Green movement could credibly claim JJ among its progenitors, if we add this clover preference to his support for clustered interdependent rural housing, and reconstructed local and regional government.

Continuing the above debate on January 15 1947 JJ introduced an amendment urging that the Minister should '..issue a licence for the import free of duty of any chemical product which is used as an agricultural raw material in all cases where the corresponding product of domestic manufacture is available only at a higher price.'

The key issue here is that '..all our industrial development is directly or indirectly based on agricultural productive and export capacity'. JJ then went back into the history of the economic war, rubbing the Minister's nose in it along the lines '..that it was necessary to throw Kathleen Ni Houlihan into the water in order that the Minister should effect a heroic rescue', along the lines of a PG Wodehouse story.

Industrial development in the 30s had been done at the expense of the profits made by Irish farmers during the first world war. He urged prioritising such industrial development as was agriculture-based, or serviced agricultural needs (as indeed did cement, which was based largely on native raw materials). The cement industry was kept going during the war with prioritised supplies of coal, and much of the produce went to Northern Ireland, an act of benevolent neutrality. The electrical industry was well-founded, but there were some industries which were not well founded, in that they simply added to the costs of other industries. Any increase in agriculture costs decreases productive and export capacity. JJ did not want this Bill to provide a cover for building a fertiliser factory of which the products would be more expensive than imported products, and this was the thrust of his amendment.

The above amendment being defeated, JJ tried again on January 22, along the lines that the Minister '...shall have regard to the desirability of making available at all times the chemical raw materials of agricultural and industrial production at prices which compare favourably with the prices at which similar chemical material could be imported.'

JJ had taken on board criticism of his earlier amendment. In support of his revised amendment he adduced comparisons with Britain during the war, where agricultural production had increased by 50%, while ours had declined. He was aware of the availability of native gypsum but wondered where the nitrogenous component would come from. Would it be techno-economically possible to produce ammonium sulphate at a price to compete with imports?

On January 22 1947 JJ had another bite at the Land Bill 1946, second stage. The problem as then perceived was the inflated price of land consequent on the influx of foreign buyers, mostly wealthy refugees from British Labour Government policies. JJ used the debate to reiterate his arguments for expanded commercial agriculture. The State should intervene to buy land when the price was low, and should lease land to 'persons having agricultural knowledge who would farm them as tenants of the State'. He urged an increase in the number of farms employing labour, and an increase in the number of farm workers, and an increase in their wages, in an expanded commercial agricultural sector, with expanded facilities for agricultural credit.

JJ must by now have been tired of the need to reiterate these arguments, and of being not listened to; Fianna Fail backbenchers, dependent on masses of bought 30-acre votes, must have found this reiteration uncomfortable and boring.

On February 26 1947 the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS) was debated. There was a lot of criticism of the Institute, on the basis that it should have been attached to the Universities. JJ came to its defence, on the basis that there existed some areas of research which did not easily combine with a teaching load, and that TCD experience of co-operation with DIAS was positive, especially as it provided a common meeting-ground for people from the two Universities.

JJ then went in some detail into the history of Dunsink Observatory, and the contributions to science of Brinkley, Hamilton and their successors, up to the time of Plummer, who had left TCD in 1921, after which they had the observatory but no Astronomer Royal, and TCD had been somewhat embarrassed by Dunsink, as increasingly a white elephant. They could have sold it at a high price, for greyhound racing or whatever, but the College had hung on to it, in the hopes that something would turn up. In the end it did, and TCD were happy to do a deal with the DIAS in the confidence that the asset would remain of scientific value in the new context.

On March 12 1947 the Agricultural Credit Bill 1946 (second stage)was debated; putting into effect one of the minor recommendations of the Committee on Post-Emergency Agriculture, in which JJ had participated. The Agricultural Credit Corporation was to be set up, thus distinguishing the special needs of farmers from the market normally served by the banks.

JJ began by referencing Doreen Warriner's Economics of Peasant Farming in which the number of families fed by a family farm is estimated for various countries, being 1.5 in Poland and India, three in Germany, five in the USA and eight in Britain. In Ireland we come between India and Germany, at about 2 to 2.5, with half of the 1.5 non-farm families fed by the farm being in Ireland and the other half in Britain.

Alternatively, for every 125 units of food we produce, we consume 100; our exports are only 25% of our total output. Thus a 20% increase in production would enable exports to be doubled. The real comparison to be made is between the best farmers and the worst, with a view to bringing all up to the level of the best. In this context he leaned on his recent SSISI paper on capitalisation of Irish agriculture(11). The essence of the argument was that the output per worker on a well-managed large farm was substantially greater than that on an equivalent area of 30-acre farms run by the same number of people.

He went on to call for a farm survey, and to draw on the experience of the British War Agricultural Executive Committees, which had led to the development of co-operative ownership of machinery centres(12). The credit-worthiness of an application for a loan should be a matter for such a committee, rather than the opinion of a Civic Guard. In general the ACC should deal primarily with large farms or with co-operative societies, relying on mortgage or collective security(13).

On March 13 1947 JJ spoke on the Butter Production and Milk Prices motion, developing further his arguments in the post-Emergency Agriculture Committee, going on to urge the 800-gallon cow and the scientific use of grass in all its forms.

The argument continued over the need to re-establish a free market in butter, and to bring this under some sort of organised control by the dairy industry as a whole. JJ referred to the existence of a civil servant Butter Marketing Committee, and urges that this function be taken over by the industry, thus foreshadowing what later became Bord Bainne.

