Sir, - The career of James Dillon has attracted renewed attention recently, with the publication of Maurice Manning's lively biography, reviewed by Donal McCartney (October 16th). Both biographer and reviewer agree that Dillon's years as Minister for Agriculture were a highlight of his career - as indeed they were from many points of view.
There is, however, one issue on which Dillon did not cover himself in glory. It is briefly alluded to by Manning, who professes himself puzzled as to why the generally liberal James Dillon could have set himself so solidly against granting a paid half-day to farm labourers, that overworked, underpaid and socially despised rural underclass. Manning's puzzlement is very revealing, for surely there is no mystery here.
James Dillon came from the Catholic elite and as a TD represented the farming interest. He would also not have been disposed by his own background to have much understanding of or sympathy for the difficult life of the labourer. In his dealings with farm labourers, therefore, Dillon was merely acting in the interests of the class he represented. Dan Bradley's Farm Labourers: Irish Struggle 1900-1976 shows that already in 1936 Dillon had spoken in the Dail against the setting up of an agricultural wages board. He thought that getting farmers to pay more would be like squeezing blood from a turnip, so labourers would presumably have to resign themselves to misery.
What does it tell us about even our finest historians, and the perspective in which they operate, that Maurice Manning should find rural class politics either puzzling or almost unmentionable, that Donal McCartney should not mention the matter, and that Dermot Keogh (who, coincidentally, figured on the same page) should make no mention of this aspect of Dillon's politics in his Twentieth Century Ireland?
Catholicism and nationalism were not the only forces that operated in independent Ireland, and residual loyalties and antagonisms formed in forgotten social struggles may underlie voting patterns that might otherwise appear inexplicable or irrational. It is to be expected that we should forget, but it is disappointing that our historians should do the same. - Yours, etc.,
Barra O Seaghdha, Rathmines, Dublin 6.