Dev’s secret war on the side of the Allies destroys neutrality myth

“LIKE it or not, Ireland is no longer neutral and this is crunch time,” Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny declared on Thursday.

The truth is that we were never neutral. People have been confusing the right to remain neutral with actual neutrality.

Some people will probably think that the new policy document, Beyond Neutrality, is a reckless piece of political opportunism, merely designed to grab some cheap headlines. Others will say it is a brave attempt to grasp a political nettle in order to afford real leadership for a change.

The neutrality issue has long been a political red herring. Garret FitzGerald accused Charlie Haughey of secretly trying to use neutrality to end partition in 1981. Eamon de Valera tried to do that until his bluff was called in June 1940, when the British secretly offered to end partition in return for Irish bases.

The primary duty of the State is to provide for the security of the people. “It is wrong for us to ignore the issue and it is wrong for us to keep our heads down,” argued Gay Mitchell, the Fine Gael spokesman for Foreign Affairs.

We were not neutral during the recent Iraqi war. We helped the Americans, by providing landing facilities at Shannon, which was a violation of strict neutrality.

Whether anybody finds weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is really of little significance. Enough evidence has been produced to justify the removal of Saddam.

As a member of the League of Nations the Irish Free State played a courageous role in international affairs in the 1930s, especially during the Manchurian and Ethiopian crises. De Valera warned that if a proper stand were not taken against international aggression that the league would crumble and that there would be another world war. When the Italians invaded Ethiopia in 1935 he went so far as to suggest that the Irish Free State should provide military support, if the league decided to go to war with Italy. Of course, that never happened, because the major powers funked the issue.

Some of our moralists frequently criticise de Valera for not taking a moral stand on the side of right and justice in the Second World War, which was the greatest crisis of the 20th century. But those moralists do not know what they are talking about.

At the outset of the war, de Valera assured John Maffey, Britain’s representative in Ireland, that he desired an Allied victory and he was prepared to do whatever he could to help the British, short of going to war. He refused to give Irish bases to Britain, but he contended those bases would be of little value.

The shipping route south of Ireland was too vulnerable to German attacks from the French coast and the British already had bases in Northern Ireland to protect the shipping route north of the island.

Seaplanes based on Lough Erne provided air cover for the Atlantic shipping and the Dublin Government authorised the British to fly over Sligo, Leitrim and Donegal. In April 1941, a seaplane landed off the Donegal coast due to lack of fuel and it was towed into Bundoran. The British were invited to transport the plane back to Northern Ireland, and they were then allowed to station a boat at Killybegs for air-sea rescue purposes. The Robin Hastie, with its crew of 11 British sailors, took up duties in Donegal in June 1941. While in Killybegs, the British naval personnel dressed in civilian clothes to facilitate the myth of Irish neutrality.

Throughout the war there was almost total Dáil support for the Government’s foreign policy. James Dillon, the deputy leader of Fine Gael, was a lone exception.

In July 1941, he admitted that what he called “the Government’s present policy of indifferent neutrality” had the support of not only a majority of the people but also a majority of his own party. Still, he contended the policy was wrong.

“It is not in the true interest, moral or material, of the Irish people,” he said. Possibly he did not know about the Robin Hastie being based in Killybegs.

“We, the parliament of Ireland, should ascertain precisely what co-operation Great Britain and the United States of America may require to ensure success against the Nazi attempt at world conquest and, as expeditiously as possible, to afford to the United States of America and Great Britain that co-operation to the limit of our resources,” Dillon told the Dáil.

He had the courage of his convictions, but he was advocating a dangerous policy. On the basis of Dillon’s attitude, David Gray, the US minister to Ireland, suggested that a British or American invasion of Ireland could be facilitated, if they appealed to the deputy leader of Fine Gael as a means of a way of dividing the Irish people. Yet there was no question of Fine Gael allowing this to happen.

Dillon was promptly repudiated and forced to resign from Fine Gael when he repeated his views in early 1942 after the United States entered the war. There was a danger, however, that the British or Americans could have acted precipitately in the mistaken belief that Dillon had significant popular support. This did not happen because de Valera was secretly providing the Allies with essentially all the help that they desired.

William J Donovan, the head of American intelligence, wrote to US President Franklin Roosevelt on March 30, 1944. This mentions that the Irish approached the US in early 1943 with an offer “to cooperate with the United States Government in intelligence matters”.

Donovan described this Irish co-operation as “very full”. His report contained an extensive list of the kinds of information that Irish military intelligence turned over to the Americans. This included all information obtained from captured German spies and from interned German airmen and sailors, as well as from Irish people who had recently returned from the Continent, such as William Warnock, who spent much of the war as Irish chargé d’affaires in Berlin.

An amount of material is blacked out of Donovan’s memorandum, presumably because it would embarrass the Irish Government. That material related to de Valera’s secret authorisation to use Irish diplomats in Berlin, Rome and Vichy as American spies. The department of external affairs transmitted questions from the Americans to the diplomats and then forwarded the replies to US intelligence.

“So far the information contained in these reports has been of use primarily as confirmation of information from other sources,” Donovan wrote to Roosevelt.

“However, the potentialities are important.”

(You can find a photographic copy of the report on the internet at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box4/a54o02.html.)

We still do not know exactly what information the Irish diplomats provided, but it is absurd to talk about our traditional policy of neutrality. Secretly this country pursued a moral policy of which nobody need be ashamed.

There is no real international threat to this country at this time, but experience would seem to suggest the dangers of trying to debate the neutrality issue in the midst of a crisis.

Now is the time to debate the issue in the light of history, rather than against the backdrop of a supposed traditional policy, that was neither real nor traditional.