The civil service and the revolution in Ireland 1912–1938

Shaking the blood-stained hand of Mr Collins'

Martin Maguire

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719081941
• eBook ISBN: 9781847797124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

This book is a history of the Irish civil service and its response to revolutionary changes in the State. It examines the response of the civil service to the threat of partition, World War, the emergence of the revolutionary forces of Dáil Éireann and the IRA through to the Civil War and the Irish Free State. Questioning the orthodox interpretation of evolution rather than revolution in the administration of the State it throws new light on civil service organization in British-ruled Ireland, the process whereby Northern Ireland came into existence, the Dáil Éireann administration in the War of Independence, and civil service attitudes to the new Irish Free State.Based on a wide range of new sources, the book is of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of Irish, Imperial and Commonwealth history and of post-colonial, governance and political studies as well as a reader with an interest in the role of the State in the process of decolonisation in the 20th century.

1

The civil service and the State in Ireland, 1912–18

Introduction

FOR THE IRISH CIVIL servants Dublin Castle represented dead-end departmentalism. Political influence and personal connections were the avenues to advancement in an administration that was a byword for nepotism. The failure of examination entry to open up the Irish higher posts to genuine competition and the continuance of patronage, whether ‘Green’ or ‘Orange’, in the elite division of the Castle became a major source of dissatisfaction. Even nationalist and Catholic civil servants preferred a meritocratic system to the corruption of preferential patronage.¹ Frustrated by the narrow field of opportunity offered in the Castle, the Irish civil service sense of corporate identity was based on a general and widespread feeling of shared grievance and disappointment.

Although presented primarily as political reforms, the Irish Home Rule bills introduced by Gladstone in 1886 and 1893 were also shaped to deliver administrative reform. The separate Irish executive in Dublin Castle was, in Gladstone’s view, operating without the restraint of a popularly elected assembly. The result was an inexorable growth in the size and cost of the Irish administration, a cost that was borne by the British Treasury. Home Rule proposed to address this by cutting the bonds that attached the civil service to the British State and by transferring it to the authority of an Irish assembly which, it was implied, would have to make drastic cuts. The Irish civil service was unprepared for the 1886 bill and failed to act. But it responded to the introduction of the 1893 bill by organising under a single all-service committee to agitate and lobby for the security of their positions, salaries and pensions under a future Home Rule assembly. This committee, led by the senior members of the Irish civil service, represents the most significant mobilisation of the entire Irish civil service. The committee adopted public and political tactics that ordinarily would have been treated as rank insubordination or even subversion of the established relationship between parliament and the civil service. Both bills failed but the question of Irish Home Rule was now embedded in both Irish and British party politics and in the consciousness of the Irish civil service.

The Home Rule Bill, 1912

Though Ulster Unionist resistance eventually overwhelmed the third Home Rule Bill, it was the financial question that initially dominated the debate. In 1912 government spending in Ireland, boosted by enormously expensive developments in national insurance, land transfers, congested districts relief, regional development and an old-age pension, had exceeded Irish revenues by £2 million and was continuing to grow. The immediate and, it seemed, insurmountable problem was how to grant executive and financial autonomy to an Ireland that was technically bankrupt.² Herbert Samuel, the Postmaster-General, was given the task of drawing up the financial aspects of the Home Rule Bill, thus separating the financial from the constitutional aspects of Irish self-government. His financial proposals were so complex that it was said that only he himself could understand them fully. What he proposed was that Ireland should be given a grant of £6 million to meet national expenditure, including administrative costs, and would be then expected to live within that budget. The Liberal government thus hoped to use the financial provisions of the bill to encourage the Irish to stop looking to London for money and learn to govern themselves cheaply.³ It was therefore generally accepted that a Home Rule government would be compelled to reduce its administrative costs by reducing its civil service. The Castle civil servants had no involvement in drawing up the 1912 bill nor did Francis Greer, the parliamentary draftsman for Ireland, prepare it.⁴ Home Rule as shaped by the 1912 bill was a system of indirect rule with local administrative responsibility. Initial Ulster Unionist opposition to what constitutionally speaking was a very modest proposal concentrated on objecting to the control of the Irish civil service being handed over to the Irish government. Fears were expressed about the future of Protestant civil servants and the potential for administrative rather than legislative discrimination.⁵

However, as Ulster exclusion came to dominate the proceedings the clauses relating to the civil service in the 1912 bill generated little debate in a ‘sparsely filled and languid house’.⁶ The assumptions that underlay the contributions to the debate by Augustine Birrell, the Chief Secretary Ireland, and John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and probable prime minister of an Irish Home Rule assembly, were of broad continuity in the civil service allied with necessary reductions in its size and cost. The reason that the civil service clauses generated so little debate was the Irish civil service had not waited for the Home Rule proposals but had itself seized the initiative at the earliest opportunity. In May 1911, when it was clear that the Liberal government was committed to bringing in a Home Rule Bill, three senior civil servants – A.R. Barlas, secretary to the Local Government Board (LGB), P.E. Lemass, secretary to the National Education Board (NEB) and Alfred Beckett, chief clerk to the General Valuation Office (GVO) – circularised the staff of the government departments with a proposal that the Irish civil service should immediately organise in readiness for the Home Rule Bill. In the circular these civil servants explained how they had attempted to meet with Birrell to discuss the implications of any Home Rule legislation for existing officers, but that he had refused on the grounds that a meeting would be premature in advance of a definite bill. Nonetheless, rather than wait for the Home Rule Bill to emerge they had decided to press ahead with the formation of a general committee representative of the government departments. This general committee would draw up an authoritative statement of the views of the officers as to the safeguards they considered necessary in the event of a Home Rule Bill being submitted to parliament.⁷

