Seán Lemass
Seán Lemass was in the GPO at sixteen, on the anti-Treaty side in the Four Courts at twenty-two, and the minister who built de Valera's Ireland behind tariff walls for twenty years, and when he finally succeeded the old man in 1959 at sixty he took the walls down, opened the country to foreign capital, applied to join the Common Market, and drove to Belfast to shake hands with the Unionist prime minister, none of which the party he led had ever imagined doing. He was born in Dublin in 1899 over his father's hat shop, fought in Easter Week and was sent home for his age, was in the squad that killed British agents on Bloody Sunday in 1920, and took the republican side in the civil war, in which his brother was murdered. He was de Valera's man in the founding of Fianna Fáil in 1926, called it a slightly constitutional party, and from 1932 was minister for industry and commerce for most of twenty-seven years: the tariffs, the state companies for sugar, peat, electricity and the airline, the Control of Manufactures Acts, and in the war the ministry of supplies that kept the country fed. By the 1950s the policy had failed on its own terms, with half a million people emigrating in a decade, and Lemass knew it before his party did. As Taoiseach he took the civil servant T. K. Whitaker's programme of 1958 and made it policy: tax holidays for exporters, grants for foreign firms, the end of protection, free trade with Britain in 1965, the application to Brussels in 1961 that waited for Britain's, and a growth rate the country had never seen. He meant the meeting with Terence O'Neill at Stormont in January 1965 as the beginning of something and it was the end of O'Neill instead. He said the historic task of his generation was to secure the economic foundations of independence and that the constitutional questions could wait, retired in November 1966 at sixty-seven, and died in 1971. His son-in-law Charles Haughey inherited the party and not the temperament.
- Lived: 1899 CE – 1971 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: taoiseach, politician
