The navigation officer sets his course when at sea, first of all in terms of where he is going to—it is very important to know clearly where he is going to—and, secondly, in terms of where he is coming from; that is the course he has been following. If he does not know the course he has been following, he cannot set an exact course—or, indeed, any kind of course —into the future. In this supremely important matter of parity or disparity with the British £, I wonder how many citizens of this country—I will not say distinguished members of this House— could set out exactly on an historical chart the course which this country has not so much been following but has been forced to follow for almost the last 150 years.
Not long ago, in a glass show-case in our Municipal Museum in Belfast, I saw a tax receipt for County Derry, dated 1811 and showing the amount collected in Irish currency. It struck me as being a very interesting thing to show to the citizens of Belfast. I wondered how many of them, looking into that show-case, realised the significance of the words "Irish currency". How many citizens of Dublin could tell you offhand that the Irish £ fluctuated freely in relation to the English £ right up to the second decade of the last century?
To leave the ordinary citizens of Belfast, Dublin and the 32 counties of Ireland out of it, how many members of Seanad Éireann ever troubled themselves in the past about that curious sequence of historical events that brings what I call the shotgun wedding of the Irish and British currencies in 1825, first in time, and what we call "the Starvation" of 1846 and 1847 following very closely behind it. I say "first in time" because it may be post hoc propter hoc reasoning to connect the two historical events. That is for some young Irish economist to decide. I suggest this as a thesis for the students of our universities—the fact that we had this shotgun wedding of the two currencies in 1825 and that the next great historical event we had in Irish history was the tragedy of the Starvation. Whether the relationship exists exactly in sequence or not, is it not as plain as a pikestaff that, after that shotgun wedding of the two currencies, we had lost any real control over our national destiny— not only over the extent of our population but over the kind of employment we could offer to those left behind here after the tragic experience of the great trek to America and the coffin ships?
Why, as a nation, did we not see more clearly what was happening? Why, as a nation, do we not see it more clearly to-day, even in retrospect? I think there is a very understandable reason. We were engaged in the first stage of our struggle for national sovereignty, the struggle for political freedom. Dublin Castle had to be destroyed. But in the struggle with Dublin Castle, Irishmen very naturally lost sight of another and still more powerful symbol in the background, the former Irish Parliament House in College Green, the Parliament House which had become a bank. The English poet Shelley saw its significance at a glance. It is a way that poets have: they have it not only as the unacknowledged legislators of the world but also as the mirrors of the great and cloudy issues of the future, the mirrors in which those issues are reflected. What Shelley said when he saw the Bank of Ireland was: "They have turned the fane of liberty into a temple of man". How many of us realised the significance of that sermon in stone? We pass it every day on the tops of buses. It is unique in Europe, I think. I do not think any other nation in Europe has such a sermon in stone, such a blossoming of the very historical process itself, in part of its capital city and, if we cannot realise the significance in any other way, let us ask ourselves in this House to-day, why are we sitting in this House and not, by right, in our former Parliament House?
At this point I fear I must disappoint all those who expect a critic of monetary policy to burst into wild diatribes about "wicked bankers". I want to persuade many people in this country, I want particularly to persuade one of our outstanding national newspapers, also, I want to persuade the present Minister for Agriculture that no intelligent monetary reformer regards bankers, even central bankers, as bad, wicked men. Nor does any intelligent monetary reformer believe that the cure for all our economic ills consists in printing bank notes ad libitum. All we believe about bankers is that it is disastrous to try to run a 20th-century world on 19th-century lines and particularly disastrous when you happen to control such a key instrument as finance.
Mr. Montagu Norman was probably a zealous and extremely efficient official but the more zealous and the more efficient he was the greater was the resulting mess. What I would do if I were an Englishman would be to thank God that Mr. Montagu Norman had not been the Archangel Gabriel because, if he had been the Archangel Gabriel, and had been carrying out the same policy, the result would have been an even more disastrous mess in so far as the Archangel Gabriel would have been still more efficient and still more zealous than Mr. Montagu Norman.