This was a revival of the strategy adopted by the civil service during the debate on the 1893 Home Rule proposal. The civil service had formulated a united response and used vigorous political and public agitation to win guarantees for their security under a Home Rule executive. Both Barlas and Beckett had been active on the 1893 committee so it might be supposed that the 1911 initiative represented simply the reactivation of that committee. However, the new committee was in several respects different to that of 1893 and represented an innovation in strategy in three areas: its representative nature, its eschewal of political lobbying at parliament in favour of influencing the key administrative and political figures, and in setting the terms of the civil service clauses of the 1912 bill at the drafting stage.

The initial circular emphasised that any committee must have the authority to represent the views of the entire service. It therefore suggested, as a preliminary, the formation of a ‘provisional committee consisting of one delegate from each department to determine the proportion in which the several classes of civil servant in each office should be represented’. The provisional committee, made up of a representative delegate from each department, then decided the number of delegates that each department and class should return to the general committee. Although the Irish administration defied any attempt at precise analysis, the 1911 committee had close to full saturation with representatives from all departments.⁸ The only substantial section of the civil service not represented on the committee were the postal workers; however, as they had their own organisation, and previous Home Rule bills excluded the postal service as an imperial service from the authority of the Irish executive, their absence was not significant. The committee did have representatives from the GPO, the administrative core of the postal system in Ireland.

The general committee was also carefully constructed so as to represent not only each government department but also all grades within each department. The intent was not that it should be strictly proportionate to the relative size of each department, but that it should be fully representative of each grade within each department. The number of representatives for each department reflected the complexity of the grades within the department rather than simply its size. This was innovative inasmuch as civil service organisations usually confined membership to particular grades. The 1911 committee was simultaneously a vertical and a horizontal organisation. The land commission was represented by its professional, higher grade, second division and clerical officers, all sitting around the same table. At the same time the professional officers of the land commission were working with the professional officers of the other government departments. For many civil servants the 1911 committee was an introduction to later civil service trade union organisation. The committee was financed by a levy of 6d (2.5p) for every £50 of annual income of each civil servant member to create a fighting fund. An executive committee of the General Committee of Irish Civil Servants (GCICS) was then formed. The executive committee drew from all the civil service grades, preserving the cross-class nature of the general committee. The single representative of the lady clerks marks the hesitant emergence of women civil servants’ organisation.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the 1911 GCICS committee was that across a wide spectrum of grades and departments it succeeded in securing agreement on a response to the implications of Home Rule for the civil service. The explanation for this emphasis on cross-service, representative mobilisation lies not only in the previous mobilisation of 1893, but also in the growth of trade union or quasi-trade union organisation and consciousness within the civil service. That the committee could demonstrate its representative base proved vital in the committee stage of the debate on the civil service clauses. Just a week before the debate a section of Belfast-based civil servants denied that the Dublin committee was in any sense representative of Irish civil servants. Barlas, who suspected that this was a ‘mud-slinging operation’ inspired by elements in the Orange Order, was able to detail to Francis Greer the fully representative membership of the committee and to underline the considerable financial outlay made by each civil servant’s donation as illustrative of the commitment of the vast majority to its success.⁹

In assessing the innovatory aspects of the 1911 GCICS, we may turn next to the method of agitation. In contrast to the public agitation adopted in 1893, the 1911 committee preferred to exercise influence within the administrative system to make their views known and win concessions. Birrell placed a lot of emphasis on the many meetings he had held with the Irish civil service committee and the extent to which he had endeavoured to meet their fears.¹⁰ The ‘Preliminary Statement’ of the civil servants, initially sent to Birrell, found its way to Greer and the legislation was generally shaped to meet their points. Barlas kept Greer informed of civil service sentiment at each key stage. His letters suggest a frank relationship in which Barlas felt that Greer could be trusted with confidential disclosures. In December 1912, when the key civil service clauses were coming up for debate in the committee stage at the House of Commons, Barlas wrote to Greer to assure him (and Birrell) that though ‘a lot of stupid amendments have been put on the order paper … they merely expressed the views of individual civil servants in very small sections’.¹¹ During the debate the committee of the Irish civil service met to pass a motion expressing support for the government on the clauses in the Home Rule Bill touching on the civil service, support which Birrell used to good effect.¹²

The civil service clauses of the Home Rule Bill

The final innovatory aspect to the 1911 committee was its decision not to wait for the legislation and then react to it, but instead to shape it before it emerged into the political arena. In November 1911 the committee was ready to issue a preliminary statement of their position and demands. This statement began by setting down a clear and unambiguous commitment; the Irish civil servants wanted it to be clearly understood that as a body they ‘were anxious to continue to work under the new Government of Ireland to be est...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The civil service and the State in Ireland, 1912–18
• 2. Dublin Castle in crisis, 1918–21
• 3. The revolutionary State, partition and the civil service, 1920–21
• 4. The Provisional Government and the civil service, 1922
• 5. Cumann na nGaedheal and the civil service, 1923–32
• 6. Fianna Fáil and the civil service, 1932–38
• Conclusion: the civil service, the State and the Irish revolution
• Appendix
• Select bibliography
• Index