Speech by Taoiseach, Micheál Martin for Launch of ‘Sean Lemass – the Lost Memoir’ Wednesday, 25th March 2026 National Library of Ireland, Dublin

Speech

Speech by Taoiseach, Micheál Martin for Launch of 'Sean Lemass - the Lost Memoir' Wednesday, 25th March 2026 National Library of Ireland, Dublin

• From: Department of the Taoiseach

• Published on: 25 March 2026
• Last updated on: 25 March 2026

By any measure Seán Lemass is one of the great figures of independent Ireland. In this excellent new book Ronan McGreevy has performed a really important public service.

He has made accessible to us all the voice and personality of a leader who delivered remarkable and sustained progress for the Irish people.

When the Irish Times first published extracts from Lemass's interviews with Dermot Ryan it became obvious that he was a more interesting and engaging person than we had understood. More importantly we got a glimpse of someone who was deeply thoughtful and complex.

With this far more extensive presentation of the interviews we can see even more of the personality, the actions and the farsightedness of this truly remarkable life.

Ronan has already made an important contribution to our understanding of various turning points in our history. In writing 'Sean Lemass - the Lost Memoir' he has produced a book which I have no doubt will inspire many more scholars to explore new perspectives on Lemass and his time.

The interviews on which the book is based took place over a period of almost two years. Dermot Ryan was not a historian or a journalist, but he did have a detailed knowledge of the politics of independent Ireland as well as the good sense to understand that his primary task was to get Lemass comfortable with talking at length about his half a century of involvement in public matters.

The depth of the answers and the complete absence of obfuscations or diversions is remarkable.

Lemass believed in getting to the point and being clear about what was done and why it was done.

Yet the range of the interviews, and the positive atmosphere in which they were conducted, also led him to show more of his personality than can be found in any other source.

I would like to mention just a few of the areas where this book gives us a deeper understanding of Lemass.

The period before 1923 was excluded as a principal topic, but it is clear that his reaction to those revolutionary years defined him.

I think the most important aspect of this was his constant desire to move on - to refuse to be defined by the past while focusing on the future.

Repeatedly he rejected the idea of keeping old divisions alive. In these pages he often defines past struggles only in terms of positive objectives while rejecting the need to talk about enemies.

As a teenager he had fought in the Rising and carried a wounded James Connolly's stretcher - yet half a century later he went out of his way to make the point that Irish men who chose instead to fight in France did so with "honour and sincerity."

During the Civil War he was tortured upon arrest and soon afterwards his brother was cruelly murdered. Yet the defining characteristic of his political programme was a belief that we had to stop focusing on Civil War divisions.

The twin tragedies of the deaths of his brothers Herbert and Noel, and his own responsibility for Herbert's death, meant that he carried scars which could never heal.

However, he was part of a much wider group who spoke little of those times. He and they shared a refusal to define their patriotism in terms of the actions of the past.

You see this in his comments about what he called "the Jacobins" within the republican movement who clung to a rigid orthodoxy in beliefs and methods.

You see it in his understanding of the need to develop close and honest relationships with a British government he had fought to remove from Ireland.

You also see it in his belief in the need to build trust across sectarian divides.

It is a testimony of an exceptional personality that the biggest lesson he appears to have taken from his dramatic revolutionary youth was the need to be able to move on and show respect for those you opposed.

No contemporary came close to him in terms of his deep engagement in policy development - and none understood as he did that as circumstances and information change the policies should also change.

His lack of ego in saying that time had come to move on from an old policy is striking. He could well have had as a motto the phrase coined by a student of John Maynard Keynes, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"

In these interviews his explanations of his overall economic policies from the 1930s onwards are direct and comprehensive.

In nearly all cases they reflect someone who was deeply knowledgeable of both economic theory and contemporary policy.

I have always been struck by a comment of the renowned economist and historian Kevin O'Rourke about protectionism. He said that the question about policies of the 1930s should not be about why they were adopted but why they had not been adopted earlier.

As circumstances changed, so too did Lemass's search for ways of delivering the jobs and higher standard of living which he believed would be the true mark of Ireland's success.

Immediately after the end of the war, and in particular during the crisis of rising prices and food scarcity in Europe, he was impatient to find a new model of development.

In opposition in the 1950s he led policy work of a scale then unknown in an Irish political party.

His 1955 speech on economic development is rightly seen as the opening shot in the radical change of policy later implemented under his leadership.

