HISTORY: Freedom to Choose: Cork and Party Politics in Ireland 1918-1932 By Micheál MartinCollins Press, 288pp. €22.95
‘FROM AN EARLY age, I have been interested in politics and the political process”, writes Micheál Martin in the introduction to his book on party politics in Cork city in the decade after independence. When studying history at UCC he became fascinated by the way in which locality, family and friendships in Cork interacted with the national issues being debated in Dáil Éireann. Martin joins a select group of historian TDs, including John Marcus O’Sullivan, Conor Cruise O’Brien, David Thornley, Maurice Manning, not forgetting John A Murphy (who taught Martin at UCC) in the Senate.
But Martin is unique as none of these wrote an academic study of their own constituency. He was born and educated in Cork, played a prominent part in local government, has been TD for Cork South Central since 1989 and has held several cabinet posts, including currently Minister for Foreign Affairs. Although he is writing about the first decade of the new state, the political insights he has gained at local and national level are threaded through this book.
Over the past 30 years a series of groundbreaking local studies has deepened our knowledge and understanding of the Irish Revolution. Most of these concluded with the Civil War; Martin’s book is one of the first to look at the period up to Fianna Fail’s accession to power in 1932.
In the December 1918 general elections the Cork city electorate increased from 12,000 to 50,000 (including women for the first time), national issues predominated, and Sinn Féin’s victory, as Martin argues, introduced a new type of public representative. However, it wasn’t quite the tabula rasa that he implies and the Cork City constituency needs to be understood in its wider historical context: in the 40 years before 1918, it included Charles Stewart Parnell and that great maverick William O’Brien among its MPs.
In the Pact election of June 1922 Labour topped the poll in Cork city, benefiting, Martin thinks, from the "plague on both your houses" mood of the electorate as civil war loomed. But this was not sustained in the August 1923 election. The new Cumann na nGaedheal party had the support of the local bishop, Daniel Cohalan, and the local paper, the Cork Examiner, advised de Valera (then in jail) to "decently retire from public life". Professor Alfred O'Rahilly of UCC, hailed by the Examineras "one of the greatest intellectuals in the country" was imposed by Cumann na nGaedheal HQ on the constituency. O'Rahilly disdained canvassing and preferred to address the electorate from the lofty columns of the Examiner. Although he won a seat he resigned in high dudgeon the following year, commenting bitterly: "When I go to Dublin the powers that be treat me as an outsider and as a negligible automaton. What on earth am I there for? Any fool can vote the ticket".
Although Sinn Féin's Mary MacSwiney won a seat in 1923, the party's policy of abstention from the Dáil was increasingly seen as a cul-de-sac. Martin observes interesting local straws in the wind with the founding in 1925 of an Irish-Ireland Society consisting of republicans and pro-Treatyites and the appearance of the Irish Tribune, which was published in Cork in 1926. This had the backing of two prominent Cork businessmen, TP Dowdall and Hugo Flinn, and of Alfred O'Rahilly. They all wanted an end to Sinn Féin abstention and when Fianna Fáil was founded in 1926 and entered the Dáil the following year, Dowdall and Flinn joined the new party.
MARTIN PAYS PARTICULAR attention to the importance of local elections and how they reflected a continual oscillation between local and national issues. In 1920, TDs were encouraged to stand as candidates, thereby setting a significant precedent, although some, like Liam de Róiste, were unhappy at the prospect of getting involved in “local petty affairs” particularly constituents “looking for a job at Ford’s, wanting information regarding rents, investments, wanting money, even influence to get a supply of coal”. De Róiste’s diaries in the Cork Archives Institute are an incomparable source, which Martin has mined thoroughly. In the 1929 local elections the campaign focused on the welfare and improvement of the city with the Business Party and Independents gaining most seats. In the 1932 general election priorities oscillated again towards national questions with local government hardly featuring at all as an issue.
Given Martin’s career in local government, his discussion of brokerage and the role of the backbench TD clearly reflects his own experiences. Local authorities had huge powers until they were clipped in the 1940s. Political scientists, for example Mart Bax, have dated the growing involvement of TDs in local politics to the 1930s when they began to realise that “ideology and regional hero worship were no longer enough for a safe seat”. Martin may be correct when he argues that this happened earlier in Cork but further local studies are needed before this can be conclusively proved. Dáil attendance was a problem for both parties, as their respective minute books demonstrated, with TDs seeking leave of absence for attendance at council meetings.
Martin’s historical judgements are even-handed and although he shakes his head at Cumann na nGaedheal’s lax party organisation, his respect for men like Cosgrave is evident. I missed the sense of place which he emphasised in his introduction and here his long and deep proximity has perhaps restricted his vision. But his book brings out the overlapping frontiers between local and national history and the longer perspective they offer on the process of political change and stabilisation in Ireland after 1922.
Deirdre McMahon lectures in history at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick