In the summer of 1965, a 55-page booklet dropped through the letterbox of every house in the country. Its title did not mince words. It was in Irish, but even those with a modest understanding of the language could not mistake its meaning: BÁS BEATHA – death life.
The cover depicted a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion, a globe beneath an ominous cloud covering much of Europe and Africa, and a simple image of a house, with a silhouetted family sheltering together in a single room.
With the new Be Emergency Ready booklets due to land on doormats from Monday, it’s worth recalling that Irish governments have previously issued public information about emergencies, with mixed results.
During the second World War, an Air Raid Precautions organisation had issued notices telling people what to do in the event of enemy aircraft bombing Irish cities – something that did, in fact, happen when Dublin was accidentally bombed in 1941 and Belfast was targeted. But these were mainly leaflets and single-page instructions.
RM Block
It was with the establishment of Civil Defence in the 1950s, as the Cold War intensified, that the idea of a comprehensive household emergency booklet took shape. The possibility of nuclear war, with consequences extending across continents, increasingly entered the public consciousness. It reached a terrifying peak with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the prospect of nuclear conflict became an immediate international concern – and a concern for Ireland too.
In 1965, the Government produced its answer: BÁS BEATHA.
The booklet was specifically concerned with surviving a nuclear war. It offered advice on protection in the home and on the farm, reflecting an Ireland that was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural.
It would surely have put the fear of God, as they would have said at the time, into anyone opening it.
Nuclear weapons, it explained, had added a “new and deadly peril” to modern war: radioactive fallout.
It could affect “every home and every farm in the country”. It could arrive on the wind from other countries. It could not be seen or felt, although instruments could detect it.
In a nuclear war, the booklet warned, thousands of people could die from radioactive fallout and thousands more could become seriously ill if they did not know how to protect themselves.
The advice was nevertheless presented as practical and achievable. The then minister for defence, Gerard Bartley, wrote a foreword urging households to keep the booklet carefully and place it somewhere it could easily be found in an emergency.
“It could mean the difference between life and death for you and your family,” he warned.
The illustrations look quaint now, but they reinforced the grimness of the prose. There are drawings showing contamination on skin, people weakened by radiation and diagrams of makeshift shelters.
The booklet explained a three-stage warning system. The first would be a national alert indicating that war had broken out and Ireland was threatened by nuclear fallout or nuclear attack. An advance warning would indicate that fallout was approaching a particular town, city or region. Finally, there would be a warning that fallout had actually begun.
The system reflected the Ireland of 60 years ago. Many households did not have telephones. Some did not even have a radio, or “wireless” as it was commonly called. Local warnings could therefore involve church bells sounding double notes, sirens, whistles and motorcar horns. When the final warning was issued, yellow flags would be displayed along roads to alert motorists and other road users.
Much of BÁS BEATHA was intensely practical. Families were told to establish a secure refuge room by blocking windows with wardrobes or even hiding under stairs. They were to remain indoors for at least two days after the emergency began. They were advised to keep their radio set tuned to Radio Éireann for updates on the fallout situation.
Food and water were to be stored in advance. Water was considered particularly important because the public supply could become contaminated. Meals were not to be cooked during the emergency because cooking would consume valuable resources.
Given how agrarian the society was, almost half the booklet was devoted to protecting animals and agricultural produce. Farmers were advised to bring animals indoors where possible.
Milk and eggs could be contaminated if animals had consumed radioactive material. Suspect food was not to be used. Eggs could be preserved using “waterglass” (a traditional preservative). Butter should be made and retained for testing. Contaminated skimmed milk could be fed to pigs or bullocks, the booklet explained, because it would not affect their flesh.
The final section became considerably darker.
It described the effects of a nearby nuclear explosion. There would be a blinding flash lasting several seconds, accompanied by searing heat, followed some seconds later by a hurricane-like blast. A crater could be almost half a mile wide and about 100 feet deep. Buildings within roughly a mile and a half could be totally destroyed.
People exposed outdoors could suffer fatal or severe burns as far as five miles from the explosion.
The instructions were stark: throw yourself flat on the ground, put your hands beneath your body and protect your head and the back of your neck with whatever was available.
BÁS BEATHA was to remain Ireland’s principal household emergency publication with further printings into the 1970s.
By the late 1980s, the Cold War had ended and the immediate fear of nuclear confrontation had receded.
Then came September 11th, 2001.
The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City revived questions about Ireland’s vulnerability, particularly because of the proximity of the Sellafield nuclear complex across the Irish Sea. RTÉ Radio 1’s Marian Finucane Show began asking how the State would respond to an emergency – including an accident or attack at Sellafield.
The programme’s researchers sought answers from Government departments. Eventually Joe Jacob, then minister of state at the department of public enterprise with responsibility for energy, agreed to come on air.
What followed became one of the most notorious interviews in Irish radio.
Finucane’s questions were remarkably simple. What would happen now if something occurred at Sellafield? What would the Government actually do? What would people be told?
Jacob had a fact sheet and a briefing note. He also had a plan – or, rather, several descriptions of one. He referred to the “new plan”, the “updated plan”, the “state-of-the-art plan” and the plan that was still being developed.
Finucane kept bringing him back to the present.
What would happen now?
Jacob waffled about mechanisms, emergency-response committees, warning systems and a public-awareness campaign, pointing to a fact sheet that was being prepared.
Finucane asked the obvious question: did the public not need to know what to do before an attack happened?
Eventually Jacob began discussing sheltering and iodine tablets.
But how would people get the tablets?
The answer, once again, was the fact sheet.
It was a meltdown.
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The interview effectively finished Jacob’s ministerial career and was an acute political embarrassment for the government. Shortly afterwards, it announced iodine tablets would be distributed nationwide.
The distribution took months to organise and became another chapter in the saga. The government spent about €2.3 million distributing 12.6 million tablets. The scheme was abandoned in 2008.
It was not the end of booklets, though. In 2008, one was distributed nationwide covering a range of threats: nuclear incidents, pandemic influenza, hazardous chemical spills, flooding, accidents at sea and suspicious packages.
But none matched BÁS BEATHA for its breadth and directness. In fact, it was what Jacob should have reached for in 2001, rather than his elusive fact sheet.