As proof that monetary reformers are not necessarily morons, I want to read, with your permission, a Chathaoirligh, a portion of a leader from The New English Weekly dealing with Ireland. It appeared, to the best of my recollection, about the year 1939. I quoted it in the pamphlet called Eamon de Valera Doesn't See It Through and I got my head in my hand for doing so. I would just like to read what this English newspaper had to say about us and our affairs and I would particularly address this quotation to the present Minister for Agriculture. This English journal says:—
"We know that Irishmen will fight like lions for their political independence or isolation: but when it comes to taking charge of their own accounts, they are as easily cowed as anybody else. We are not forgetting the highly intelligent Minority Report issued by Ireland's Commission on the National Finances a few years ago: but when it comes to action the melancholy truth is that Ireland has never put up a fight, on principle, for financial freedom. Irishmen will prefer phthisis, rheumatism, and swamps to the admittedly difficult task of telling their financiers that they must either produce the needful credit instruments without debt, or give up their jobs to someone else who will. It is a pity; for Ireland will never have better ground on which to offer battle to the banko-cracy——
that is a new word to me—
——than this drainage question. Ireland is a wet, flat country, almost as dependent upon field drains as some arid lands are dependent upon irrigation.... Work such as this, improving and regulating the interaction between a country's soil and its water, is the very foundation of its fertility, life, and prosperity: yet it is precisely this kind of work, the most important of all, of which the financial mind is least able to conceive the value. A few readers have occasionally grudged the amount of attention that this journal has given to questions of soil, water, and fertility: but we find no better instances of the absurdity and artificiality of current financial valuations than they exhibit when applied, as in this instance of Ireland, to the values which are the most real and physical of all."
These are some of the monetary reformers talking, and I hope the present Minister for Agriculture—and more power to the work he is doing— will note that it was the monetary reformers who for the past 20 years have been advocating exactly the kind of work he is doing now. In other words, we said the national credit should be made available for socially useful purposes, and to and behold, the Minister for Agriculture—and more power to him—has at any rate made a beginning. The difference is that we said the necessary credits should be made available without debt to the community—but that will come in the course of time. One of our major objectives is within sight, because, after all, it is more important that the work should be done than the manner of doing it.
This work now initiated on the soil of Ireland is one bright spot in the picture, but when we turn away from that, when we turn from the question of how the national credit is to be used inside the nation, and the even bigger issues looming beyond that again of the use of credit as a social as opposed to a purely national instrument, we come back to the overriding issue of this debate, which is, in the last analysis, the collision between economic nationalism and international finance. Here, we come back to that and, as the specific point of this motion, we come back in fact to the relation between the Irish and the British pound.
I asked Senators to turn their minds back to 1825, to the point at which the Irish £ ceased to fluctuate in relation to Irish conditions, to the point at which, as a writer in the Irish Monthly has just expressed it, our national economy was tied to the British economy, like a dog below a cart. From that point onwards, British financial imperialism was an increasing factor in world economy. I need not weary this House by reminding it in detail that if Karl Marx was right about nothing else, he was right in holding that capitalist imperialism must lead eventually to war. It did lead to war, in 1914. But, the point I am making for is the situation after the war—to the making of the so-called peace in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. I think it is a curious thing that history does things like this. It gives us a symbol in our capital which is a whole lesson in stone and it contrives, with some queer sense of humour, that the Peace Treaty of 1918 should be signed in a Hall of Mirrors, a place where the statesmen lost themselves in illusions. What happened in that palace of illusions, the Hall of Mirrors? A number of so-called statesmen, seated around a green table, waved their fountain pens as if they were wands and, hey presto, the galaxy of nations was supposed to be restored, refurbished and resplendent, with, of course, the notable exception of the Irish nation, which, officially, did not exist and was therefore not allowed to be heard.
What the so-called statesmen round that green table did not restore, however—what they positively forbade to be restored on pain of direst penalties —was an economic way of life that took into account the fact of the restored nationalities. The restored nationalities were to be restored only on paper, in the political context of the 18th century and the Congress of Vienna. The moment they set to work —as they inevitably must and did— to industrialise themselves, to exert themselves as factors in the 20th-century scene, they were to be excommunicated in the name of economic and financial imperialism. In brief, the so-called statesmen round the green table set up a new Europe and at the same time took enormous pains to make sure it could never possibly work. They then proceeded to be naively surprised and shocked at the results of their own handiwork.
So much for the Hall of Mirrors. The sequel came 14 years later in an equally ironical setting, as if history was having a little quiet fun on the side—because the sequel came in the Geological Museum, South Kensington. When the World Economic Conference met there in 1933, cattle were being cremated on the Continent of Europe, wine was being poured down drains, drifter-loads of herrings were being dumped back into the North Sea, coffee was being burnt in the fire-boxes of locomotives and crops were being ploughed back into the earth.
And what had the curiosities of international moneylending assembled in a geological museum to say about all this? All they had to say was there must be no interference with the workings of what is ironically called orthodox finance, or still more ironically, sound finance. The world was in process of being governed by what are still called financial experts. A friend of mine once wrote in criticism of a certain well-known financial expert in Britain whom I shall call Mr. X. "Mr. X," he wrote, "knows everything that there is to be known about the financial system except for what it is for." It was, apparently, quite useless to point out to these assembled experts in 1933 that their Mumbo Jumbo of a system just was not working. A little point like that did not worry them in the least.
We all know what followed that disastrous farce called the World Economic Conference of 1933. We had the roaring twenties, followed by what I call the sinister thirties. Hitler roared louder than ever in Germany and well he might, because the breakdown of that conference bred in the minds of the young exactly the mood of despair on which Fascism flourished, and not only Fascism but Communism, State Socialism and the whole tribe of creeds ending in ism. It was, for example, a sad day for LabourSocialism in Britain when it got into its head the strange idea that it was possible fundamentally to alter the conditions of life in Britain by a process of socialising and nationalising the structure of British industry, and at the same time to leave entirely untouched the system by means of which the products of the socialised industries were distributed internationally.
Well, they know who is the master now, because we are back again in the atmosphere of the sinister 'thirties with, as far as the Western world is concerned, international finance still in the saddle, but operating this time even more openly from Wall Street.
I am not saying a word against Americans as such; I think we in this House should acknowledge the bighearted idealism and the staggering generosity of many things the Americans have done in Europe—that is, Americans operating as Americans. Nor am I even accusing international finance, as operated from Wall Street, of wickedness. I am simply accusing it of trying to do the impossible—of trying to bring back the 19th century world. I am accusing it of making exactly the same mistake that prompted those so-called statesmen at Versailles all over again. And what was that attempt in essence? It was the attempt with which we were all only too familiar in the 20th century—the attempt to solve a problem by enlarging it on to a world screen—the attempt to build a good wall by clapping together a lot of rotten bricks. Of course, nations must co-operate, politically, culturally and economically, but does it necessarily follow from that they must have one international currency? I suggest that the attempt to impose one international currency is the nigger in the wood pile of all these otherwise extremely praiseworthy attempts at international co-operation. I suggest, in fact, that just as we cannot co-operate as nations until as nations we are politically free, so in this new century we cannot co-operate in the economic sphere until we are monetarily free—that is, co-operate in any real sense of the word as opposed to veiled economic domination of the weaker by the stronger. And much more practical and learned economists than I am have come to the same conclusion.
During the last war there was published in London, with, I understand, the co-operation of the Economic Reform Club and a considerable degree of backing from the London Chamber of Commerce, a pamphlet called A Twentieth Century Economic System. It was a remarkable publication because in England, of all countries, it acknowledged the facts of the 20th century economic world. It acknowledged the fact that 19th century political nationalism is now inevitably issuing—whether old gentlemen round green baize tables like it or not—in 20th century economic nationalism; that a host of smaller nations are now, and rightly, industrialising themselves; that the old 19th century idea that nations will always welcome cheap imports just because they are cheap is now completely exploded; and that national sentiment being not weaker but stronger than ever, primary producing countries will no longer tolerate the necessity for their citizens to emigrate in order to find congenial occupations, but will seek to provide more varied and congenial occupations at home.
And what machinery did this extremely realistic English pamphlet suggest for the functioning of national and international trade in the western world as it really is? It suggested a system of free national currencies, fluctuating according to the relation between consumption and production within each nation, and linked for the purposes of international trade through the agency of an international exchange—an international exchange through which the nations would trade on a system of blocked credits or, in the last analysis, by account and contra account. Note that it was an international exchange that was suggested—not an international bank, which is a very different thing. Note, too, that these proposals emanated from England, not Ireland. In fact, I have never heard them discussed in Ireland, which was, in fact, the very country in which they should have originated.
