Ireland: Lifting the Green Curtain

(6 of 10)

Though he never returned to prison after his release in 1923, four-time Loser Lemass was plainly a poor matrimonial risk. When he started courting pretty, vivacious Kathleen Hughes, he had the added disadvantage of having to placate her father, a Dublin carpenter and an Anglophile. He warned his daughter: "That boy is always on the run; he'll never be able to make a home for you." Kathleen decided to risk it anyway. They were married in 1924, have a son Noel, who is a Member of Parliament, and three daughters (the eldest, Maureen, is married to Charles Haughey, the shrewd, hard-knuckled Minister of Justice, who is tipped as a potential Prime Minister).

Heat with Peat. When Sinn Fein broke apart, young Lemass was the chief architect of De Valera's new Fianna Fail (Heroes of Destiny) Party, which came to power in 1932 and has been in office almost continually ever since. At 32, Lemass was the youngest member of De Valera's Cabinet and earned the affectionate Biblical sobriquet "Benjamin" (after Jacob's youngest son). Though Dev had taught mathematics—and is fervently believed by many fond compatriots to be one of the 13 men on earth who comprehend the theory of relativity—the Taoiseach had neither head nor heart for economics, and left Benjamin to run his ministry as he saw fit.

Lemass faced monumental problems, for during the '30s the government was locked in a vindictive, futile economic war with the English, though it remained economically dependent on Britain. He strove desperately to mobilize enough new industry to supply the nation's basic needs, though at high cost; he also founded the state transport network and organized a national merchant marine in time to keep Ireland fed during World War II, in which he took on the additional job of Minister of Supply, and by brilliant improvisation averted crippling shortages.

Until recently, it was axiomatic that "nobody but a fool would invest" in Ireland. Lemass did not hesitate to use public funds wherever private capital was not forthcoming for key projects.

He took over a one-horse power company and built it into a nationwide network that has electrified 76% of all Irish farms. The country had no oil and little coal, but Lemass found an inexhaustible source of industrial fuel in its peat bogs, where huge machines now cut turf that a busy, state-owned processing plant turns into inexpensive, slow-burning briquettes. After a long political wrangle, he got Ireland's state-owned airline off the ground, and has watched happily as Aer Lingus' shamrock-painted planes have made it one of the few government airlines to turn a consistent profit on the Atlantic run.

The very word socialism terrifies Fianna Fail supporters, who are not only overwhelmingly Catholic but include many small landowners. Yet one-third of all industrial enterprises in Ireland today are bankrolled by the government, which has gone farther toward nationalization than even Britain's Socialists advocate. Lemass says he shares the attitude toward socialism that was expressed in the late Pope John's encyclical, Pacem in Terris: that no political system is undesirable if it benefits the people.