WHAT OF EIRE’S FUTURE IN TRADE AND POLITICS?

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 29, 6 December 1948, Page 5

WHAT OF EIRE’S FUTURE IN TRADE AND POLITICS?

Room For Men Who Look Ahead (By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) Dublin, October 31. Like a crowd watching a tennis i’ally, heads of many shapes and colours about the world are shaking at an imagined decline of Britain in this age of shifting power. Not so in Dublin. The baleful view directed from here to Westminster proclaims Britain as having shed not one of her rifle butt, Empire snatching ways since Drogheda and before. A compliment, if an Irish kind. Most persistent evidence advanced is the segregation of. the six counties of the north, prevented by British bayonets from, that . accession to the South which their people so longingly await. Not quite as I heard it in Bel- ' fast, but it would be a toneless world with room for but one opinion. The foregoing line of argument was served up to us with some of the most warming food and company it has been my pleasure to know. Should it become necessary ever for me to be branded a double dyed scoundrel, I would wish no more than that this dark epithet be bestowed by a chuckling Dubliner, over a glass of Guinness. Dined By Minister We were dined by Mr Sean MacBride, Eire’s Minister for External Affairs, and scheduled for translation to Foreign Minister on Eire’s repealing the External Relations Act. Mr Macßride’s father was executed by the British after the Easter Rising of 1916. His mother was a figure in revolutionary literature. He himself was an IRA officer till not so long ago. • To counsel him to dismiss these matters as of the past, and instead to get on with thinking about atoms | and Russians and so on, would surely be to insult him as a son of his parents and his country. At the same time, there does seem in Dublin room for men who spin dreams of .the years ahead, instead of telling of heroes of fights now j past, provided those , dreams pay I due attention to pantries and wardJ robes throughout the country. J An inescapable query, having I heard the considerable catalogue of items the Irish are against, is: “What are you for?” There is- a most adverse balance of trade, with no evident plan for redressing it. Eire is almost purely an agricultural economy, and peasant agriculture at that. All heavy industry in Ireland is round Beli fast, and the practical Mr Macßride is swift to mix economics in with mistier appeals to nationalism over Partition. Progress Of Eire - How will Eire progress? The twentieth century .is one of urban development. In Dublin I am told the Catholic church is somewhat meagre in its praise for this and other social phenomena arising from industrialisation. The Church, not surprisingly, is a most influential force in 96 per cent Catholic Eire, whose proud claim it is to be, with the possible excep>tion of Spain, the only Catholic country in Europe today. There is the question of whether the Church’s conception of a sound social structure (and Eire offers the Church almost laboratory conditions for creating such a structure) can march in step in an interlocked, materialistic world economy. This question is complicated further by the Catholic church’s current position as the best disciplined organisation of any size the Communist tide is likely to wash up against. Except perhaps that Eire is so far behind the ideological firing line that she may not be affected by tactical expediencies.