In conclusion I try to summarise the development of JJ's economic thinking over the decades, focusing on the combination of liberal free trade with social control excercised via co-operative ownership of the means of production and distribution. I supplement this with an outline of my own evolving democratic political model, based on a requirement for democratic contol over the movement of capital, with an explicit role for the support of science, technology and the innovation process.

It is necessary to consider the nature of the failure of the Irish co-operative movement, as exemplified in the Plunkett model, and the failure of JJ's analysis to have any impact upon it. The key issue here is the real-world drift towards commodity-based producer co-operatives, rather than the type of community-based co-operatives to which the early visionaries had aspired. This issue was addressed by JJ; he attempted in 1951, unsuccessfully, to revive the earlier community approach, in the form of a projected network of specialising family farms grouped around a central large-scale 'estate' under co-operative management, with the latter taking care of all marketing, including the strategic planning of production to adapt to market needs, servicing the whole group of farms associated with the central co-operative 'estate'.(1). He was attempting to democratise the working of the large-scale, labour-employing commercial manor-farm, of which he had shown the productivity to be far superior to that of the isolated family farm.

He had been attempting to promote aspects of this approach consistently over the decades, beginning with his 1913 promotion of consumer co-operation in TCD, followed by his exposure to experience of producer co-operation abroad, initially in his Albert Kahn analysis of experience in India in 1914-15, and then in France in 1916(2). This road of development, which he had hopefully envisaged taking place under all-Ireland Home Rule conditions, however was rudely interrupted by the 1916 Rising, and the Partition politics which followed. JJ's attention was diverted towards a dedicated but unsuccessful political campaign against Partition, and then to the long-term struggle to minimise its negative effects.

In this context, he made repeated efforts to defend and promote the co-operative movement. He contributed to the 1923 Agriculture Commission on the training of co-operative managers, and then extensively to the 1926 Prices Commission based on French experience of co-operative marketing picked up during his Rockefeller Fellowship(3). He had attempted to get the Plunkett House Library to set up as an Albert Kahn Documentation Centre(4). In all this however he was frustrated by the Civil War (eg the burning of Plunkett's house, and the transfer of Plunkett's attention to his Oxford centre), and by the effective partition of the co-operative movement, dependent as it was on State subvention, thanks to the way it had been related to Plunkett's Department of Agriculture pre-war, in a dependent mode.

He attempted in the 1920s to use the Barrington Lectures in support of his co-operative development vision(5), during the period when they had been abandoned by the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society. He made an attempt to get into the Seanad in 1926, which was unsuccessful despite some cultivation of the rural Protestant vote. He then became active in the SSISI, and succeeded in getting the Barrington Lectures back under SSISI management by 1932, using his influence to keep them going on an all-Ireland basis. He began to gain first-hand experience of small-farm economics, in a process dismissed by his academic colleagues as 'hobby-farming': he employed a man to do the work, and kept the books, so that he developed a hands-on feel for costs and prices.

In the 1930s JJ began to pay attention to building up an academic reputation, with his work on Irish economic history, with particular reference to Berkeley's Querist, of which he recognised and promoted the role as seed-bed for ideas relating to the economics of development at the outer fringes of the English imperial system. He continued his polemical writings, criticising de Valera's policies(6), which he saw as disastrous for the primary producers, particularly the policy of attempted self-sufficiency in wheat(7), which he later identified as being a contributor to the wartime agricultural crisis, which generated near-famine conditions.

In the Seanad from 1938 JJ continued his gadfly role, urging the need to negotiate a win-win deal with the British, such as to build up Irish agricultural prosperity while effectively feeding Britain during the war(8). He made extensive use of his contacts with agriculture in the North for comparison with his own 'hobby-farming' experience, advocating, in effect, the development of an all-Ireland agricultural policy. He was involved from 1938 with the development of the Irish Association, in an attempt to keep all-Ireland intellectuial contacts alive.

Post-war, after a period of actively contributing to the Agriculture Commission, and surveying what remained of the co-operative movement(9) as it had evolved, JJ again resorted to what his academic colleague again dismissed as 'hobby-farming', demonstrating that small-farm livestock production could profitably be combined with market gardening, in a farm in Laois. He developed further his north-south links via the Irish Association(10), of which he was President from 1946 to 1954, succeeding Lord Charlemont. Academically his work on Berkeley led to his giving the keynote paper at an international conference in 1953, in commemoration of the bicentenary.

In TCD JJ's main attention was on the campaign to defend the TCD role in agricultural education, the focus being the Kells Ingram Farm in Meath(11). This was an example of the large-scale productive labour-employing commercial enterprise that JJ had over the years attempted to get accepted as the norm, transforming the 'landlord's estate' perception by means of co-operative ownership. When this failed, in the environment dominated by inter-university rivalry and State centralist control of the agricultural research process, JJ turned his attention initially to his attempt to develop a Berkeleyan theory of credit, and then to his Berkeley Querist project(12), on which he spent his declining years, publishing finally in 1970. During this process he participated in the debates leading up to Ireland's accession to the European Economic Community, which he initially supported, but then opposed, on the basis that its volume-subsidised agriculture would undermine the third-world development process, just as British subsidies had undermined Irish agicultural development.

JJ's role as a 'one-man Agricultural Institute' in the decades before 'an Foras Taluntais' was set up was widely recognised in the agricultural research community; Dr Tom Walsh, who headed the Institute, turned up at JJ's funeral in 1972.

My own political development was not consciously linked to that of my father, but there is no doubt that the family and educational environment was very much in the Protestant liberal tradition, with emphasis on technical competence and knowing how things worked, and how to make things that worked. The influence of the war, and the early use of electronics to pick up via short-wave radio what was going on globally, despite the Irish censorship, must have contributed to my taking up with the school group that became the Promethean Society(13) and subsequently the student Left in TCD.

The political model which we had worked at the micro level, in that we identified the need for student democracy, and we were successful in reforming the Student Representative Council, and giving it a variety of progressive social roles. Our perceptions of what was going on at the macro level, in the Irish environment, and in the global post-war environment, were both however seriously flawed. In the Irish case, the culture-gap between our attempted Marxist analysis of the situation and the then Irish political environment was huge, the majority of the group being of British origin. The bridging of the gap was attempted individually by the present writer, and by Justin Keating. As regards the global environment, the scene was increasingly dominated by the black and white characterisations of the Cold War, and the developments of Soviet foreign policy under Stalin.

(I was also conscious of the culture-gap between world-class science and the state of Irish economic development. I had encountered it initially with the Ecole Polytechnique laboratory in Paris, and later in the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. This was the 'science and society' problem(14), as instanced at the fringe of an imperial/colonial system, where the core was dominated by the military-industrial complex.)

In this political situation it is not surprising that the Irish Workers League, which emerged at the end of the 1940s and struggled on through the 1950s, remained as an isolated group without significant influence, somewhat like a religious sect, looking to a remote presumed utopia, dominated by politically unrealistic alien concepts like the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', in an economic environment dominated by emigration, or by the aspiration to start a small business or become self-employed(15).

Insofar as anyone was trying to do anything 'politically' in the black 1950s, it was the republican movement. We were of course critical of what they were doing, recognising the counter-productive nature of the 'politics of the gun'; we aspired to show the way to a genuine political road to Irish unity, beginning with the unity of the working class. Contact-points however were few. It was necessary for internment to run its course, and another republican generation emerge with the desire to 'go political', before there was any meeting of minds.

The meeting of minds began to take place in the late 1950s, with my articles in the Plough, and encounters with Sean Cronin. Then while I was in London, in the early 1960s, Cathal Goulding initiated in Ireland the process for commemorating the Wolfe Tone bicentenary, a process which led eventually in 1964 to the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society (WTS)(16). At the same time in London Desmond Greaves was independently laying the basis for the 'civil rights' approach to political reform in the North, and I participated in this environment. So on my return to Ireland in 1963 the contact points and the organisational forms were there, ripe for the introduction of leavening ideas.

Scientifically my experience in London had enabled me to make the transition from the support-technology of high-energy particle physics, via systems engineering in an industrial environment, towards techno-economic analysis in an investment planning environment. This enabled me to contribute significantly to the understanding of the innovation process in the Irish economic development context(17), as well as to earn a living in Ireland.

