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New Hibernia Review 6.1 (2002) 149-151



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Book Review

Ireland and the Marshall Plan, 1947-57


Ireland and the Marshall Plan, 1947-57, by Bernadette Whelan, pp. 426. Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2000, $55.00. Distributed by ISBS, Portland, OR.

The United States initiated the Marshall Plan, or the European Recovery Program, in 1947 to try to stimulate growth in the postwar European economy to make it self-sufficient. The American vision for Europe was at the very least multilayered. It was in America's enlightened self-interest to assist its best customers to reestablish enough prosperity to be able to buy American goods [End Page 149] again. It was also in America's best interests, as the Cold War tensions became firmly set, to raise the standard of living in war-torn countries to a sufficient level of prosperity that the people would not reject liberal, democratic capitalism and turn in desperation to communism and the Soviet Union. By the time the program was ended more than $13 billion had been sent to Europe in grants or loans. The conventional wisdom within the historical literature is that this was a generous attempt to revive the downward spiral of misery, poverty, and economic collapse caused by the war and one of a number of steps taken by the United States to assume the leadership role into which the war and economic circumstances had cast it. The revisionist view is that Europe was recovering steadily by 1947 but that the United States needed to protect its economy from a return to the prolonged depression of the 1930s and to create the long-term market dependency that foreign aid would guarantee by placing American goods in the European vacuum.

Ireland occupied a peculiar place in these circumstances. Neutral during the great crusade of World War II, Ireland had few friends in the State Department or the White House. Moreover, Ireland did not have devastated cities, bombed industries and transportation systems, or vast numbers of homeless or displaced persons. However, Ireland could not be left out of European recovery plans since it was a major supplier of foodstuffs to Britain, America's most important ally in both World War II and the growing Cold War.

Bernadette Whelan has given us the most extensive study of Ireland's place in this complex international process, and shown that the Irish response was also multilayered. Eamon de Valéra and Frederick H. Boland, secretary of the Department of External Affairs, understood that the recovery program would facilitate a return to European affairs since Ireland's effective withdrawal following the collapse of the League of Nations and the outbreak of the war. The coalition government headed by John A. Costello, which came into office in early 1948, seemed to regard the aid program as a way to finance purchases and improvements not otherwise affordable, while the new minister of external affairs, Seán MacBride, saw the numerous meetings in Europe and the United States as opportunites to enlist international support for ending the separation of the Six Counties from the rest of the country. The mandarins of the Finance Department saw the program as a nightmare which would encourage governments to embark on excessive spending programs that would generate inflation and for which there were no dollars with which to pay back the money. Whelan leads the reader through this complex maze, the end result being that Ireland obtained $128 million in loans, $18 million in grants, and $1.25 million in technical assistance, as well as appropriating "counterpart funds" through its own budget to parallel the monies received. These funds were used both to purchase [End Page 150] American goods, otherwise not obtainable because of the dollar shortage, and costly capital improvements within Ireland.

The question remains, what was the effect of all this? In the short term both employment and agricultural exports remained high into the 1950s. Furthermore, the United States demand for the export of Irish goods and more sophisticated paperwork forced the Irish government and civil service to be more...

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