Then on April 16 1947, debating State Intervention in Public Enterprise: JJ referenced an article of his which had appeared in the day's Irish Times, on the same question(14).

This was based on a report of an Athlone Barrington lecture, under the auspices of the Vocational Education Committee. In this wide-ranging and radical paper JJ laid down criteria for recognising situations in which the public good would best be served by public enterprise, instancing utilities, education and scientific research. He drew on the experience of the Tennessee Valley Authority regarding demonstration farms, run on a scientific basis, with good record-keeping accessible to their neighbours.

He welcomed the rural electrification programme of the ESB as a factor in the future development of farm productivity, but again urged the need for co-operative pooling of investment in machinery, along the lines seen in Britain under the influence of the War Agricultural Executive Committees.

His most radical proposal was the taking over of derelict farms by the local authority, and their leasing to worker co-operatives, or to existing farmer co-operatives, to be run under the direction of people properly trained in agricultural best practice. He pointed out that the local authorities had the power to do this, under Section 99 of the Local Government Act 1946, conventionally considered as being related to housing needs, but extensible by implication towards a process of agri-village development.

This is relevant to the needs of the contemporary 'eco-village' movement, which is seeking to develop a positive approach to rural resettlement economics. It was a good practical proposal which could credibly have been taken up by the nascent Left, had we been aware of it.

JJ went on to commend the ESB as being a model State enterprise, and urged the need for development of State enterprise where there was a natural monopoly situation, like public transport. He expressed concern however about a variety of hybrid organisations where State and private interests were '...mixed up in the most extraordinary way...' He instanced the Sea Fisheries Association and the Roscrea meat factory. He warned of the danger of State investments ending up in private hands, in a way '..which escapes the knowledge of the public and completely escapes parliamentary control..'.

He urged that enabling Acts should set up constitutions for such hybrid activities, with rules of the game, distinguishing subsidies from 'loans', capital from income. In this context he instanced the Dairy Disposal Company, as a long-term embodiment of what was originally defined as a transitional situation.

We have here an early warning of the situation which has led in recent times to the series of Tribunals exposing corruption in high places.

On May 21 1947 the Slaughter of Calves (motion) was debated; this related to what was the beginnings of the switch in the dairy areas from the Shorthorn dual-purpose animal, whose male calves were bought by the dry-stock farmers for beef, to Frisian, whose male calves were not worth feeding. JJ urged that detailed attention be given to the implications of this 'completely new factor in our whole agricultural economy'. It would be necessary to encourage the dry-stock farmers to go into rearing their own calves, and thereby produce better beef in a shorter time than under the traditional procedures.

Then on June 17 1947 the Finance Bill (second stage) presented an opportunity for JJ to thank the Government for taking into account the needs of Trinity College in the Estimates, to put on record the positive attitudes that TCD had in 1912 and in 1922, and to comment appreciatively on the role of the State in the appointments of Provosts (The College electoral procedure comes up with three ordered preferences which it submits to the Taoiseach, who up to now has always accepted the first). He went on to comment on the world economic situation, warning of the need for the US to find markets for its expanded production, if another 1929 was to be avoided.

He urged the maximum development of intra-European trade, and the avoidance of imports from the dollar area of raw materials which could be obtained in Europe, using current economic data from the Central European Observer. He expressed concern over the early exhaustion of the US dollar loan to Britain.

JJ was foreshadowing the situation that led to the Marshall Plan in 1948, and by implication urging that scarce dollars be used with priority for capital re-equipment purposes.

After supporting a revised schedule for expenses of members (the 'free service' idea reserved Parliament for the rich) on July 16, on the Appropriation Bill, JJ responded constructively to some of the points made earlier in the debate. He supported the idea of 'dower-houses' for aging farmers to retire to, and hand over the farmhouse to the coming generation. He approved of the attendance of the Government at the recent European conferences, predicting that we could have an influence disproportionate to our small size.

He then spent some time on Partition, urging the routine exchange of reports, blue books and white papers on related topics. He noted that the Veterinary College was all-Ireland, and that problems of disease elimination had to be approached on an all-Ireland basis. He noted with approval the Erne hydro-electric scheme. He urged discreet co-operation at the working level, such as to help undermine the prejudices of the Protestant working people, who currently regarded '.. their Roman Catholic countrymen in all parts of the country as one of the most regrettable mistakes of the Almighty..'. He warned against regarding either Senator Douglas of himself as '..in any sense typical Protestants..' and pointed out that it would be '...a slow business to get the majority of the Northern Protestants to take a more Irish outlook on things..'.

He then commented on the proposal to encourage the raising of tomatoes in greenhouses in the Gaelthacht, supporting it with some enthusiasm, and urging that the greenhouses be heated with stoves burning locally produced turf fuel. He had himself constructed one in his own greenhouse.

I remember this episode; he used a Russian stove design, from Nick Couris of the emigre Russian colony in Collon, and built it himself. It worked quite effectively, storing heat in the brickwork for slow release, and did not require much attention, though in the long run there would have been build-up of tar in the flues, had he persisted. I remember him discussing the combustion technology with Dusty Miller, then head of R&D in Bord na Mona. Dusty understood the problems of combustion of high-moisture fuels, and tried to convey them to JJ, who persisted in underestimating them. Basically, however, JJ was 'right in principle', though perhaps underestimating the practical obstacles.

