Ireland Since 1939 Read online

  Yet the Unionist position in June 1940 was more vulnerable than at any time since 1921. Craigavon's own leadership at such a time of crisis was itself increasingly subject to internal party criticism because of the regime's lack of preparedness for the challenge of wartime mobilization. The Unionist leadership was open to the charge of putting a sectarian ‘little Ulsterism’ before the interests of not just the British Empire but also of the ‘Christian civilization’ that was threatened by Nazi barbarism. Basil Brooke's subsequent recollection of the period highlighted the fear that they would be faced with an agonizing choice: ‘I had an awful feeling that had we refused we would have been blamed for whatever disasters ensued.’ Brooke's son claimed that at the time his father had told him that faced with the choice between ‘western civilization’ and Irish unification, he would have to accept the latter.52

  There is also some evidence that public opinion in the South was less of a potential obstacle to an alliance with Britain than has been asserted. The British intelligence evaluation was that the return of the ports had increased goodwill towards Britain but that the attitude of the average Irishman was ‘of indifference to either side, except in so far as the acts of either belligerent might affect his own or Irish interests generally’.53 In a context in which a move to end neutrality was linked to a British commitment to unity, it might not have been beyond de Valera's considerable political skills to carry a majority of the southern electorate with him. Even the semi-official biography of de Valera notes that in those circumstances ‘the whole atmosphere would have been so completely transformed that one can only speculate as to what path Ireland would or would not have chosen.’54 However, although there is some evidence to suggest that in the summer of 1940 the country would have split two thirds to one-third in favour of participation on Britain's side, anti-British sentiment would have been much stronger within the ruling party. James Dillon, the lone figure in the Dáil who would by the end of 1941 openly reject neutrality, did not think that de Valera had a choice in June 1940, given that he would have split his party if he had jettisoned neutrality.55

  The Unionist leadership was saved from having to consider such an excruciating choice by de Valera's preference for defending the integrity of the existing twenty-six-county state and the unity of Fianna Fáil over what might have been a historic opportunity to undermine partition. W. T. Cosgrave, the leader of Fine Gael, was wasting his time when, after de Valera's rejection of the British proposals, he continued to press privately for entry to the war on Britain's side using the prize of unity to attract the Fianna Fáil leader.56 De Valera's own pronouncements on the issue had made it clear that the territorial completion of the national revolution would always take second place to the imperative of maintaining a broad coalition of ‘national’ forces and sentiment behind Fianna Fáil. Just as any trade concessions to northern manufacturers in 1938 had been ruled out by a combination of southern economic interests and Fianna Fail fundamentalists, de Valera had, in a memorable speech in the Senate in February 1939, asserted that he would not accept unity at the price of the project of restoring the Irish language.57 Those in London or amongst the opposition in the Dáil who saw in the offer of unity, even if it had been more of a realistic possibility, a chance of ending neutrality misunderstood the deeply partitionist dynamics of Fianna Fail rule.

  Another important factor behind support for neutrality in 1940 was the widespread belief that Britain was going to lose the war, something that was not an unwelcome prospect to some. Hempel, the German minister in Dublin, reported to Berlin that his discussions with Joseph Walshe and Frederick Boland of the Department of External Affairs showed an Irish government concerned to ensure that Germany would support ‘an entirely independent united Irish state' in the event of Britain's defeat, a position that displayed a wilful blindness to the record of Nazi treatment of small neutral countries on the continent.58 Walshe's pro-German position – he declared to David Gray, the US envoy in Dublin, that ‘no one outside of Great Britain believed that Great Britain was fighting for something worthwhile’59 – was shared by the leader of Ireland's Catholics, Cardinal MacRory, Archbishop of Armagh. A northerner who saw partition as placing Britain on the same moral level as Nazism, he was believed by the Germans to favour an invasion to end partition.60 In October 1941 he publicly supported the idea of a negotiated peace.61 Such opinion was more extreme than that of most cabinet ministers and senior civil servants. De Valera's own inclinations may have been in favour of an Allied victory,62 but the rigorous censorship regime did little to challenge the world-view of those who dismissed the war as a manifestation of inter-imperialist rivalry.

  Such views were widespread at both elite and mass level. The Round Table's pro-Allied Irish correspondent described public opinion as not pro-German ‘but by no means enthusiastically pro-British… the popular view may perhaps be best summed up in the words of one old farmer, who on being asked to express his views on the war said “I hope England will be nearly beat.’” 63 Arland Ussher, a southern Protestant who favoured neutrality, claimed that most southerners either took no interest in the war or had the sort of ‘detached and comfortable interest with which one might take in a serial “thriller’”. His description of the views of ‘most educated Irishmen’ indicated an attitude of insular superiority: ‘England they would tell you was a “liberal” or secularist state, Germany was a “pagan” state and there was no great difference between them.’64

  Frank Aiken, as Minister for the Coordination of Defensive Measures, had responsibility for censorship. Commander of the Fourth Northern Division of the IRA at the time of the Treaty and Chief of Staff of the anti-Treaty IRA at the end of the Civil War, he was considered, even by some of his own colleagues, to be a bigot as well as deeply anti-British.65 His rigidity had led to his being shifted from the Ministry of Defence in 1939. In his new ministry he did all within his considerable powers to ensure that the coverage of the war excluded any hint of a moral preference or any news of the nature of the Nazi regime that would trouble those who treated it as little worse than the ‘Stormont dictatorship’. At times it appeared that Aiken was prepared to allow pro-Nazi propaganda. