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Northern Ireland entered 1971 with the institutions at Stormont under severe strain. The civil-rights movement had exposed long-standing grievances over housing, electoral arrangements and policing, while republican and loyalist violence, alongside the expanding British Army presence, had made everyday security precarious in many places. The split between the Official and Provisional wings of the Irish Republican movement, completed in 1970, had also created competing armed organisations rather than reducing republican militancy.
The central foreign-policy decision came on 10 May, when Lynch formally asked the six states of the European Economic Community to open negotiations on Irish membership. Ireland had first applied in 1961. That application had stalled when President Charles de Gaulle blocked Britain’s proposed entry in January 1963. The 1967 initiative was therefore a renewal rather than an entirely new departure, but it confirmed that the Irish government regarded participation in European integration as essential to the country’s economic future.
On 14 January, President Charles de Gaulle of France rejected Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community. Ireland’s own application, lodged in July 1961, had been conceived alongside Britain’s because the British market remained central to Irish trade. De Gaulle did not formally veto Ireland; nevertheless, a separate Irish entry while Britain remained outside was judged impracticable. The result was a serious check to one of Lemass’s central international and economic ambitions. Dublin adopted what was, in effect, a waiting policy, while continuing to liberalise trade and to make the State more attractive to industry.
Lemass did not pretend that entry would be easy. Ireland’s economic circumstances gave the six existing EEC members reason to ask difficult questions. Much Irish manufacturing had developed behind tariffs; agriculture remained central to employment and exports; and Britain was overwhelmingly Ireland’s principal trading partner. In Brussels, the Taoiseach argued that the Programme for Economic Expansion, begun in 1958, had already encouraged industrial growth, exports and investment. He accepted that Irish firms would need to adapt to a more competitive environment, while stressing that Ireland’s external trade made access to wider markets essential.
The census taken in the Republic on Sunday, 9 April was a sobering inventory of the society that the Lemass government hoped to transform. It recorded a de facto population of 2,818,341 people, lower than the 1956 total. The result confirmed that the long demographic decline which had shaped independent Ireland had not simply disappeared with the arrival of economic planning. Census night counted those physically present in the State, including visitors, rather than Irish people temporarily abroad; this technical definition mattered in a country whose families were so often divided by migration.