Regarding the Gaeltacht greenhouses: these were built, without heating; few of them survived the Atlantic winter storms. To implement the plan, and to bring in effectively the heating dimension, would have required some collaborative design between engineers and greenhouse experts. The concept however has re-emerged, with the energy for heating provided by a wind-generator, and this system was piloted in the 1980s in Baile an Fheirterigh at the tip of the Dingle peninsula, though apparently without long-term success on this scale. Wind-farms on the scale of megawatts are are however currently a good commercial proposition.

Continuing this omnibus contribution JJ got on to strawberries, which grow in Mayo virus-free, and could form the basis of an export enterprise. He wondered if documentation was available in Irish to enable the Gaeltacht people to pick up this type of knowhow.

He then digressed into the utility of Irish as an all-Ireland cultural unifying factor, via the interest in the North in understanding the place names, and concluded on a positive note on the need to keep alive this unique link with pre-Roman (European) culture, which was attracting the interest of 'scholars of European fame'.

While supporting the idea of a National Health Council in July 1947 JJ was critical of the procedure of Ministerial nomination; there should be a defined nomination procedure by expert groups. He similarly opposed direct Ministerial control of food premises licencing procedures.

Then on November 19 1947 on the Finance (no 2) Bill JJ spoke at some length, praising the Minister for doing many of the right things, at the risk of becoming unpopular (as indeed they did, losing the election in the following year!). He began however by querying the increase in car tax for all users: might there not be a case for favouring some for whom the use of the car was essential, like for example rural Protestant Ministers with scattered parishes?(15)

Coming to the main features of the Budget: it was balanced, not inflationary. Under the Budget the lower income groups would gain more from subsidy than they would lose by taxation. He however discounted the claim in 'irresponsible quarters' that the cost of living could be reduced by 30% by taxing incomes of £1000 or more, exhibiting the necessary numbers, to Minister Aiken's approval.

He welcomed the agreement with Britain making available phosphates, of which the land had been starved. While the agreed price for beef cattle was not up to Northern Ireland standard, it would again begin to make stall-feeding feasible. He urged some strategic planning between ourselves and the British regarding the long-term management of agricultural prices, and warned against the British extremes of subsidising of food. A budget like Aiken's then current one would be much better for the British, and it was a pity Aiken was not advising them; '...unfortunately, we gave the British Home Rule some years ago....'

Currently the British wages and prices policy was highly redistributive, but unfortunately this had the effect of surplus money spilling over into all sorts of undesirable economic activities.

He then ranged over France, where they had pegged the price of wheat and left all other prices to drift, the effect being danger of actual starvation, and the US, where the price of wheat was comparable to the Irish price, reflecting an overall global scarcity.

He complemented the Government on taking part in world conferences and generally acting the good neighbour in regard to European recovery. His concluding remarks, based on the Prodigal Son story in the Bible, are worth quoting in full:

"...During the past 15 years the Minister's Party has by no means been in the political wilderness - on the contrary it has enjoyed the fruits of office - but perhaps during much of that time it was in a sort of moral wilderness, living on the husks of exploded political, economic and ideological fantasies. But lately, and altogether to its credit, it has decided to come out of that moral wilderness, and to return, so to speak, to its father. The Irish people, the father in question, so unlike the father in the parable, has slaughtered the fatted calf and fed it to the greyhounds and is entirely disposed to send the Minister's party back again into the political wilderness. That is just not fair and the Minister's Party has my utmost sympathy..."

On December 11 1947 on the Poultry Hatcheries Bill, the purpose of which was to licence hatcheries, with a view to the control of disease, JJ was able to complement the Minister for implementing one of the proposals of the Committee on Post-Emergency Agriculture, but he was critical of the heavy-handed and arbitrary nature of the licencing procedure, which appeared to require a licence for all incubators, whether for commercial production of chicks for sale off farm, or not.

This was another example of undue dependence on Ministerial regulation and arbitrary rule of inspectors. '..I would remind the Minister that, on a famous occasion, James II claimed to exercise that power, and that, in consequence of that claim, he went on his travels and lost his job. I would ask the Minister, is he not afraid of something similar happening to himself? I think it ought to be possible, on the Report Stage, to draft and amendment which would give effect to the licencing provision in the more restricted manner which I recommend, and to deprive the Minister of that wide degree of autocratic power which he is claiming for himself under the terms of this and other sections.'

Later in the debate, JJ pointed out that the clause '..the Minister may, in his absolute discretion, revoke a poultry hatchery licence..' would be a total disincentive to any agricultural entrepreneur investing money into a hatchery.

On January 8 1948, on the Garda Siochana Bill, JJ attacked this same process of including excessive Ministerial arbitrary powers in the legislation: '..in that procedure the legal rights safeguarded by the Oireachtas have been shot away and there is substituted the discretionary power of the Minister..'.

We see here an attempt to nip in the bud what has become standard political patronage practice over the decades since, the consequences of which are currently being uncovered in the Tribunals.

After the election, on March 11 1948 a Milk Yield of Dairy Stock motion was debated.

This was JJ's last intervention before he lost his seat; the election had taken place for the Dail, and the new Government was in, with Dillon as Minister for Agriculture. The Seanad election had not yet taken place.