And so we arrived back in the 1940's and the original fluctuating national currencies from which we, as a nation, were originally driven to our cost, and almost to our very destruction as a nation by the shotgun wedding of 1825 that integrated the Irish with the British £. Ministers or subsequent speakers may tell me they never heard of the proposals I have just mentioned. I will not weary the House with a detailed account of the unofficial but extremely efficient Press censorship that operates on all ideas about money, and the working of money, that do not tally with the ideas of orthodox finance. But I do want to underline the fact that at least some economists in other countries are aware of the 20th century dilemma of small nations like our own and of the fallacy of shutting one's eyes to the fact that the 19th century is dead and gone. I suggest that in this pamphlet—A Twentieth Century Economic System there is at least a stimulating approach to the problems of international trade in goods and raw materials between nations with free currencies.
Now, in conclusion, there may be speakers who will hold that whatever we think of the present system—whatever we may think of the lamentable financial history of the 21 years between the wars, a history now repeating itself before our eyes—whatever we may think of all that as a system, it is quite impossible at this moment, and in the circumstances at this moment, for a nation like our own to escape from it. That may be so. I say then, if so, let us face the consequences without deceiving ourselves. Are we then going to continue indefinitely the absurdities and anomalies of monetary and financial policy that were so ably exposed by the Minister for External Affairs in his lecture last week on the link with sterling? I refer to the lecture he delivered on Tuesday, 18th October, in the O'Connell Hall. Must we go on putting all our eggs in one and the same basket up to the point at which our much boasted invisible exports may ultimately become entirely and completely invisible, in so far as they will have ceased to exist, and must we go on with the farce of pretending that the Irish £ is exactly equivalent to the British £ when, in fact, the Irish £ has a higher intrinsic value, for the excellent reason that it is based on a sounder economic structure? Two years ago, in New York, I found that the kerb dealers in exchange, the unofficial brokers, and a number of travelling agencies had a firmer faith in our economic structure than—at any rate, officially—we have ourselves because they were quoting the Irish £ at a higher rate than the British. I understand that that has been going on since. Are we to have less faith in ourselves and our economic future than the kerb dealers of New York?
If we are to continue exact parity indefinitely, how long are we to go on deceiving ourselves about our two political bugbears of emigration and Partition? Other speakers may hold that there are social and biological factors involved in emigration. I entirely agree; but even if these social and biological problems were blotted out, were eliminated, how long could we maintain an increased population on our present policy of investing in British picture palaces and withholding investments from, humanly speaking, much sounder enterprises in our own country? And if we are all going to slide down the scale together— Great Britain, the Six Counties and the Twenty-Six Counties—if the ratio between us is to remain unaltered but at a lower level, how are you going to persuade the Six Counties to throw in their lot with you rather than with Britain?
As I wrote eight years ago in this pamphlet, Eamon de Valera Does Not See It Through—and again I got my head in my hand for doing it:—
"The Ulster Protestant prefers the ills he has to the same ills translated into Gaelic".
I said then, and I say now, that you can never end Partition simply by painting the pillar-boxes green and beginning your letters: "A Chara". It will take an active creative statesmanship, and, by "creative statesmanship" I do not mean just adjustment, what is called consequential legislation arising out of something which has happened somewhere else, which is all we have at the moment, but creative statesmanship in the full sense of the word. If the majority of leaders of opinion in this State tell me that an act of creative statesmanship is impossible, then I tell you— and I tell you as an Ulster Protestant —to stop deceiving yourselves about Partition.
Lastly, a loyal band of Irishmen made perfectly clear at Strasbourg the things for which this nation stands: a Christian way of life, based upon the simple pieties of the soil, but sufficiently diversified industrially to offer its population a chance of remaining rooted in that soil. How far do you think you will really go to achieve that ideal in the full sense in terms of international finance? How far are we achieving it now in terms of a mechanism which regards human lives as commodities—to be shipped out of the country not only like but, ironically enough, along with, sides of bacon which might have fed them?
I have tried to show how international finance worked in the period between the wars and how it is getting to work again to-day—not so much in wickedness as in wilful disregard of the facts of the 20th century world of nations. If we are bound to that system, if it is a flat impossibility to escape from it at the moment, let us stop deceiving ourselves about many things, including our ideal of setting up in this country a Christian State that will show, at any rate, some faint reflection of Divine justice. But let us debate this matter to the full for here, emerging in this House to-day, I think we find the real line of cleavage in our politics of to-morrow. I think this question will be the real issue in the Irish political field of to-day and to-morrow.