What I had in mind politically was a democratic-revolutionary movement which would involve not only the 'working class' of Marxist tradition, but also wider groups of 'working people': working managers, working owner-managers, self-employed, all of whom seemed to me to have a potential common interest in democratic control over the capital investment process, and in building bridges with corresponding groups in the North, working politically towards an inclusive united Ireland, in a Northern environment where, given civil rights, it would be no longer regarded as being subversive and one could do so openly.

We were aspiring to a creative fusion of the Fenian and Marxist traditions, getting rid of the military aspect of Fenianism, substituting political education and intellectual discipline. We also wanted to get rid of the Stalinist incubus from the Marxist tradition, and we tried to do this by building on Connolly, and by attempting to regenerate the co-operative movement. In this latter aspect I was, unwittingly, following in JJ's footsteps.

The WTS enabled ideas along these lines to be clarified, and the problem arose of how to transmit them so as to be implemented by the activists in the movement. This process was rendered somewhat complex by the structure of the movement, consisting as it did of an active 'core' (the 'army') and a relatively passive and conservative shell (Sinn Fein). According to Goulding, the 'army' aspect was moribund, and the relatively few remaining activists in the 'army' were open to new ideas fuelling the politicisation process, and would be likely to respond by increasingly taking part in the Sinn Fein cumainn, and transforming Sinn Fein into a principled all-Ireland party of democratic social reform by constitutional means.

There were of course tensions within this projected process. For example, the concept of the Army Council as the Government of the Republic, with apostolic succession 'as by law established' from the First Dail, was deeply rooted in the culture, and this was an elitist element in the philosophy. The Army Council felt it had the right to impose its will on the Ard Comhairle, and the latter felt it had to treat the former with respect. There were also elements within the 'army' for whom the military aspect remained sacrosanct, and who regarded Goulding's projected politicisation process with suspicion; in this context the prime mover was Mac Stiofain.

I was prepared to accept Goulding's plan, and to help him implement constitutional change in the movement from within. It was a gamble, but it seemed to me at the time likely to pay off, by enabling an effective broad-based political movement of the Left to be developed. The alternative process, based on the narrow 'Marxist' orthodoxy of the Irish Workers' League, isolated by the alien Stalinist influence, was in discredit. So I joined Goulding's 'HQ staff' and helped to set up a series of educational conferences, with which we hoped to enable the ideas emerging from the WTS to gain acceptance(18).

This process did not get under way sufficiently to enable the 1965 Ard Fheis to reflect the new progressive thinking, but by the 1966 Ard Fheis it became dominant, with Goulding himself elected to the Ard Comhairle, and the 'army' activists integrating themselves into a regenerating active Sinn Fein. The Republican Clubs in the North had been set up and were beginning to assert a quasi-legal existence. The need for a Civil Rights approach in the North was beginning to be understood, so that when in 1966 the opportunity came to set up a broad-based Civil Rights movement, with the War Memorial Hall meeting planned for November, the Republican Club activists were prepared to go along with the idea, swallowing their unease at the name of the location, and keeping their 'united Ireland' ideas on the back burner. The 'educational conference' approach was beginning to pay off.

The momentum for the War Memorial Hall meeting had come from the Dublin WTS on the initiative of Anthony Coughlan, who had taken over the secretaryship, and was editing the newsletter Tuairisc. In retrospect it could be argued that he and I should have been better co-ordinated; we were working quite independently, with the present writer trying to build up a broad-based political understanding of non-violent political philosophy throughout Ireland, including an attempt to regenerate the co-operative movement, while AC was concentrating on the Achilles heel of Unionism, civil rights, setting up the June 1966 Maghera meeting which led to the War Memorial Hall meeting and the setting up of the NICRA(19).

Our thinking in mid-1967 is encapsulated in the reports of the June meeting of the 3 Wolfe Tone Societies, Dublin, Belfast and Cork, which was broad-based, had many visitors, and generated some political euphoria(20). With hindsight however, it is evident that the Northern Republican Clubs were not fully politicised to the extent of being ready to take up, with understanding, the challenge of how to support the NICRA actively, while keeping the national unity objective on the back burner. They were open to subversion by Mac Stiofain's militarism, which became easy once Unionism responded to the Civil Rights demands with guns and armoured vehicles, as they did with the B-Specials in August 1969.