JJ began by asserting his Independent status, and expressing agreement with most of Minister Dillon's speech, to which he had some points to add, arising out of the Report of the Post-Emergency Agriculture Committee. Better Dairy Shorthorn bulls were needed in the dairy areas. It would be necessary to again abolish the Beef Shorthorn bull premium, as the former Minister had done, following the good advice of the Barrington Committee to the Northern Ireland Government. Dillon had reinstated it. He urged the Department to produce Monthly Reports along the lines done in Northern Ireland, or if not, to circulate the NI Reports. Beef Shorthorn bulls with Dairy Shorthorn cows produce heifers which are indistinguishable from those with Dairy Shorthorn sires, with the '..danger that they will filter into the dairy herds and prove to be ...unprofitable..'.

He then went into cow-testing procedures, and attacked the procedure of making the supervisor dependent on the number tested, proposing instead a levy on creamery milk volume, with State subvention, and the building up of the link with the Cow-Testing Associations, developing them into Dairy Cattle Improvement Associations working closely with the existing creameries.

JJ was acting as a sort of precursor of the Agricultural Institute, and was a fount of technical knowledge, which he got from reading the international literature, and with hands-on experience with his own small-scale farm experimentation. It is probable that this role was beginning to be recognised (though not alas in TCD) so that when he lost his seat in the Seanad in 1948, he was, in fact, missed. This may have been a factor in his next spell in the Seanad, as a de Valera nominee, in 1952.

My father had been re-elected in 1944, and so in 1948 he was in the position of defending his seat, in which however on this occasion he was unsuccessful, losing out to the classical scholar WB Stanford.(16)

JJ and TCD Politics

Then on November 6 it was noted that the Provost and the Registrar were to discuss the needs of the College with de Valera. An Honorary Degree for Sean Lester was projected for July 1947, in appreciation of his role as the Irish representative in the League of Nations, which role he had fulfilled throughout the war. It is difficult not to associate this with the politics of the developing attitude of TCD to de Valera, pre-dating the 1952 McConnell Provostship. JJ was influential on the Board, being still an 'enfant terrible' among the gerontocrats.

On December 11 the Board approved a memo to the Government, in which they welcomed the formation of an Irish Universities Council, to include Northern Ireland, as an opportunity for consultation on an all-Ireland basis.

At the TCD Board on February 26 1947 the Provost and Registrar reported on the meeting with the Government, but no details were given. Then on March 12 the existence of a State grant of £35K was mentioned in the estimates, so this must have been the fruit of the encounter.

Then on May 17, a committee was set up to consider suggestions for departmental grants from the Government money. This included JJ, the Bursar, the Registrar and Professor Purser (Engineering School). Two other committees were to consider appointments and building maintenance.

The period 1944 to 1950 can perhaps be identified as one in which JJ is at the peak of his College political influence. Episodes noted in the Board minutes, where I suspect he must have been been a supporter or a prime mover, included a reply in Irish verse to an Address from the Oireachtas of the Gaelic League (Jan 14 1948), refusal of access by the Colonial Office for purposes of graduate recruitment (Jan 21), permission for the reproduction of the Book of Kells by Titus Burckhardt of Berne (Feb 25), support for the 1798 150-year commemoration by loan of exhibits (October 20), and the rejection of a request to form an Orange Lodge (December 1 1948).

The foregoing juxtapositions suggest a conscious policy on the part of the College to raise its political profile, and a key role for JJ in the process.

Other indications of his role in this period included his joining the Agriculture School Committee (February 4 1948), and the assertion by this committee of its own right to appoint a committee to supervise entry, a devolutionary move from centralist Board control (February 25). Then on June 2 JJ, Duncan (economics) and Broderick (mathematics) considered applications for a Lecturer in Statistics, appointing EH Thornton on October 1.

JJ's role on the Agriculture School Committee laid the basis for his survival into the 1950s as an influence in College politics, despite marginalisation by the incoming McConnell Provostship. Later JJ was nominated by the Board to serve on a Committee to watch developments in relation to the Agricultural Institute, along with the Provost (Alton) and Professor Purser. This set the scene for the next decade, and the saga of the Kells Ingram Farm, at Townley Hall, Co Meath. This episode, conceived initially as part of the projected Agricultural Institute, was to be JJ's last attempt to introduce estate-based integrated commercial farming into the Irish agricultural scene. We treat this in the next chapter.

On October 23 1950, the College welcomed the idea of the projected 1953 Berkeley Bicentenary Conference, organised by the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society. This, as we shall see, turned out to be JJ's opportunity to contribute a keynote paper(17) identifying Berkeley's status as an economist.

JJ's post-Seanad political outreach

He was however active at the level of being an invited speaker on the Protestant secondary school circuit, from which platform he received some publicity, and he almost certainly did this in support of his Irish Association Presidential role. He kept some records of these episodes among his papers.

There is a front-page photo on the Irish Times of October 7 1949 of JJ at the distribution of the prizes in Drogheda Grammar School; he was at that time Chairman of the Board of Governors, and had helped to turn around the fortunes of the school, enlisting financial support from Mrs Balfour, of Townley Hall, who was a daughter of John Kells Ingram(19), author of Who Fears to Speak of 98. Ingram had died in 1907, and had become a Fellow of TCD in 1846, at a time when the Thomas Davis republican vision was making an impact in TCD. This episode got the full treatment from Editor Smyllie on October 15 1949, in his 'Nichevo' column; he had been invited by JJ to the event, and went at length into JJ's CV, and about the school, its background and current resurrection with local support. There had been also a feature on the school on October 7, headed 'Children who Should be Proud'.

