Government-Business Relations in the Services Sector of Independent Ireland, 1922-1958

Abstract

Government-business relations were vital in shaping the initial decades of the Irish economy. While broad-based autarchy was the governing paradigm of the secondary, or manufacturing, part of the economy, less is known about how government and business mutually shaped the evolution of the services part of the economy. Using three cases that examine significant services industries (in terms of capital intensity, employment and overall economic criticality) in a historical context, this thesis finds that while the state had firm developmental plans to reconfigure such industries, it found its policy intentions modified by a range of constraints that proved meaningful pre- and post-WW2. These constraints were a mixture of institutional protections for business inherited from the 19th century (railways), private sector autonomy and liquidity preference amid a national savings dearth (banking) and the requirement for industry endorsement of new native industries (insurance). In particular structuralist dependence on service businesses, in various guises, emerges as a key theme throughout the work. This work seeks to make an empirical contribution by examining three intense periods of government-business relations and uncovering new historical findings using underexplored archival collections, as per the business history domain. In addition it seeks to make a theoretical contribution by utilising the empirical findings to test some canonical theories on government-business relations (such as structural power arguments) and thereby draw some preliminary and exploratory conclusions on which further research can be built.