Judging the life of a political giant

A SPLENDID new book on Seán Lemass makes no mention whatever of the Shannon hothouse, where the shoots of modern Ireland were cultivated by the powerhouse minister but attentive reading of the study provides all the reasons why.

What went on and went down at Shannon was not documented and does not survive in official archives because the cauldron that bubbled with imagination and flair around the new airport was kept out of reach of government officials and that was exactly how Lemass wanted it.
In Judging Lemass, Shannon does not even figure in the index and Brendan O’Regan only merits a passing mention because his thoughts on how Shannon moved out of the action and under the control of the bureaucrats once Shannon was no longer under the Lemass wing were preserved in the archives of previous Lemass biographer, John Horgan.
That Lemass had as little truck as possible with civil servants is made absolutely clear by author Tom Garvin. Lemass did not even trouble to learn the names of his own officials when, as the book recalls, he was “king of Kildare Street” as the nation’s economic  helmsman in terms spanning 30 years at the Department of Industry and Commerce.
He hatched around 30 State bodies, mostly dreamed up to plug gaps in the infrastructure and apparatus of support for the enterprise that he firmly believed would be the saving and the making of the country. Of what are recorded as “his beloved semi-State bodies”, the book states, “Lemass tried to shelter them from Dáil supervision so as to keep them out of the clientist networks of the Fianna Fáil party or any other party”.  
The precepts of Lemass economic thinking which he applied as government policy, are best understood at Shannon. Seán Lemass believed in giving young people of talent the scope to get things done and the freedom to make mistakes. As far back as 1925, he was preaching his gospel. “Rules are only a means to an end. There is work to be done for Ireland at every hand; work that will well repay the doing of it. But the important thing is to do it, not merely to follow the correct procedures in attempting it.” His favouring of the younger breed which would be seen most notably in the Cabinet promotions when he became Taoiseach, was also spelled out in the Fianna Fáil formative years. For getting things done, his advice to young party activists was, “Put men and women into the positions who are young and active and who are not afraid to take chances. Make the pace for the movement.”  
The application of inspired Lemass thinking is seen at its peak in the Shannon Free Zone. To set in motion the programme that would open up Ireland to American-led overseas investment the Ir£50,000 required to prime the pump was sourced from the hefty profits of the Shannon Sales & Catering Service which Lemass patronage had been instrumental in building up. He followed up this by leasing his Department’s land on which the first airport-side duty free zone in the world would emerge at a token rate of one shilling per acre per year. Nobody knew better than Lemass that had he attempted to secure that Shannon funding and land deal through the Dáil, every constituency in the country would have been hollering about favouritism to Shannon and action would have been stalled and possibly strangled at birth the extraordinary initiatives that sprang from Shannon. Lemass also knew that it would not be only the politicians who would stand in the way. Once the civil servants started to get busy with the red tape, an impenetrable web would be woven.
As revealed only in recent years about Clare’s Dr Paddy Hillery, both he and Donnagh O’Malley when serving as Ministers for Education under Lemass, were advised by the Taoiseach who promoted them to Cabinet rank to over-ride the protocols and go public with controversial measures as the way to stifle objections and fend off delaying and obstructive tactics from the civil service.
The “clear-the-way” approach by which Seán Lemass provided his protégés with freedom to get things done was seen to greatest advantage in the glory days of Shannon. That was when the Sales & Catering Service under Brendan O’Regan was doing extraordinary things. That was largely because Sales & Catering was an extraordinary State body. It was a unique enterprise because it did not have a board. It was unique because the chief executive reported directly to the minister – the chief executive was the extraordinary Brendan O’Regan and the minister was the extraordinary Seán Lemass. Linking them was another extraordinary character and shaper of history. John Leydon was Department secretary and right-hand man to Lemass. A diminutive figure of enormous energy and power, the former seminarian was, in the memory of Sales & Catering veterans “the only person that Brendan O’Regan was afraid of” and, in the words of Lemass himself , “The most able man I have ever met”.
The dislocation of the power connection between the action centre of government and Shannon came about when Lemass became Taoiseach in 1959. It was the changing of the guard. Until then, Shannon did its own indefinable thing with what was perceived as automatic approval from the very top of the Department of Industry and Commerce. However, when Lemass moved out, the civil servants finally moved in on Shannon. But in this case, the stones being cast at the hothouse of innovation and enterprise that had grown up around the airport were being thrown from outside.      
The loss of the Lemass dynamic was put into words by Brendan O’Regan when interviewed by Lemass biographer, John Horgan in 1995. “When he became Taoiseach, I can remember the feeling of loss that he was gone from the hub of progress. You could feel it in industry and commerce as well,” he said.
Distilling the nation-shaping impact of Seán Lemass under various aspects of a man born in 1899 but who was a giant of 20th century Ireland, Judging Lemass is written by political scientist, Tom Garvin and is published by the Royal Irish Academy.