Then on October 28 1949 JJ was the distinguished guest at the Dungannon Royal School speech day; he tried to counter the then current anti-partitionist rhetoric being promulgated by Fianna Fail out of office, via the Anti-Partition League and otherwise, calling for co-operation between north and south, and promoting, in somewhat veiled form, his long-held belief in all-Ireland government within the Commonwealth. He suggested that 'republicanism was only skin deep', given the attention paid by many in the South to the doings of the royal family.

He kept the letter of thanks, dated October 31, from the headmaster A deG Gaudin, who mentioned that a number of people had expressed to him in the previous few days their interest in JJ's remarks, referring to the pride with which the old school must consider his career. JJ was clearly holding out a hand to his home ground, in an attempt to preserve his all-Ireland vision, within which the Protestant community had a positive role to play.

There is among JJ's papers a copy of a letter to the Irish Times dated 01/06/50 in which he reacted to a letter from David Gray, the US Ambassador, on the previous day. It is worth reproducing in full:

"A propos Mr David Gray's letter in your issue of May 31 an episode took place in the early summer of 1940 which, if my interpretation is correct, places Mr de Valera's attitude in a very different light.

"At a time when German military power was sweeping over Western Europe I, in my capacity as a Senator, sought a private interview with Mr de Valera. I suggested to him that in spite of our neutrality our national safety was very precarious, and that it might be a good idea to suggest to neutral America the advisability of guaranteeing the integrity of our shores, and making good that guarantee by acquiring naval and air bases here by agreement with our Government.

"Mr De Valera discussed the suggestion in a most friendly manner and said he would make inquiries about the possibility of it.

"A few days later, when we were both going into the debating hall of the Senate, he told me that he had made inquiries and ascertained that it was utterly impossible. It was impossible to pursue the subject then, but I understood that American public opinion was at that time too neutral and too isolationist for President Roosevelt's Government, however sympathetic, to be able to entertain this suggestion.

"Am I right in this interpretation, and if I am who is to blame if America did not have bases in Eire when their country finally entered the war? "

JJ and Irish Agriculture in Transition

Our reason to go to Tuam was that we had picked up about Bobby Burke's 'collective farm'(20) from Paddy Bond in Longford, who somehow had discovered it, and had written to us about it from Cambridge, where he was in college (rather than Trinity; the Bonds of Farragh, though descended from, or at least related to, Oliver Bond of 1798 fame, were decidedly 'landed gentry', for whom the educational system in Ireland was judged to be inadequate; I suspect that the only reason he went to school in St Columba's was the war).

In Tuam we spent a couple of nights in Bobby Burke's house; he had built a small bungalow for himself, having plans for using the big-house in some socially useful mode after his mother's death, apart from its role as the management centre for the estate. He showed us round what was clearly a well-managed commercial agricultural enterprise, encountering some of the workers, who however appeared to treat him with the type of respect one would expect from their relative class positions.

I regaled Desmond Greaves some time later with our impressions of the the Burke scene; he was aware of it, having seen it on his own political travels, and was sceptical: 'why then do they call him Sir?'. In retrospect I am inclined to discount this type of critical view. There clearly was a culture-gap; the estate workers had little schooling, and little chance to accumulate experience of co-operative organisation. This situation however was remediable, with the aid of an educational programme. Bobby Burke himself was working in effect as the co-op manager; subsequently, when he got into the Seanad via the Labour Party, he employed a professional manager.

Burke's time in the Seanad, 1948-50, did not coincide with JJ's, and as far as I can find out they never worked closely together, although they had met, and were known to each other, at least by repute. Bobby Burke was almost certainly responsible for organising JJ's October 1947 Barrington Lecture in Tuam.(21).

If JJ and Bobby Burke had been in a position to collaborate, it is possible that their combined forces might have helped the Tuam co-operative to succeed, because JJ would have been supportive in the need for education in co-operative principles, and in particular for training of co-operative managers.(22). The Burke motion urging support for a co-operative approach to commercial-scale managed-estate agriculture was withdrawn for lack of support; had JJ been there he undoubtedly would have supported it. By 1952 when JJ got back to the Seanad, Bobby Burke had given up and gone to Africa.

It is quite possible that the professional manager employed by Bobby Burke, during his time in Dublin-based politics, would have acted as a traditional estate manager for an absentee landlord, and this would have soured the work-force, to the extent that in the end they opted for the division of the estate, whereupon Bobby Burke, in some disillusionment, went off to do development work in Africa. He returned from Africa in 1978 and ended his days in retirement in Belfast, close to his wife's family. He was honoured by Tuam Urban Council in 1988, for his generosity and services to the community, with a civic reception and a plaque on the wall of the Town Hall. He died in Belfast in 1998, at the age of 91, having spent his retirement working for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

While the present writer was engaged as above, trying to build the student left in TCD, and developing links with the shreds of the Connolly tradition which survived among the Dublin working-class, and the scattered remnants of the 1940s Republican Movement all over Ireland, JJ was pursuing what remained of his vision rooted in Horace Plunkett and Standish O'Grady. In 1947, in his last year as an elected Senator, he engaged in what he called an 'Arthur Young's Tour of Ireland' and gathered material for his book Irish Agriculture in Transition(23).

The starting-point for JJ's analysis was the same book which he had used in 1913 as background to his Civil War in Ulster, namely Dr Moritz J Bonn's Modern Ireland and her Agrarian Problem, published in English translation in 1906. The process of State-subsidised tenant purchase left in existence many isolated holdings without any social organisation such as had been provided, in a rudimentary and exploitative form, by the landlords, bailiffs and agents. There was no organised link via village communities, as was the case in most other European countries. The co-operative movement could have provided such an organisation, but failed to do so, except insofar as it organised the processing of milk. According to Bonn "...it cannot be said to have established in the country as a whole any system of 'communal agricultural organisation'...".

