"A Unique and Unparalleled Surrender of Sovereignty": Early Opposition to European Integration in Ireland, 1961–72

Ireland's economic situation in the 1950s had grown dire at the very moment when much of Western Europe was experiencing remarkable economic growth. Suffering from an unstable agricultural economy, high emigration, declining wages, and high unemployment, the Irish state's protectionist economic policy and its unequal economic relationship with neighboring Great Britain left the Republic without the flexibility necessary to fix its economic deficiencies.¹

In response, the Fianna Fáil party, under the leadership of Seán Lemass and, later, Jack Lynch—the dominant political force in Ireland at the time, though one that had been out of office twice during the 1950s—boldly connected Ireland's national interests with those of the European Economic Community (EEC). They argued that Ireland's economic fortunes could no longer remain static behind a tariff wall while the rest of Europe moved toward further integration. Such a path, Lemass warned in 1962, would leave Ireland "a beggar amongst the nations, seeking to maintain a dying economy on the crumbs of charity from our wealthier neighbors."² Instead, aligning with the EEC and embracing liberalization would allow Ireland to rebuild its economy and control its own economic destiny. This was a stunning reversal of nearly thirty years of protectionist economic policy, made more remarkable in that it was Lemass who had crafted the earlier policy in the first place. To allay concerns over EEC membership's impact on Ireland's political sovereignty, Lemass and Lynch skillfully connected Ireland's future political independence with a narrative of economic prosperity under the aegis of Europe—a shift in interpretation that in effect redefined the goals of Irish nationalism.³ Their reappraisal of the principles of Irish economic autonomy bluntly acknowledged that the "unfettered control of Irish destinies" inherent in the Irish Constitution was largely a false sovereignty for a republic hobbled with a weak and declining economy.⁴ With a few notable exceptions, the Irish political establishment and the Irish public accepted Fianna Fáil's arguments and overwhelmingly supported Irish membership in the EEC.

Coexisting alongside the mainstream Irish debate over membership in the EEC was an argument that relied more heavily on overt appeals to cultural nationalism and a more "pure," and ultimately inflexible, understanding of sovereignty. Coalescing around the guidance, inspiration, and eventual leadership of a cadre of eccentric academics and leftist members of Sinn Féin, this early opposition to Irish membership in the EEC occupied a marginalized public space where, unconstrained by the burden of mass appeal, the primacy of sovereignty overwhelmed all rhetorics. It was from this eclectic collection of individuals, which included the maritime historian and socialist John de Courcy Ireland and the radical academic Anthony Coughlan, that the contemporary Irish opposition to European integration developed. One can see this in the several connections between the original Common Market Defence Campaign (CMDC) that unsuccessfully fought the 1972 Irish Referendum on EEC membership and the Irish Sovereignty Movement and the National Platform (both fronted by Coughlan himself) that, three decades later, helped to defeat the first Nice Referendum in 2001.⁵

This early Irish opposition to European integration was, and remains, a marginal force within Irish politics, but there has been little attention paid as to why this is the case. In examining the period prior to membership (1961–72) when the debate was most prominent in Irish political life, there are several key questions that appear. How and in what manner did this early opposition develop? What social and political forms did it take? How important were academic intellectuals in framing the opposition argument? What was its relationship to the Irish political system and other marginal political factions? Finally, why did early opponents fail to galvanize the Irish public against the EEC?

It is helpful to understand what it was that Irish opponents of European integration were offering during the debate. Where pro-Europeans described Ireland's European future in laudatory and forward-thinking terms, promising full employment, economic growth, and unheralded prosperity, anti-Europeans articulated a traditionalist argument that forewarned of...