From ‘his Majesty’s service’ to the creation of a nation

ALONG with the State Papers released annually under the 30-year rule, other documents that should have been opened in previous years have also just been released.

They include a request from the Vatican on February 19, 1971, to grant political asylum to Milton Obote, the deposed President of Uganda.

The following day, after the Irish Government had given the matter “particularly careful and sympathetic consideration”, Ambassador TV Commins informed the Vatican the request had been turned down.

Mr Commins gave the possible adverse impact on Irish missionaries in Uganda as one of the reasons for the refusal.

This year’s batch of old papers contains material of particular interest to historians interested in the development of the Republic.

Speaking at Arbour Hill on April 23, 1933, the President of the Executive Council, Eamon de Valera, promised to introduce changes so that when a Republic was formally declared it would only amount to a change of names, as the country would in fact already be a republic.

One of his earliest moves was to limit the official functions of the Governor General.

On September 19, 1933 he notified the British that henceforth foreign diplomats taking up posts in Ireland would present their credentials to him as President of the Executive Council, rather than to the Governor General as the representative of the King.

“Your Majesty is accordingly advised,” he wrote. He concluded that all of this “is submitted by Your Majesty’s obedient Servant”.

Another released file, containing just a single page, relates to the appointment of Michael MacWhite as Irish Minister to Italy.

Mr MacWhite was being accredited to the Court of Victor Emanuel as King of Italy and Emperor of Ethiopia, which afforded formal recognition of Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia in 1936.

It set a precedent for Ireland’s independence within the British Commonwealth, as officially Mr MacWhite was King George’s Minister from Ireland and this meant the King was recognising the annexation on behalf of Ireland, but not on behalf of the other countries of the Commonwealth, which were still refusing to recognise what Italy had done.

Of course, the greatest demonstration of the country’s independence was staying out of the Second World War, while the rest of the Commonwealth was involved in the conflict. By mid-1943, the Department of External Affairs was worried about this country’s international post-war position.

Michael Rynne, the department’s legal adviser, warned on November 11, 1943 the post-war world would “be managed by the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the USSR without too much regard to the small States”.

Mr de Valera was already moving to improve his influence with the Allies by secretly agreeing to an approach from the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, to allow Irish diplomats on the Continent to be used as American spies.

Mr MacWhite helped the OSS in the Vessel Project, which involved sending espionage material to Dublin in the Irish diplomatic pouch.

It was then handed over to US intelligence. In 1972, R Harris Smith caused a stir by publishing details of this secret co-operation.

The Ambassador to Italy reported on August 31, 1972 that Harris had disclosed that “representatives of the Holy See in Tokyo passed military information to the United States administration via the Vatican, the Irish Embassy in Rome, the department of External Affairs, Dublin and the OSS Office in London.

"The Vatican agent is said to have been Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, now His Holiness Pope Paul VI”.

The situation was played down in the US. It was presumed this was because of the Pope’s involvement, but many years later there was a different explanation. The Americans had paid a lot of money for the material and believed they had brought off a great espionage coup.

But the material was forged by a conman in Italy and the subsequent silence was about protecting the reputation of US intelligence.

In 1949, this country was formally declared the Republic of Ireland. As Mr de Valera had promised in 1933, this only amounted to a change of name.

This country had already refused to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation earlier in the year, on the grounds Britain was a member and Ireland could not “enter into an alliance with a State which had denied the historic right of the Irish people to a unified island”.

One of the newly-opened files traces the history of Ireland’s early relations with NATO.

The British responded to the eclaration of the Republic of Ireland by guaranteeing the “territorial integrity” of Northern Ireland, and this was then cited as a further reason for Dublin’s refusal to join

NATO, because Article 4 of the NATO treaty stipulated that “the parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened”.

“Ireland has made the point that the above reference to ‘territorial integrity’ taken in conjunction with a similar reference in the British Government’s Ireland Act was an additional factor which precluded Ireland’s accession to the Atlantic Treaty,” the Department of External Affairs noted.