In his introductory chapter JJ contrasted the unorganised mass of de-socialised 30-acre farmsteads with '...a well-known 2000 acre mixed tillage farm in the midlands (where) 100 workers are permanently employed, a ratio of 5 persons to 100 acres....Can we reproduce under a co-operative system the technical and other conditions which enable our best-managed, privately-owned large holdings to show a high density of employment and a high output per man and per acre?...'.

There is among JJ's papers a letter from George O'Brien, dated 20/04/1948: '...I have read your manuscript with the greatest of interest and I am passing it on to Duncan. I think your idea of "Young's Tour of Ireland in 1947" an excellent one... There is no gainsaying your thesis that larger-scale farming should be attained, if at all possible. The scope for large farms is limited by the passion for land division, but the possibilities for co-operation are very great. Your insistence on the advantage of large scale production is very timely and I hope to see it published... The second part of the manuscript is one of the most acute analyses I have read of the underlying foundations of Irish agriculture...'.

In the course of the field work for this book he visited several co-operatives in Munster which had developed large-scale labour-employing agricultural enterprises, and he also visited Bobby Burke in Tuam on the Barrington circuit. He devoted several chapters to the Munster farms, but there is no mention in the book of Burke; he must have concluded that the Burke model as it stood was unworkable. Nowhere however did he find anything approximating to his 'rural civilisation' vision(24). The Munster farms were commercial capitalist farms owned by absentee shareholders who happened to be dairy-farming owners of a co-operative creamery.

The book was, perhaps, a modest success; I have met people who remember it, and thought highly of it, but it had no impact. The damage was done, the Plunkett/AE vision had been killed by the land policies of successive Free State governments. Isolated 30-acre farmsteads without social cohesion, owing their land to Fianna Fail patronage, dominated the landscape. Those with a little more capital leased land from their neighbours, who got jobs on the roads, another vehicle of Fianna Fail patronage. Those who succeeded by getting more land supported commodity-processing co-ops, with production cycles following the growth of the grass. The concept of a managed estate, with many food products, absorbing its own by-products, generating added-value local industries, and catering for year-round quality market demand, never managed to emerge as the norm.

Building the Marxist Left

The present writer was also beginning to be concerned with 'science and society' issues, and with the interactions between science and government. I had been observing the high emigration rate among science graduates, and had personally set an agenda to explore how the Irish environment could be adapted to take up the amount of science know-how which it was exporting. An influential factor at the time were the writings of JD Bernal FRS, who had visibly made the bridge between Marxism and contemporary science; Desmond Greaves, who had an applied-scientific background in industry, also contributed, though not always from a consistent scientific position(26).

Desmond Greaves and the Irish Workers' League

We as the Promethean Society were in touch with Sean Nolan, Geoff Palmer and the group around the Pearse St bookshop 'New Books', and also with John de Courcy Ireland. We were also in touch with the Connolly Group, mostly of ex-1940s internees, which included Denis Walsh, Sean Mulready, Ned Stapleton, and some others who joined subsequently, like Sean Furlong, Brian Behan (Brendan Behan's half-brother and brother respectively), Alfie Venencia and others. It was agreed to attempt to inaugurate an open Marxist political group, to be called the Irish Workers' League; the inaugural meeting was planned for some time early in 1948, and it took place in Deirdre MacDonagh's bookshop in Lower Baggot St.

There was a good attendance, mostly of people with a 1940s republican background, who had their period of education and reflection behind the wire, and were keen to go political. Sean Nolan for the bookshop group and Denis Walsh for the Connolly Group were presiding at the table; also I think Paul O'Higgins for the students group. There was a draft document on the agenda, and we discussed it. It may turn up in the CPI archive, and if so I will reference it here. It was quite tentative and was a long way from being a founding document for a CPI.

I was present, and I remember during the discussion Greaves standing up and introducing himself as acting on behalf of the International Affairs Committee of the CPGB. He supported the proposal. A probable consequence of this (though there could have been other factors) was that the next meeting, when it occurred, was very poorly attended, and the IWL got off to a bad start. The negative image of Communism as imposed in Russia under Stalin dominated the scene. Greaves picked this up later when on his travels; the perception was dominated by Stalin's purges and the forced collectivisation. I think he later regretted his premature intervention on that occasion. He was then in his 30s and his thinking was dominated by the post-war euphoria; his knowledge of Ireland was superficial; he was only beginning to realise how much he didn't know.

Later, during the summer of 1948, Denis Walsh, Sean Mulready, Ned Stapleton (all Connolly Group people, ex-internees) and I went travelling around Ireland. I had the use of JJ's old Ford Anglia (he had upgraded to a Morris 12), and we had tents. We called on 1940s IRA and other contacts, hoping to set up the IWL network in some sort of effective structured manner. I remember meeting Peter O'Connor, an International Brigade veteran from the Spanish civil war, in Waterford, Tommy Molyneux in Killarney, Bernard Kennedy in Cork, Jack Gavaghan in Loughrea, John Joe Hoey and Packy Gralton in Leitrim, Walter Dwyer in Swinford, Tommy Kilroy in Kiltimagh, and perhaps others. In the case of Hoey we had a living link with the 1934 Republican Congress, but he was living in poverty on a smallholding, with one cow, which he milked outside into a pail, for our breakfast porridge and tea. Later I heard he emigrated to the USA. I remember also hearing the Jim Gralton saga from Packy Gralton, by the light of an oil lamp in the latter's cottage, where we shared lumpy beds.

