How a Cork medium helped to create black propaganda about Ireland’s WWII neutrality

In the second part of his series on Irish neutrality, Ryle Dwyer recounts how messages ‘received’ in a seance helped convince a US minister that de Valera wanted Germany to win the war, despite Ireland’s extraordinary co-operation with the Allies.

While I studying for a doctorate in history in Texas in the early 1970s, it became obvious that Irish neutrality had been greatly distorted by David Gray, during his tenure as the US Minister to Ireland from 1940 to 1947. I got access to Gray’s personal papers, which included a manuscript for a book that he began writing after the war.