More than 60 years on, the media still swallow distorted information

THE contemptible arrogance of the Government seems to know no bounds. Last year, Eamon Ó Cuív announced that the name of Dingle was being changed to An Daingean on all road signs, whether the people of Dingle liked it or not.

They did not like it and made that clear in a postal referendum, calling for the retention of Dingle by a majority of 91.7%. It was a majority rarely ever associated with truly democratic votes. But this week we learned that County Council workers are still obliterating Dingle from road signs and replacing it with An Daingean. The council workers say they are under orders from the Coimisinéir Teanga. Who is he taking his orders from? It is certainly not the people.

We tolerate this contemptible affront to our democracy at our own peril. This was even worse than the arrogance of the same Government in 2003 when the minister responsible for the Freedom of Information amending bill went off to the races at Cheltenham for the week while the bill was being debated in the Oireachtas.

On the issue of freedom of information, broadcaster Cathal O’Shannon complained on RTÉ’s Hidden History programme this week about being denied access to a Department of Foreign Affairs file on Andrija Artukovic, an infamous Croatian war criminal who managed to hide out in Ireland for a while in 1947 and 1948. This file should be released.

We could not have helped all the persecuted people of Europe during the war but we could certainly have done more, and it is a crying shame we did not help the Jewish children we could have. We need to know why this happened. Unfortunately, some aspects of O’Shannon’s programme were so distorted that it is unlikely to help the cause of freedom of information.

O’Shannon served with the British Royal Air Force during the war, which was his right, and he can be justifiably proud that he was on the right side doing his bit for humanity. “When it’s over we can say we did our part and made our sacrifice for what we hold dear,” my father wrote from the front, three months before he was killed in the war.

Irish policy did little to hamper anybody wishing to join the British forces. But there was a distinct bias in the programme intimating that our then Government was sympathetic to Nazi war criminals. Indeed, we were told that this country “seemed to give a greater welcome to Nazis and former collaborators than it did to returning war veterans”.

O’Shannon and his colleagues only had to take off their uniforms when they came here, but all Germans, including the distressed seamen rescued by the Kerlogue in the Bay of Biscay, were interned. No evidence was produced to suggest that anybody in authority here was aware that any of those people who came here were war criminals.

The evidence O’Shannon produced has been available for decades, and it is a disgrace that he would seek to distort the record with such a selective presentation of the facts. He distorted de Valera’s unwillingness to give the US ambassador to Ireland, David Gray, a blanket assurance in the autumn of 1944 that Ireland would not grant asylum to any Nazi war criminals.

What the programme did not explain was that the US was classifying as “war criminals” anyone who helped the German war effort in any way. By the same criteria, O’Shannon himself could have been classified as a British war criminal.

If the Axis had won the war, should Ireland have refused to grant asylum to O’Shannon as a war criminal?

The Americans were not really looking for such an assurance. Their request was designed specifically for US politics. It was part of a series of requests to undermine any support de Valera might get in the US if he tried to end partition as part of the post-war settlement.

In the summer of 1943 Gray returned to the US where he met President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and impressed on them the need to discredit de Valera in order to ensure he would not be able to use Irish-Americans to cause trouble for the White House over partition after the war.

WHEN the US came into the war after Pearl Harbor, Gray learned that the Irish Government had been secretly cooperating with the British to an extent “beyond what might reasonably have been believed possible”. De Valera had been prepared to give them everything short of involving Ireland in the war. Gray suggested that the Americans should ask for Irish bases so that they could say afterwards that de Valera refused to help, but the US joint chiefs of staff blocked the idea because they were afraid the long fellow might give them the bases, which would only be a liability.

Gray then suggested they should just ask for a guarantee the bases would be made available if they were needed, but the British blocked this because they feared de Valera would accede. Gray then persuaded Roosevelt to demand the withdrawal of Axis diplomats from Dublin in February 1944 on the grounds that they were an espionage threat to Allied preparations for the invasions of Europe. The American went so far as to suggest that de Valera should realise diplomats were frequently used as spies.

This sent de Valera over the top, because he had authorised the use of Irish diplomats in Berlin, Rome and Vichy, France, as spies for the Americans. If the Americans divulged that, he threatened to break off all cooperation. WJ Donovan, the head of American intelligence, intervened with Roosevelt to stop a follow-up note. But Gray persuaded the president to authorise the request about the supposed war criminals.

“As I told you,” Gray wrote to Roosevelt on October 2, 1944, “our Irish policy should be conducted primarily with reference to political conditions in America and to the end of protecting the administration from pressure group attacks on our foreign policy.” Gray was not looking for cooperation but for de Valera’s refusal. “If he should say ‘no’ as he would like, that would be best,” Gray wrote.

De Valera did not say no. “The Irish Government,” he explained, “can give no assurance which would preclude them from exercising that right should justice, charity or honour or the interest of the nation so require.” He added, nevertheless, that his Government had no intention of altering the existing practice of denying “admission to all aliens whose presence would be at variance with the policy of neutrality, or detrimental to the Irish people, or inconsistent with the desire of the Irish people to avoid injury to the interests of friendly states”. In short, real war criminals were not going to be granted political asylum, but he was not going to give in to the blanket demand.

I have never been an unqualified admirer of de Valera, but we can all be proud of that answer.

The US State Department promptly published the reply, as a rejection of the request. “The department, I think, has handled this War Criminals versus Eire situation extraordinary well,” Gray wrote to Roosevelt on November 18. “I detect your fine Italian hand in letting de Valera’s reply speak for itself, leaving the matter for the journalist wolves.”

It is a sad reflection on the state of our media that anyone would distort the true nature of what happened by going for the same bait more than 60 years later.