The Political Economy of the Irish Welfare State: Church, State and Capital by Powell Fred

Author:Powell, Fred [Powell, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Policy, Public Policy, Political Science, Social Services & Welfare
ISBN: 9781447335375
Google: 7eU2DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2017-09-13T12:22:30+00:00

Catholic periodicals such as the Catholic Bulletin, the Catholic Pictorial (later the Catholic Mind) the Irish Rosary and the Standard assiduously promoted a Catholic worldview.

Moreover, as J. H. Whyte (1980: 165) points out, Maria Duce ‘cannot be dismissed as of trivial importance’. While its core membership was in the hundreds, associated membership rose to the thousands and the circulation of its periodical Fiat ‘went into five figures’ (Whyte, 1980: 165). It also had ‘ambivalent’ support from the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid (Cooney, 1999: 239-240).

Such explicit statements of Catholic supremacist ideology were unusual. In reality they caused embarrassment to the Catholic hierarchy. John Charles McQuaid, in his capacity as Archbishop of Dublin in 1954, effectively suppressed Maria Duce forcing it to change its name to Firinne (Truth). Whyte (1980: 165) notes that Firinne and Fiat survived until the beginning of the 1960s, concluding this movement was ‘perhaps only a lunatic fringe …but it was still of interest as a symptom’.

While Maria Duce’s opinions were very much on the fringe of the Irish political spectrum, they represented the voice of a Catholic social movement in Ireland. Moreover, there were influential intellectual voices supporting the Catholic social movement. Professor Alfred O’Rahilly, President of University College Cork (UCC), wrote prolifically in the Standard, a weekly newspaper promoting Catholic social teaching. O’Rahilly was a strong advocate of corporatism and devoted much of his commentary to social policy issues. But he also discussed ‘wider political matters’, for example, an issue with the heading ‘Catholic Statesmen Seek Peace Order’, was accompanied by portraits of Petain, Salazar and Franco (Whyte, 1980: 71).

Proponents of the doctrine of subsidiarity as a ‘third way’ grounded its rationale in an appeal to public opinion based on a fear that the welfare state was totalitarian. Sociologist Fr Jerome O’Leary (1953: 552-3) asserted: ‘During the last century the spirit of Individualism or Liberalism was in the ascendant’, adding, ‘during this century the inevitable reaction set in and, as is common with all reactions, the pendulum swung violently to the other extreme, the extreme of totalitarianism’.

The Catholic critique ignored the fact that the idea of the welfare state was the product of social democracy, which replaced revolution by evolution and constituted a democratic third way. It was left to O’Leary’s editorial collaborator on Christus Rex, Monsignor McKevitt, to deal with Fabian social democracy directly. McKevitt declared, ‘when tried out in practice, socialism has proved the truth of the old prophecies that freedom would be the first casualty of universal state planning’. But the most vitriolic attack on the idea of the welfare state came from leading Irish theologian, the Reverend Felim O’Briain. Fr O’Briain described the welfare state as ‘the Silken Tyranny’ in a series of articles published in the Irish Independent during November, 1952. In these articles, he characterised the welfare state as ‘a variant of the cruder methods of Nazism, Fascism, Communism’, and referred to ‘welfare totalitarianism’ and the ‘dehumanitization that State paternalism is bound to achieve’ (quoted in Blanshard, 1954: 203).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.