From 1963 Lemass, absorbed with other issues, took an increasingly back seat in relation to the tripartite institutions he had initiated, leaving them to the ministers responsible. Until 1966 the industrial relations bodies came under Jack Lynch as Minister for I&C, and then Patrick Hillery at the new Department of Labour, while the NIEC remained under Finance and its energetic and capable minister, James Ryan. Like Lemass, of whom he was a close ally, Ryan was a veteran of the independence struggle and drove implementation of the ever more detailed Programmes for Expansion with considerable energy.
During 1963-66, the NIEC, under Ryan’s guidance and with Whitaker as chair, flourished, pursuing the mandate it had assumed in relation to the Second Programme and preparing the parameters for its successor. Despite its tight representational base and lean bureaucracy – henceforth hallmarks of Irish social partnership – its output was prodigious and authoritative. Its reports included annual economic reviews as well as studies of individual sectors, and aligned strategy with the international policy frameworks set by the OECD. The CIO’s 1965 Survey of Industry provided the basis for the NIEC’s preparations for the Third Programme. This identified major constraints on expansion such as the “backwardness” of Irish industry, inefficiencies, small firm size, low investment ratios, limited diversification and poor use of “modern management techniques”. It set an ambitious national aim of overcoming these to achieve both competitive advantage and a steady increase in real incomes through a productivity-based formula for price/wage growth in 1966-68, a national prices commission and redistributive equity through progressive taxation. It urged that the Third Programme include sectoral “adaptation” plans to be implemented through tripartite “Industrial Development Councils”, cooperative structures within companies and a thorough reform of industrial relations practices.34
But concrete initiatives by Departments to progress NIEC proposals were often weak and ineffective. William Roche describes Lynch at I&C as an “industrial relations conservative in sharp contrast to [Lemass]”. While paying “lip service” to tripartite planning, he saw little need to change “the prevailing
34 “prodigious”, FitzGerald 1968: 158-63; “Survey”, CIO 1965; initial conclusions, NIEC 1965: Pt. IV, paras.
system of collective bargaining”, preferring these continue autonomously with “minimum interference from the State”. He ignored suggestions for reforms towards what Roche describes as a “Dutch system” of works councils and social partnership as “outside the realm of practical politics”. It is notable that up to 1965 all decisive interventions, including those initiating wage agreements and establishing the CIO and NIEC, were Lemass’s own, with Lynch contributing little discernible. But Lemass was in declining health and these initiatives now depended on Lynch, who failed to secure a successor “National Wage Recommendation” at the end of 1965. A central agreement was not to return until 1970. Although ICTU showed a willingness to return to such a framework by setting its own “maximum guideline” and seeking equalisation of employment conditions - which Lemass welcomed as the basis for an agreement - wage determination reverted from 1966 under Lynch to “local bargaining”.35
The drift back to free collective bargaining at a crucial stage in industrial expansion was to prove disastrous, as the lack of regulatory reform saw industrial conflict escalate to a national crisis. There had been a gradual increase in conflict – examined in the next section – but up to 1966 this had been manageable, with ELC-agreed wage “guidelines” generally implemented and the 1965 CIO Survey judging industrial relations to be “fairly good” apart from “restrictive practices” in a few sectors. Lemass made a final intervention in early 1966 before retiring, warning of an urgent need to reform industrial relations which had remained essentially unchanged since 1906. Hillery at the Department of Labour drafted a Trade Union Bill to reduce the number of unions and strengthen Congress authority over “unofficial action” and ICTU gladly cooperated in this initiative. But when Hillery circulated the heads for an Industrial Relations Bill in June 1966, proposing the outlawing of unofficial strikes and giving the Labour Court statutory powers to end disputes, ICTU was outraged and the government-ICTU talks on reforms stalled for three years.36
With these ominous failures by Lynch and Hillery, the whole framework of tripartite institutionalism frayed. The Adaptation Councils floundered, NIEC
35 On Lynch, Roche 2009: 190; failure of wage agreement, O’Brien 1981: 12-13; Lemass health/retirement,
Horgan 1997: 326-3; ICTU position and Lemass welcome, ICTU ADC 1966
36 Lemass IR reform initiative, McCarthy, C. 1973: 184-98; Hillery proposals, ICTU EC mtgs., 21.06.1965,
lamenting the poor level of implementation of their proposals at industry level, the CIO was disbanded and the “Industrial Development Councils” never materialised, formally because of FUE’s refusal to countenance sectoral union involvement but principally because government showed little interest. Progress on industrial relations reform came to a halt, the joint working group ceasing to meet in 1967, and neither Hillery’s initial proposals nor any alternatives, apart from a 1969 bill modifying secondary Labour Court functions, were enacted. Relations became so strained that ICTU accused Hillery of lying to the Dáil when he claimed to have received no requests from ICTU to consult on it.37
Even the NIEC became fractious. Following 17 unanimously agreed reports since 1963, a major study, Planning for Full Employment, begun in 1965, was delayed for two years over Whitaker’s insistence on including a competitiveness principle of maintaining incomes below British levels, by statutory means if necessary. ICTU, which clashed continually with the bullish NIEC chair, accused him of trying to impose a “one-sided” incomes policy, and only acquiesced to the report’s publication once its dissent on its wage formula was formally noted.38