In an almost incredible error of judgment, Cathal Goulding had in 1967 given Mac Stiofain a 'military intelligence' role in the North, in effect giving him carte blanche to undermine the politicisation process which was going on via the Republican Clubs, and lay the basis for the subsequent rapid emergence of the Provisionals, as a military response to the 1969 B-Special pogroms, which was of course exactly what the Unionist hard-core leadership wanted(21).

Our strategy might have succeeded had the build-up of the Civil Rights been allowed to proceed with a slow but steady strengthening of the organisation, cross-community, with Trade Union and Co-operative Movement participation. Instead the pace was forced, a key factor being the January 1969 Peoples Democracy march on Derry, which 'trailed the coat' through a series of Antrim Protestant towns, and led to the Burntollet ambush. This polarised the situation into sectarian mode, pushed the Civil Rights demands into the Catholic ghettoes, and stimulated the August 1969 pogrom led by the heavily-armed B-Specials, which triggered the process that led to the Provisionals, giving Mac Stiofain what he wanted, and incidentally what the Unionists and the British military establishment also wanted: a military campaign which could be contained, with the working people of the North increasingly divided on sectarian lines, perpetuating British rule.

As a consequence of the foregoing the political process via Civil Rights was shattered, and the call went out for arms to 'defend the people', instead of a political call to disarm the B-Specials and enable a Civil Rights environment to be established. Voices such as mine, and those of Anthony Coughlan and Desmond Greaves, which called for the latter, were increasingly disregarded. The Provisional process set in inexorably, fuelled by fringe-Fianna Fail support, the key actors being Haughey, Blaney and Boland, supported by Dublin speculative property-developers, whose corrupt links with Fianna Fail politics Dublin left-republican activists were beginning to expose(22).

I have to conclude, self-critically, that I had totally underestimated the strength and persistence of the Fenian 'physical force as principle' culture, and likewise the strength and persistence of the loyalist culture of violence on which the maintenance of their hegemony depended. The people concerned were, and still are, all working people, whose objective interests, under normal circumstances, should coincide. Had we succeeded in building a Civil Rights environment in the North, without violent disruption, it would over time have been possible for working people irrespective of religion to identify their common interests. The Provisional decades have made this more difficult, but we must keep trying to identify areas of common ground, and build on them.

During all this period of intense political activity, I managed during working hours to contribute to the development of the use of the Aer Lingus computer in techno-economic analysis of projected investment decisions, and I discovered that this in fact existed as a discipline known as Operations Research (OR), which JD Bernal during the war had had a hand in initiating. In Aer Lingus we initiated the development of OR as a network within Ireland, and participated internationally, to the extent that we were able to pull the 1972 International Federation of OR Societies (IFORS) conference to Dublin(23).

After the movement was split at the (postponed '1969') Ard Feis in January 1970, I was increasingly marginalised politically, and I began to give priority attention to building up an applied-science consultancy business, working mainly at the interface between Trinity College and industry, initially with the Statistics Department, and then later across the spectrum with the Applied-Research Consultancy Group(24). This was a learning process, and it is possible to conclude that the creative role of the third-level system in economic development is concentrated in the postgraduate system, primarily at the MSc level, and that the uptake of creative graduates into economic life can be enhanced if small innovative firms are encouraged to start up, to take the results of college-based research towards effective implementation.

It was possible to keep in touch politically, with the Left and with the Labour Party, though these contacts on the whole were not fruitful. The Wolfe Tone Society went into decline. There was a dearth of publication outlets for critical or theoretical papers. Some reflective synthesis which I did, and presented to a Wolfe Tone Society meeting, were taken up by a Trotskyist gadfly journal; a reflective political publication by JJ had similarly been taken up by another Trotskyist publisher(25) in the 1960s. Continuing in this mode in the 1980s and 1990s it became evident that the innovative enterprise process needed regional enhancement, if over-concentration of population in Dublin was to be avoided; concepts like the 'regional technopole' emerged into development economics thinking. This process however needs to be linked to genuine devolved regional government(26), and this issue remains very much on the agenda, being a major principled concern of the increasingly influential Green party, as well as a pragmatic requirement arising from the peace process in the North, under the Good Friday Agreement, with its provision for cross-border linkages.