In these years we see the development and clarity of the thinking which went into his transformative actions.

Seán Lemass's relationship with Eamon de Valera, his leader of over forty years, changed over time, but I believe, the evidence of this book is that the younger man had a deep respect and admiration for de Valera's irreplaceable role.

When talking of the 1920s he told Ryan, "Nobody but him could have got the republican movement back to a state of reality."

In his account of the dramatic constitutional, defence and trade developments of the late 1930s you find almost awe at what he described as de Valera's "real political genius of the highest order".

He was clearly impatient for faster change - and he would have liked to have become Taoiseach earlier, but his respect for de Valera is undeniable.

In terms of 'what ifs', the biggest one to emerge from these interviews is actually not the often-asked question of what would have happened if he had become Taoiseach earlier.

It is actually what would have happened if the new departures on North/South relations he and de Valera were considering had been implemented earlier?

They wanted to start building engagement and shared development from as early as the 1930s - but events and the inflexibility of others stood in the way.

If you want an example of Lemass's capacity for far-sighted reflection there are few examples better than a paper on Northern policy, he developed in the mid-1950s at de Valera's prompting.

In it he set out a model of cooperation and development which is remarkable similar to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

This book confirms again that Lemass's commitment of Ireland to seeking a future as a member of a European community of states was not an afterthought or a late conversion. It reflected thirty years of deep consideration of European issues and their impact on Ireland.

As early as 1928 he wrote a memo to the party's Árd Comháirle which considered a proposal which the French Minister for Foreign Affairs had made concerning the creation of a European customs union.

Soon after the end of the Second World War he publicly advocated for cooperation amongst European states.

At the meeting in Paris in 1947 which founded of what is now the OECD he told those gathered "We cannot recover the prosperity we seek or win for our people the high and rising standard of living we wish them to have merely by the temporary patching up of our own national economies."

The policies which he enacted as Taoiseach achieved his first objective of creating employment. What he wanted was for Ireland to go further and deliver significantly higher standards of living, better public services and high levels of education.

This was the reason for Irish independence and for him, Europe was the only context in which it could be achieved.

His internationalism included his belief in the United Nations and Ireland's duty to play a role.

In these interviews he went as far as to describe his push to secure agreement for Irish involvement in peacekeeping as "one of my major decisions in public life."

Lemass's genius in political strategy also comes through in a much clearer way in these interviews.

He believed that Fianna Fáil could only succeed if it did two major things. It had to have a programme focused on the future which could reach across the Civil War divide, and it had to have a wide membership base in all parts of the country.

The organisation he built started with no resources and uniform media opposition. He told Dermot Ryan that for some time there was "no way to pay for postage or notepaper."

He travelled the country recruiting members, leading policy development and building a movement which reached government within six years.

It was a feat of political organisation and campaigning which will never be matched.

Just as he instinctively understood politics, he equally understood the operation of government. To understand government you must, he insisted, understand that at least half of the work is to stop bad things happening or to manage issues which have no news value.

He also had an impatience with the angry utopianism of those who were content in the comfort of their rigid ideologies.

He accepted criticism but demanded perspective and realism. He told Dermot Ryan, "I would not be at all upset by the fact that young people are critical of the past generation's achievement, so long as they do not think they have a right to be born into a world where there are no problems left to be solved."

In the pages of this important book, you will find example after example of a thoughtful leader impatient with empty gestures and engaged with both theory and practice.

It is remarkable how wide the references he uses when answering questions. I was struck by how much he valued having time to read - and to read a diverse range of material.

In this context it is fitting to find that he was shopping for books along the Quays when he noticed in a paper that he had just been selected to contest a by-election.

He never ceased to be curious about the world. Those who knew him say that he loved debriefing them on their experiences working and travelling abroad.

Near the end of the interviews Dermot Ryan asked him about the judgement of history. He expressed his scepticism that historians would be capable of seeing his times through a proper perspective and he imagined that they would look back condescendingly at the ignorance of the past generations.

In this he was completely wrong. In fact, the more we engage with the life and impact of Seán Lemass the more impressive he seems.

Born in the nineteenth century, he remains a source of wisdom relevant in the twenty-first.

Thanks to the generosity of the Ryan and Lemass families, and the scholarship and dedication of Ronan McGreevy, we now have a much deeper and nuanced understanding of a remarkable man.

This book is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the progress of modern Ireland and the man who made so much possible.