THE ULSTER CONFLICT this period. Catholicism has always thrived among deprived social groups, and part of De Valera's autarchic policy depended on devloping an austere spirit among the workers. In his gratitude to the Church for what it achieved by its "charitable works", and in order to cast off the odour of unholiness that chmg to his "subversive" activities of the early 1920s De Valera started to institute a whole series of laws which embodied Catholic social policy, such as the outlawing of divorce and birth control, the censorship of literature (including books on birth control) and films, etc. The final accolade was his Constitution of 1937 which conceded a special place in the structure of the state to the Roman Catholic Church. Not unnaturally this document, which laid claim to sovereignity for Eire over the whole island, inflamed tensions in the North and reinforced ideas about the role of the Church in the Nationalist movement. By now, however, De Valera was experiencing strong opposition to his protectionist policies from the Fine Gael supporting farmers who had been hard hit by them. In 1938when industrial expansion had fallen to an eighth of its previous rate he negotiated a settlement of the "economic war" with the British whereby he handed over flümillion of blocked funds to settle the Land Annuities question once and for all, negotiated a mutual reduction in tariffs which facilitated the export of agricultura! products, and transferred back to the Irish government strategic ports which had been reserved by the U.K. government for defence purposes in the 1921 Treaty. These legal moves did not stop the downward spiral of exports and imports in the southern Irish economy and the neutrality of Eire in the 2nd World War resulted in an absolute nadir of economic activity. The only alternative to this autarchic decline after the war was the progressive liberalization of trade relations with Britain. The two main periods of the Fianna Fail government opening up its economy to British influence were marked by I.R.A. campaigns against Ulster and Britain. The I.R.A. was functioning as the nationalist conscience of the traditional separatist party, and one can discern the same syndrome in the resurrection of the I.R.A. as a military force in 1969/70, during a similar period of pragmatic rapprochement between the Ulster and Eire economies. 61
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