The final collapse of the USSR and discredit of the central-State model of socialist planning was a focus of comment(27). There were many episodes at the interface between science, technology and business, mostly related to human aspects of the innovation process(28). The Maastricht and subsequent Nice referenda focused critical thinking on European issues(29), though the field was muddied by the increasingly strident intervention of the 'Catholic Right', on issues like divorce. The increasing importance of the Internet made it feasible to address more agressively the 'science and society'(30) issue in the national context. The ongoing Northern problem and the roads leading eventually to the Good Friday Agreement were, I think, influenced by some of our analyses(31). The ongoing role of science in society, the crisis in the Left and the perceived need for a 'left-green convergence' remain top of the agenda(32).

Concluding Theses

1. The accumulated military experience of activists in an armed movement makes adaptation to subsequent democratic politics extremely difficult, though it can sometimes be done.

2. The State should be primarily a referee not a player in the economic game.

3. The players in the economic game can be individuals or organisations, but in the latter case the Board of Directors needs to be democratically accountable to all who depend on the firm, not simply to the owners of capital, a fortiori if the latter are remote. This is the central problem of the Left: how to bring this about politically.

4. Economic games can be played at the local, regional national and international levels, ideally under fair trade conditions, with democratic contol by workers, consumers, suppliers, all being owners, at all levels. The 'core-fringe' development problem, in post-imperial situations, is how to set up the 'fair trade' rules, and how to foster the 'knowhow', or 'enterprise', factor of production(33) in 'fringe' regions/nations. There is a role here for a co-operative approach to the availability of credit, in the manner foreshadowed earlier by JJ(12). Credit should be accessible, under locally-defined 'terms and conditions', on the basis of consumer demand and available productive know-how, rather than possession of land or capital as collateral.

5. Strong local and regional democratic government, within national and international frameworks, is an essential part of the State referee role, as a provider of education for cultural (including technical) competence, laws of contract, justice etc. Government by in-groups, defined in terms of religion, ethnicity or colour, are incompatible with justice: equal rights for all citizens is essential. Ireland, India, South Africa and Israel/Palestine share common features derived from religious and racial hegemonist pathologies rooted in British imperial culture(34).

6. Means must be found to prevent the above democratic process from being subverted by the type of corruption generated by private property in land, and the added value generated by re-zoning. As an interim measure, compulsory purchase by the local authority at the prior price, followed by leasing to the re-zoned users, would capture the added value for the community. In the longer term, the principle of private ownership of land needs to be questioned. Land should be owned by the whole people through the State, and leased out as a valuable resource for socially-defined use.

7. Economic development must increasingly become dependent on sustainable resources. This will require increasing scientific understanding of the properties of materials, of organisms, and of the production process, especially the interaction of the latter with human and organisational factors.

Notes and References

2. See JJ's Albert Kahn Reports: the main one based on the 1914-15 work which concentrates on India, and the additional 1916 report on French wartime food production.

3. See JJ's addendum on co-op managers to the 1923 Agriculture Commission Report, also his addendum to the 1926 Prices Report on his French experience.

4. The background to this is in the 1920s Garnier letters.

5. Aspects of JJ's support for the co-operative movement are documented in the 1920s Plunkett House module of the hypertext, and in the 1920s Barrington module. See also his Groundwork of Economics which was distilled from his Barrington material. In Chapter 3 of this work JJ innovatively introduced 'knowhow' as a key fourth factor of production, additional to the traditional 'land, labour and capital'.

6. JJ's 1934 Nemesis of Economic Nationalism emphasised the importance of the primary agricultural producer being adequately rewarded, thus generating a home market for industry.

7. JJ attempted in his 1938 wheat paper to argue against self-sufficiency in wheat, demolishing the then current arguments in favour which were based on a flawed analysis of late 18th century economics. This paper was unpublished, but he used it subsequently in his Seanad speeches during the war.

8. JJ's Seanad speeches from 1938 onwards are available in the 1930s and 1940s Public Service modules of the hypertext.

9. Aspects of his vision were to be found in RM Burke's co-operative estate and in the Dovea farm in Tipperary; he attempted to integrate the experience in his Irish Agriculture in Transition, particularly in the Orpen chapter.

