“It is a measure of Lemass’s contribution as Taoiseach for seven and a half years that each succeeding Fianna Fáil leader invokes his influence on ascending to the position. His reputation extends across party boundaries.” 
Fr Kevin Hegarty In late August 1975 the McCarthy family in Waterford sat down to watch on television the State funeral of Eamon de Valera. The great titan of the Irish political world, the last surviving leadership link with the 1916 rising, had fallen at the age of 93.
For the poet, Thomas McCarthy, and his father, it was a day of memories. His father was a staunch supporter of de Valera. He recalled exciting and turbulent episodes from the august leader’s long career:
“My father recited prayers of memory, of monster meetings, blazing tar-barrels planted outside Free State homes, the Broy-Harriers pushing through a crowd, Blueshirts, and after the war, de Valera’s words making Churchill’s imperial palette blur.”
For Thomas, born in 1948, growing up in the last decade of de Valera’s leadership of Fianna Fáil, the memories were different and duller:
“What I remember is one decade of darkness,
A mind of stifling boredom; long summers
For blackberry picking and churning cream,
Winters for saving timber or setting lines
And snares; none of the joys of here and now
With its instant jam, instant heat and cream.
It was a landscape for old men.”
The 1950’s were the most depressing Irish years of the 20th century. De Valera, the master political mariner, now well in his seventies and almost blind, had lost his economic compass. indeed, economics were never his strong point.
To many observers Ireland was a failed economic entity. Emigration was rife. The constant drumbeat of the 1950’s was of footsteps towards the emigrant ships. Almost half a million young people left the country during that decade. The historian, Joe Lee, has written: “When de Valera looked into his own heart now, the main highway he could see was the road to Dun Laoghaire pier.”
McCarthy, in his poem ‘The Emigrant Trains’, has evoked the experience of a young traveller:
“I felt like a vagrant, destitute, until
At Waterford station I realized
My good luck; I owned a suitcase of card
While others carried mere bundles of cloth.
At Kilkenny every carriage was filled
To the door. One mother’s last grip held fast
Despite the moving train, the rising glass.
For some it was the last touch of a child.
I was so raw and Irish at the time
They said shamrocks grew out of my ears.
I wasn’t alone with my homesick mind;
When we sailed into Holyhead our tears
Made a pathetic sea. One labourer’s voice
Rose out of the ship, like a skylark’s,
Singing Kevin Barry, Kevin Barry.
His song became our night cry at the dock.”
On de Valera’s election as President in 1959, Sean Lemass became Taoiseach. Long regarded as de Valera’s inevitable successor, he had a lengthy political apprenticeship. He was a member of the first Fianna Fáil cabinet in 1932, then the youngest cabinet minister in Europe. He had served 21 of the intervening years as Minister for Industry and Commerce, where he was always a dynamic presence.
It is a measure of Lemass’s contribution as Taoiseach for seven and a half years that each succeeding Fianna Fáil leader invokes his influence on ascending to the position. His reputation extends across party boundaries. Garret Fitzgerald, later a Fine Gael Taoiseach, admitted, in his autobiography, to voting Fianna Fáil in 1961, because of his support for Lemass.
Lemass had waited impatiently for his turn in the Taoiseach’s chair. He was a pragmatist with the capacity to make quick decisions. He consigned de Valera’s romantic, Arcadian view of Irish society to the dustbin of history.
Under his leadership the “landscape for old men” began to recede into the distance. The torpidity of the 50’s gave way to the vibrancy of the 60’s. The Ireland we now live in began to emerge.
He blithely abandoned the protectionist economic policies that had been dominant since the 1930’s, and which had demonstrably failed, and made Ireland an open economy. Supported by foreign investment, he embarked on a policy of rapid industrialisation.
Emigration started to decline substantially. He applied for Irish entry into the EEC, an application which foundered because of De Gaulle’s opposition to British entry. He abandoned the futile partitionist rhetoric about “the fourth green field” and sought to understand Unionist fears about a United Ireland. His meetings with the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill, in 1965 sowed the seed that eventually flowered into the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
During his tenure as Taoiseach there was also substantial social, cultural and educational change in Ireland. Our censorship laws were relaxed. In 1961 RTÉ television was established. The Succession Act of 1965 recognised legally for the first time the right of a wife to a share in her husband’s estate. The announcement of free second-level education in 1966 opened the door of opportunity to all.
Eamon de Valera once confessed to an associate that Lemass would light up the political world as Taoiseach. It was serendipitous that his election as Taoiseach took place on June 23, 1959, the day on which, by tradition, bonfires blaze throughout the country.
A biographer of Jean Monnet, a pioneer of European Union, distinguishes between transactional leadership designed to keep the system running and transformational leadership which is creative. Seán Lemass was a transformer. Surveying our present drab adversarial political landscape, how one wishes to see a similar figure emerge out of the gloom.