This was not a productive exercise. At the same time Gearoid Mac Carthaigh was reconstructing what became the 1950s IRA from a similar but unrelated contact network, and he succeeded. The vision which the IWL at that time projected was not a marketable package. It was basically flawed and not related to the needs of the time. The gap between the post-war European Left experience, and that of Irish insularity and war-time neutrality, was far too wide.

The 'student Left', apart from the present writer, was mostly decoupled from this process, and tended to concentrate on student politics, with some success as regards broad student democracy, but this effort was counterbalanced by their tendency to look East for international affiliations which were perceived by most students as being irrelevant. On the whole we did not succeed with our analysis of the situation; we failed to lay the foundation for next-generation politics, and condemned the aspirant Connolly-Marxist movement to be by-passed by the 1950s republican revival and the IRA armed campaign. In retrospect, our student Marxist group could perhaps have been compared to that described by Doris Lessing during the second world war war in Rhodesia: well-meaning left-wing people with British connections reacting to European politics, oriented towards the USSR and totally unaware of what was going in the undergrowth of the emergent Zimbabwe.

The Irish Workers' League's Internal Development

A Constitution was adopted; among the objectives was the establishment of diplomatic relations with the USSR; the primary objective was 'to achieve socialism in Ireland, ie, a social system in which the means of production and exchange shall be publicly owned'. 'The establishment of a united, independent and democratic republic for all Ireland' was seen as an intermediate objective. A branch structure was envisaged, and an annual conference. The Executive Committee was to have Political and Organisational sub-committees. Membership was defined.

Clearly there was the makings of a genuine radical socialist movement here, which might have collected support had it not been for the negative impact of the international scene, the emerging 'cold war' tensions, and then in the summer of 1950 the Korean war, which drove the IWL practically underground.

Subsequent to the conference, the IWL embarked on an internal educational programme, which was very much slanted towards current European Marxist ideology, and was decoupled from the current Irish needs. For example, the first issue of the IWL Education Bulletin consisted basically of a listing of the various Marxist publications available in New Books, 16a Pearse St; the orientation is towards Britain, France and Russia, and there is practically nothing with an Irish flavour. Understanding and defending the USSR was always high on the agenda.

In a subsequent issue I was concerned that people talking about 'developing the forces of production' should have been given some idea what it meant in real terms, and suggested Hogben's 'Science for the Citizen' as useful reading.

Viewed in retrospect, this was a formula for producing boring autodidacts, decoupled from the real situation in Ireland.

Subsequently there were calls for development of a sound theoretical basis by the analysis of the class forces in Ireland, and their relationships with external imperialism, and for a 'theory of allies'. A subsequent item however illustrates the gulf between the vision and the practice: it is a review by the present writer of Lenin's 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism', a book of some interest to specialists in philosophy, but about as remote from the immediate needs of a struggling radical working-class party as one could get. There follow some letters from readers, one critical of the bookish orientation of the aspirant educators, including the present writer.

The September 1950 issue has a note by Sam Nolan on the circulation of the paper Irish Workers' Voice; they had targeted 6000 and were attaining about 1000, of which about 400 were personal sales by members, a derisory amount.

I recollect trying to sell the paper in public places and encountering personal hostility, a consequence of the apparent promotion of support for the USSR and the post-war Eastern European scene. Anti-communism was ingrained in Irish culture, a consequence of the perceived attitude of Communist governments to religion. The atmosphere had been made much worse by the Korean war. Our earlier attempts to make contact with the CPNI and to begin developing some analysis of the national question, under Greaves' influence, had foundered; the Northern comrades, mostly crypto-Unionists, were glad of any excuse, such as that presented by the priority of the 'peace issue' seen globally, for not discussing all-Ireland issues. Our failure to do this undoubtedly fuelled the 1950s IRA.

The December 1950 issue is dominated by feedback from the Warsaw Peace Congress and the November Cominform meeting. There is a 'Salute to Stalin'. There is a call by Mairin Mooney (whom I was then courting and whom I married in January 1952) for the leadership to run special classes for women members on women's issues, and a review by Paddy Carmody of TA Jackson's 'Old Friends to Keep'. This book in its time was seen as a serious contribution to Marxist literary criticism.

Thus ends the 1940s decade. The 'left' in Ireland had on the whole got off to a bad start; dominated by bookishness, by respect for Stalin and the Cominform, turned in on itself, doctrinaire, it provided meagre raw material for intelligent Marxist analysis of the Irish situation. There was, however, nowhere else for the aspirant radical critical intellectual to go. The present writer stuck with it, and fought for a genuine critical view where and when he could.

Notes and References

2. C Desmond Greaves, author of the Life and Times of James Connolly and Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution (Lawrence and Wishart, 1960 and 1971 respectively). He had set himself the task of encouraging the development of independent Marxist thought within Ireland, and ensuring that the Irish when they emigrated to Britain learned to act politically in the Irish interest, the vehicle for this being the Connolly Association, with its paper the Irish Democrat. I have partially abstracted his journal, which he kept from the 1930s to his death in 1988, where it bears on this narrative, in the hypertext. An overview is accessible from Appendix 10 and there is a 1940s module which expands on the background to these TCD and other Irish contacts in the 1940s. I am indebted to Anthony Coughlan, who is CDG's literary executor, for access to the Greaves journals.

3. Owen Sheehy-Skeffington (OS-S) was a leading liberal socialist, on the staff of the TCD French Department, a founder member of the Dublin University Fabian Society, which was an accessible forum for socialist thought. We as a student group had a somewhat difficult relationship with OS-S; he had us identified in his mind as a pernicious Stalinist cult, and in retrospect he can, to some extent, be forgiven. It could be argued that the Trotskyist position, with which he identified, was equally pathological, though in different ways. An account of the relationship between OS-S and the student left has been given by his widow Andrée Sheehy-Skeffington in Skeff, a biography published in 1991 by Lilliput, Dublin. I contributed some notes to the author, and have included some subsequent comments by myself and by Paul O'Higgins in the 1940s political module.

4. The Irish Students Association had been founded originally in 1931, and was one of the all-Ireland bodies which the Irish Association had attempted to foster after its foundation in 1938. The NUI authorities had opposed the ISA, while TCD encouraged it; there is correspondence with de Valera on the topic in the Irish Association archive which is in the NI Public Record Office; see the 1930s module of the Irish Association theme.

5. The personnel who were in the lead in the Fabian Society and the Student Representative Council are partially on record in the TCD Calendar editions of the period, though there are gaps and lapses. I have tried to set the record straight in the 1940s political module, in the section headed 'Fabian Society'. I have also expanded on the Promethean Society role.

6. See Chapter 2 for some background to MacManus and the Thomas Davis Society.

7. I have overviewed the role of JD Bernal FRS (1901-1971) in the 'science and society' context in Appendix 11 and supportive hypertext.

8. Arnold Marsh was a Quaker schoolteacher (Newtown in Waterford, Drogheda Grammar School) with a background in economics who was a leading Labour Party member. His book Full Employment in Ireland published in 1946 was regarded in left-wing circles as an Irish approach to the problems identified in the Beveridge Report, and widely welcomed.

9. Local and Regional Government in Ireland, Roy H W Johnston, Regional Studies Association, 15/09/1990. This paper is part of the raw material for the 1990s chapter and is accessible in the hypertext.

10. The Irish Meat and Livestock Industry, Thomas Shaw; reprint from Studies September 1946. There are comments by JJ, TA Smiddy, J Hughes and EJ Sheehy in the same issue.

11. This argument relates to JJ's support for the Orpen model of rural development, as subsequently outlined in Irish Agriculture in Transition, and currently in his 'rural civilisation' SSISI paper (JSSISI xviii, 1, 1947-8). These were all developments of his earlier 1941 SSISI paper on 'capitalisation of Irish agriculture' (JSSISI xvi, 44, 1941-2).

12. The present writer had encountered in England in 1947 the workings of the 'War Ags', having worked as a farm worker during the College vacation, after attending a CPGB 'summer school'. They were regarded as a progressive consequence of the war emergency situation, on which it was hoped to build politically, and Party personnel were involved.

13. There is the embryo here of JJ's 'Berkeleyan theory of credit' as subsequently developed in the 1960s, in an unpublished monograph.

14. This article was a report of his Athlone Barrington Lecture, and I have summarised it in the Barrington module.

15. JJ was acutely aware of the economic problems of his son-in-law, then Rector of the parishes of Ballinaclough and Templederry, south of Nenagh; I expand on this in the 1940s family module of the hypertext.

16. I have reproduced JJ's 1948 election address in Appendix 8. I have also added some notes on his attitude to the 1949 elections, which in the end he decided not to context.

17. This keynote paper was subsequently published: Berkeley's Influence as an Economist, Hermathena Vol LXXXII p76, 1953.

18. I go into the details of JJ's Presidency of the Irish Association in the 1940s hypertext module of this theme; it had been founded in 1938 by a group of liberal Unionists with an all-Ireland vision, headed by Lord Charlemont (who incidentally had been old John Johnston's landlord). JJ succeeded the latter in its Presidency in 1948. In the NI Public Record Office the Irish Association archive of JJ's Presidency however is somewhat deficient. I overview the history of the Association in Appendix 9.

19. This contact undoubtedly led later to the Kells Ingram Farm episode in the TCD School of Agriculture saga, treated in the TCD Board thread of the hypertext.

20. Bobby Burke was a progressive landlord near Tuam who had attempted to convert his estate to an integrated worker-owned co-operative farm. He became a leading member of the Labour Party, and was elected to the Seanad in 1948.

21. I am also indebted to Maurice Laheen, the Tuam local historian, for picking up this event, which is described in the 1940s Barrington module of the hypertext.

22. JJ in his contribution to the report of the 1922-24 Agriculture Commission had written an Appendix calling for training in co-operative management. I have referenced this, and other related work for the 1926 Prices Commission in which he recorded French agricultural co-operative experience, from Chapter 3.

23. Irish Agriculture in Transition, Hodges Figgis, Dublin and Blackwell, London, 1951; I have abstracted this substantially in the hypertext.

24. JJ did succeed in tracking down an estate which might, under more favourable political circumstances, have evolved in the direction of this model at Dovea, an estate owned owned by the Ballyduff Co-op Creamery, near Thurles.

25. I have given more background detail in the 1940s political module of the hypertext.

27. I have again given more background detail in the 1940s political module of the hypertext.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999