Courtney McGrailT.K. Whitaker: Portrait of a Patriot by Anne Chambers
(Doubleday Ireland, €28.99)
Felix M. Larkin
The wise counsel that Whitaker has given successive Irish governments throughout his long career suggests that he was truly “a man for all seasons”, the title of Robert Bolt’s celebrated play about More.
He joined the Irish civil service in the lowly grade of clerical officer in 1934, and rose with unprecedented rapidity to become Secretary of the Department of Finance in 1956 at the age of 39. After 12 years in that post – the most senior in the Irish public service – he was governor of the Central Bank from 1969 to 1976.
He then served two successive terms in Seanad Éireann (1977-81 and 1981-2) – an independent member, nominated by two Taoisigh of different political persuasions, Jack Lynch and Garret FitzGerald. In addition, he chaired numerous committees – most notably, the committee of inquiry into the penal system (1984-5) and the Constitution Review Group (1995-6).
He is most famously associated with the so-called ‘Grey Book’, Economic Development, published in 1958 by the government, but under Whitaker’s name – an occurrence unique in the annals of Irish public administration.
It is generally credited with kick-starting the modernisation of the Irish economy, and it did indeed mark a watershed. However, the winds of change had been blowing for some time beforehand and the Grey Book was actually the culmination of a process that had been under way since the late 1940s.
Thus, the Industrial Development Authority was established in 1949 and tax relief to encourage exports – the antecedent of our low rate of corporation tax – was introduced in 1956.
What the Grey Book did was to adopt for the first time a structured, coordinated approach to economic planning in Ireland, and sadly its success in generating the prosperity of the 1960s opened the way for fiscal and economic policies that Whitaker regarded as imprudent, even irresponsible.
As this book recounts, Whitaker advised against such policies both privately and publicly – and it is suggested that his appointment to the Central Bank in 1969 was a means of removing him from the Department of Finance, where he was a thorn in the side of the then minister, Charles Haughey.
Haughey is Whitaker’s bête noire: he despised Haughey’s blatant political opportunism, his profligacy and his sybaritic life-style, and he deplored his atavistic stance on Northern Ireland.
Whitaker had developed good contacts with Northern Irish politicians and civil servants at international gatherings of the World Bank and the IMF. These contacts led to the historic meetings of Terence O’Neill with Lemass in 1965 and Lynch in 1967 and 1968.
As an Ulsterman himself, a native of Rostrevor, born in 1916 in an undivided Ireland, Whitaker hoped for re-unification, but recognised that it could be achieved only through consent.
He was – and is – passionate about the cause of reconciliation in Ireland, both within Northern Ireland and between North and South, and has worked quietly and often on his own initiative for it. Many ideas first floated by him were reflected in the terms of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is its account of the support that Whitaker gave Jack Lynch in the dark days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Lynch was bravely trying to pursue a policy of restraint in response to the deteriorating situation in the North despite opposition from hotheads within his own party.
It is clear that, while Whitaker applauds the progress that was made in the Good Friday agreement, he nevertheless regrets that the middle ground in politics in the North has now been lost.
He blames both British and southern Irish politicians for sidelining the Official Unionist Party and the SDLP, and is quoted as saying in 1994: “I squirm at the extraordinary publicity and respect accorded to [Gerry] Adams while decent democrats are expected to wait patiently for him to deliver the decision of the IRA on whether murder and destruction are to continue.”
Assessment
There is clearly a need for a considered and balanced assessment of this remarkable man and his impact in shaping modern Ireland. This book, while comprehensive and well researched, does not fill that need. It is uncritical, written in almost affectionate tones – Whitaker is referred to throughout as “Ken”.
Moreover, his career is seen too much through the prism of our recent economic crisis. It is claimed repeatedly that the mistakes of the past decade or so would not have happened on his beat.
This is somewhat naive: civil servants can only advise, and even Whitaker’s advice on economic matters was largely ignored by the politicians from the late-1960s onwards.