10. JJ's relationship with the Irish Association is best overviewed from Appendix 9; it was his way of promoting an all-Ireland view in the North.

11. The Kells Ingram Farm saga is treated initially in policy terms via JJ's contribution to the post-emergency agriculture commission, and then later via the 1950s TCD Board records..

12. JJ's Bishop Berkeley's Querist in Historical Perspective was published by Dun Dealgain Press in 1970. JJ had attempted to develop his Consumer Demand as the Basis of Credit, based on Berkeley, but this remained unpublished. This perhaps remains to be developed further, as a weapon for use in the context of the need for expanded local co-operative credit, in the interstices, or at the fringe, of a large continental single-currency area under the control of a federal central bank.

13. The emergence of the Promethean Society is treated in the 1940s political module of the hypertext.

14. The 'science and society' problem begins to be treated in the 1940s and 1950s theme modules of the hypertext. I also begin in the 1950s to recognise it in its socio-technical and techno-economic aspects.

15. The political isolation of the 1950s aspirant Left is treated in the 1950s political module of the hypertext.

16. My initial approach on my return from London is outlined in my 1964 memo. I have also abstracted the Wolfe Tone Society records in the hypertext.

17. I had occasion to comment on the 1964 OECD Report in the December 1966 issue of Development.

18. I have recorded some of the details of this process in the 1960s RJ political module of the hypertext.

19. The basic Maghera agenda is outlined in Tuairisc 7; I have also abstracted the approach to Civil Rights via the Desmond Greaves diaries.

20. This 3-WTS conference is treated in the 1967+ RJ political module of the hypertext.

21. I have treated this in my notes on Mac Stiofain's memoirs (Gordon Cremonesi, 1975) in the hypertext.

22. I go into some detail, as best I can, in a very confused situation, in the 1969 RJ political module, but perhaps the best insight into the Fianna Fail urban land speculation aspect is given in Justin O'Brien's Arms Trial.

23. I have made available some notes on the 1972 IFORS conference in the hypertext.

24. Some of this work has been described in Julian mac Airt's book Operations Research in Ireland (Mercier, 1988). See also the 1970s socio-technical module for an overview of the TCD Applied Research Consultancy Group.

25. My paper On the Problem of Democratic Unity was published in The Ripening of Time #9, March 1978. Extracts are available in Appendix 10. JJ's Irish Economic Headaches had been published in 1966 by Aisti Eireannacha (Rayner O'Connor Lysaght).

26. I developed ideas around the 'Regional Technopole' model at a Constitution Club seminar in November 1986.

27. The crisis in the USSR in 1989 prompted me to record some thoughts on Gorbachov prior to his fall.

28. I have summarised some of the highlights in the 1990s socio-technical module of the hypertext.

29. It was impossible to decouple the divorce and Maastricht referenda, and this led to tensions among those critical of the trend into European integration. I have treated this in the mid-90s political module of the hypertext.

30. I develop this in 'outreach' mode, perhaps unconsciously in JJ's footsteps, and also in more specialised mode, in the 1990s science and society module of the hypertext.

31. My 1988 paper on Irish national identity to the Ulster Quaker Peace Committee may have contributed some leavening ideas; likewise perhaps the somewhat apocryphal 1986 Labour Party paper. More influential perhaps was the 1992 Opsahl submission, invoked by Andy Pollak's initiative.

32. Can the 'soft' Plunkett-Russell model, fortified by emergent regional policy ideas, be adapted to Green Party ecological thinking, and enhanced with understanding of the nature of the State to 'harden' it enough to be effective politically, without repeating the Stalinist/Fenian excesses? Could this perhaps be based on my Culliton critique, as submitted to the CII? Might the mcp98 paper be of use in developing the political angle?

33. See JJ's 1926 Groundwork in Economics, Chapter 3, where he (I think innovatively) introduces 'enterprise' as a 'factor of production' along with land, labour and capital.

34. See Partition in Ireland, India and Pakistan - Theory and Practice, TG Fraser, Macmillan, London, 1984. (TCD Library)

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Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999