Ghosts and fascists ran amok during the strange days of our neutrality
Now with the 60th anniversary only months away, Mercier Press has brought out a similar book packed with new information that is as ground-breaking as the first book.
Ireland in World War Two: Neutrality and Survival (Dermot Keogh and Mervyn O’Driscoll eds, Mercier Press, €16.95) is the product of an historical conference at University College Cork in 2001. In the introduction, professor Dermot Keogh provides an insight into the frustrations faced by Irish historians for many years.
It explains why such a book could have so much fresh information so long after the events.
In 1977 Dermot came back from Italy, where he was studying, to view papers of the Department of Foreign Affairs after Garret FitzGerald authorised access but the Government changed before he could view the material. He was shown the documents, but was not allowed to read them.
I had a similar experience at the army archives. I was told I could see papers, but the archivist - the late Commandant Peter Young, to whom this magnificent book has been dedicated - was ordered to show me the files but not to allow me to read them. At least, I had only travelled from Tralee, whereas Dermot Keogh had come from Florence.
As Minister for Defence, Paddy Cooney later authorised access.
“Of course, you have already seen the documents!” he exclaimed as he burst out laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing.
Journalists frequently treat history as obsolete, but it is important to learn from past mistakes. We know from history that politicians frequently get away with lying under the protection of secrecy laws. The current government was exposed thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, but it then shamelessly sought to emasculate that legislation.
One of the many fascinating insights in Ireland in World War Two is an article in which Dr Aengus Nolan quotes from the unpublished memoirs of the late Frederick H Boland, one of this country’s most distinguished diplomats.
He rose through the ranks at Iveagh House to become Secretary of the Department of External Affairs and ultimately President of the UN Assembly. He actually questioned whether Eamon de Valera ever seriously wished to end partition, even though the Long Fellow maintained it was why he got into politics. Maybe that was the greatest lie of all and it has had consequences to this day.
“Dev had a very supple mind,” Boland wrote in his unpublished memoir. “I could never find out exactly from him whether he really wanted the Six Counties in or not. My belief is, he didn’t. He felt that we were not in a position to accept such a big Protestant adjunct to our population.”
De Valera was the first person to talk in the Dáil about accepting partition, but the details of the secret session of August 1921 were not published for almost 50 years.
In 1940, he flatly rejected a British offer to end partition in return for the use of Irish bases during the war. Whether the offer was deliverable may be questioned but he never tried to examine it. The Long Fellow often complained that adjoining nationalist areas like counties Fermanagh and Tyrone, Derry City, and the southern parts of counties Down and Armagh were included in Northern Ireland against their wishes - but he never at any stage asked for their transfer.
It seemed that he preferred to wait until the higher Catholic birthrate brought about a nationalist majority in Northern Ireland and the Dublin government would then call for ethnic cleansing. In diplomatic circles he suggested an exchange of populations on lines of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) in which Greece and Turkey exchanged people.
De Valera envisaged Protestants from Northern Ireland being moved to Britain and replaced by Irish Catholics from Britain.
HOWEVER, Robert McNamara points out in his article that more Irish people migrated to Britain from 1932 to 1959 than ever voted for Fianna Fáil. Far from endorsing our independence, those people effectively voted with their feet. There was no evidence they had any desire to be moved to Northern Ireland as part of an ethnic cleansing scheme.
Aoife Ní Lochlainn has an intriguing article on Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, an organisation that roused passions during the war. I first came across references to the largely forgotten organisation in the papers of David Gray, America’s wartime Minister to Ireland.
On October 14, 1943, Gray warned President Franklin Roosevelt that the ghost of the late British Prime Minister Arthur J Balfour had told Gray’s late father’s ghost to warn him “to be more guarded than ever as regards what you say of affairs to men you have to meet.
“He says that the Fifth Column here have established a new political organisation called ‘Society of the Rising,’ or some strange name that sounds like ‘Ashereee’.”
Gray was not just informing the White House of gossip spread in the old “Dúirt bean liom” style, he was even telling the President what ghosts were supposedly telling other ghosts about the new Irish organisation. One could hardly be blamed for concluding that Gray and Ailtirí na hAiséirghe were wired to the moon.
“There are wealthy Irishmen interested in it,” Balfour’s ghost supposedly warned in the séance report that Gray sent to the White House. “One name is J Walsh, he says, and behind him and others is the German ministry.”
JJ Walsh was the main financial backer of Ailtirí na hAiséirghe. He had been a member of WT Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal cabinet. He was a close friend and shared digs with the father of future Taoiseach Jack Lynch in their bachelor days. Ailtirí na hAiséirghe set up a Hitler Youth movement through the medium of Irish, with 23 clubs for school children in Dublin. The organisation published prolifically with funds provided by Walsh and Ernest Blythe, another former cabinet colleague from Cumann nGaedheal days.
Japan may have wished to be mistress of the Pacific, but Ailtirí na hAiséirghe proclaimed ambitious plans “to make Ireland mistress of the Atlantic” and much more besides.
“We shall become master in the Pacific Ocean also,” Dr Nolan quotes from one document. “Should we play our cards carefully and cleverly, it will be possible for us from the capital of Ireland, to dictate to the dictators.”
Wow! Walsh, Blythe, and Gray took the organisation seriously, but fortunately few others did. It was already well on the way to oblivion.
Four months earlier it had fared dismally, when it ran four candidates in the general election of 1943. All four, who included a nephew of Cathal Brugha, lost their deposits. Yet Gray continued to take the organisation seriously. He was subsequently behind the infamous American Note that led to the most serious strain ever in relations between Ireland and the United States. With diplomats like him, nobody should ever be surprised that the White House would believe anything. The recent talk of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was as fanciful as the advice that Gray was forwarding from supposed ghosts.
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