Gerard Sweetman - Ministerial Career

Ministerial Career

He was now 45 years old, and he inherited a national economy that was in crisis. Unemployment was at 421,000; over 100,000 people had left agriculture during the previous 8 years; the country was seeing a level of emigration unknown since the famine.

Sweetman differed in his thinking from the staid protectionist policies espoused by Éamon de Valera since the 1930s. Rather than focussing on a self-sufficient Ireland, Sweetman enacted policies that would make Ireland a net exporter.

In his first budget in 1955, he introduced a thoroughly modern scheme whereby a tax exemption was provided for exported goods. He also established the Prize Bonds programme as a means of covering the national debt. This debt was worrying in the mid-50s. Two major bond issues were placed during Sweetman's tenure for £20 million and £12 million. These were huge sums at a time when an average worker entered the tax net with an annual salary of just £533.

However, Sweetman's greatest initiative as Minister was the appointment of another young man of talent and vision. On 30 May 1956 he elevated a 39 year old civil servant named Ken Whitaker to the position of Secretary-General of the Department of Finance. This was a revolutionary step, as it did not follow the convention of promotion based on time served.

Whittaker's time at the Department has been seen as absolutely instrumental in the economic development of the country, indeed a 2001 RTÉ contest named him 'Irishman of the 20th Century'. Whittaker was inherited by the new FF government elected in 1957, and his seminal “First Programme for Economic Expansion” published in 1958 laid the foundations for economic growth in the 1960s.