Ireland: Lifting the Green Curtain

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Many Irishmen were profanely skeptical, but the program so far has proved a gallivanting success. Ireland today is in the throes of a belated industrial revolution that is boosting living standards, diversifying its farm-based economy, and will increasingly absorb the talents that the nation breeds. Since 1955, 160 new Irish and foreign-backed plants have created 21,000 new jobs and are turning out goods ranging from transistor radios (Japanese) and pianos (Dutch) to heavy cranes for a German company and oil heaters for a French firm. Fifty more plants are nearing completion, most notably a French-owned aviation factory to turn out a new, short-haul plane aimed specifically at U.S. feeder airlines.

The shiny new plants in Shannon, Cork, Limerick, Dublin and Killarney ("Just like the Black Forest," says a West German industrialist who has built a factory there) have worked no economic miracle in Ireland to compare with Europe's boom. But industrial production has risen 20% in three years.

And its success is stanching the population outflow: from an average of 43,000 a year, the number of emigrants dropped by more than 50% last year, is expected to total only 14,000 in 1963.

Many emigrants are now returning to take jobs back home.

Four Rs. Today's expansion would not have been possible if Sean Lemass had not started laying the groundwork long ago. Lemass is the great-grandson of a hatter who landed in Dublin in 1820. A young-appearing 63, he is by age, if not by political style, a member of the generation that freed Ireland and has ruled it ever since. At school, he learned his four Rs—in the Dublin of 50 years ago, revolution was part of the curriculum—and by the age of 14 had joined the Republican Na Fianna Eireann, a sort of Boy Scout underground. Two years later, when the Irish Republican Army occupied the Dublin post office at the start of the botched 1916 Easter Week rising, Sean was the youngest rebel of them all, spent four days on the roof with a rifle, waiting for the British to mount an old-fashioned infantry charge. He says wryly: "I'm afraid we had rather naive ideas about modern warfare." When British shells ended the fiasco, 15 Irish leaders were shot. Young Lemass was taken prisoner and released within a month, presumably because of his age. According to cherished, if apocryphal Dublin legend, "the cops gave him a kick in the arse and told him to go home to his mom."

Poor Risk. But in the turbulent years when the Irish rebels fought against Britain's Black and Tans, Sean Lemass grew into a rugged guerrilla fighter in the I.R.A.'s Dublin Brigade. He was jailed by the English four times, escaped once. After the 1921 treaty, by which Britain created the self-governing Irish Free State but retained jurisdiction over the six Protestant counties of Ulster, civil war flared between "pro-treaty" Irishmen and De Valera's followers, who cried that Ireland could not accept partition. Lemass, an officer on De Valera's staff, was captured by the other side and imprisoned for a year. In jail he continued his war-shattered education with a cram course in economics, politics and Irish revolutionary writings.