With a new Minister for Finance, Charles Haughey, just establishing himself in office after already being embroiled in conflict with the farmers’ association (NFA), government disengagement from the council continued as the civil service re-asserted its autonomy. But Haughey soon began to make his presence felt, reviving engagement with the NIEC. Larkin described the 1967 full employment report as reflecting a revival of the NIEC after two “difficult years”. Another NIEC report, which used an OECD critique to propose a radical expansion of second-level educational access, was opposed by the Department of Education until its own Minister, Donogh O’Malley, intervened in its favour, leading to his famous initiative freeing secondary education to general access. Yet another report, which proposed replacing Social Welfare’s antiquated “labour exchanges” with a semi-state manpower training agency, was rejected by
37 decline of Councils and CIO, FitzGerald 1968: 66; “lamenting”, NIEC 1966c; IR working Group, ICTU EC
mtg., 25.08.67; 1969 bill, Hardiman 1988: 47; “lying to the Dáil”, Murphy, G. and Hogan 2008: 13
a civil service committee, though NIEC influence at least ensured a semi- autonomous service overseen by the Department of Labour did emerge.39
The decay of tripartitism was compounded by Labour Party negativity. Larkin, who had affiliated his union, the WUI, to the party in 1964 not least to create some political distance to government, faulted Labour politicians who “in their natural anxiety to criticise and expose the faults and failings of the Fianna Fáil government … appeared to be in opposition to the whole … [tripartite] exercise”. He regretted their “cool and detached interest” in the NIEC, their dismissal of it as mere “Fianna Fáil propaganda”, and their failure to “make [its] reports … the basis of a continuing positive criticism of government policies and failings”. He pleaded with the party to “distinguish between the NIEC and the Fianna Fáil … government” and work “to strengthen the whole concept of planned economic development and the leading role of the state in its realisation”. Calling on Labour to support the Programme, he said its seven-year plan and central role for the NIEC would have seemed like “an election slogan of the labour movement” just a few years previously. Despite Labour’s adherence to “national planning”, its wariness of tripartitism as a Fianna Fáil “three-card trick”, as Larkin described their negative view of it, was resonant of their resentment of Fianna Fáil usurping their position since the 1920s, and would persist.40
The flowering of tripartite institutionalism under Lemass thus went into reverse under Lynch. Instead of being consolidated, the NIEC/ELC planning and wage guidance system collapsed, sectoral councils disappeared, industrial relations reform was shelved and the NIEC weakened, its policy consensus- building function side-lined as civil service policy primacy returned. Lemass’s tripartitism has been described as “neo-corporatism”, but its nascent quality is better captured by Gary Murphy’s description of it as “proto-corporatism”. Lynch’s non-interventionism became dominant from 1966. One exception to this trend was NIEC’s revival in 1967, which occurred under the new Minister for Finance, Charles Haughey, a disciple of Lemass and an advocate of what would later be termed “social partnership”. But an industrial relations crisis arose in the 39 Larkin view, O’Riordan 2001: 34-5; NIEC education report, NIEC 1966b, and D/Educ. opposition, FitzGerald 1968: 175; fate of “manpower” report, FitzGerald 1968: 174 40 “natural anxiety” and “three card trick”, speech at WUI AR 1968, in O’Riordan 2001: 35; “election slogan”, Bulletin (WUI) Sept.-Oct. 1963, quoted in O’Riordan 2001: 31
institutional vacuum created by Lynch’s non-interventionism, culminating in the industrial “chaos” of 1968-69. There were simply no institutions in place to channel the grievances that undelay it towards a productive resolution.41
Spirit of the ‘60s: social change and industrial crisis 1968-69
Up to 1961, average annual workdays lost in disputes was about 170,000, higher than most North European corporatist countries but modest for the “Anglo-Saxon” liberal-voluntarist world. In the pre-1960 closed economy, external competitiveness had not been a decisive factor but this changed. Wage bargaining, characterised by what Lemass called “procedures of horse-trading and strikes”, was driven by three tendencies, of workers with negotiating power pressing their advantage to secure better pay, expanding industries “buying peace” by conceding increases, and most barely profitable enterprises relying on suppressing wages. Most wage settlements up to 1965 nevertheless remained within agreed national “guidelines”. But 1968-70 witnessed an “upheaval” of industrial conflict which was compounded by state institutional minimalism.42
As the economy opened, strike-days rose, to 450,000 in 1964, 552,000 in 1965 and 784,000 in 1966. These arose from long disputes involving relatively few workers in several specific industries rather than a pattern of conflict across the economy, and in many cases involved non-ICTU unions or non-FUE employers. 80 per cent of strike-days in 1964 were in the construction industry, in a long dispute not over wages but a 40-hour week, which employers refused to concede. The union concerned was the breakaway MPGWU, whose pickets, by union tradition, other workers refused to pass, thus closing down the industry, while on the employer side construction companies were still outside FUE and sought to prevent an industry-wide concession which FUE actually favoured. A similar dynamic characterised the print strike of 1965, which accounted for 66 per cent of all strike-days, with small craft unions forcing the closure of a then large industry, and the bank and paper mills strikes of 1966, again craft-driven, which that year similarly accounted for most strike-days. The bank strike again 41 On emergence of the term “neo-corporatism”, McGinley 1998; on “proto-corporatism, Girvan and Murphy 2005; on “stakeholder capitalism”, Hutton 1996 42 Strike days, McCarthy, C. 1973; Lemass quote, O’Brien 1981: 10-11; “most wage”, CIO 1965; “upheaval”, McCarthy, C. 1973