Lemass, Sean

Lemass, Sean (1899–1971), The son of a prosperous Dublin retailer, Lemass was a teenage combatant in the rising of 1916. Interned for IRA activities 1920–1, he fought on the anti‐treaty side in the Civil War. His brother Noel was murdered in October 1923, allegedly by Free State political police. Lemass became abstentionist Sinn Féin TD (Dáil deputy) for South Dublin 1924, and went on to play a key organizational role in the successful establishment of Fianna Fáil.

As minister for industry and commerce 1932–9 Lemass energetically promoted domestic manufacturing through protective tariffs and the exclusion of foreign capital. From 1939 he was minister for supplies (while also resuming control of industry and commerce from 1941), coping efficiently with the acute shortages created by the Second World War. By 1944–5 Lemass was already impatient with the limitations imposed by protectionism and state suport for small‐scale agriculture, but was restrained by the conservatism of cabinet colleagues. In 1959 he succeeded de Valera as party leader and taoiseach, and gave full support to the new strategy of industrial development, largely financed by inward investment, outlined in the First Programme for Economic Expansion.

The rapid modernization of the 1960s, replacing the stagnation of the de Valera era, encouraged perceptions of Lemass's premiership (1959–66) as a new era. Modern accounts emphasize the pragmatism, and at times opportunism, that allowed him to work for so long with a party largely out of sympathy with his goal of economic, and in particular industrial, development, and to respond to the new ideas taking shape in a variety of quarters at the time he became taoiseach. In the same spirit he promoted friendlier relations with Northern Ireland, notably in his exchange of visits with Terence O'Neill (1965), while continuing to insist that economic progress in independent Ireland would eventually permit the peaceful ending of partition.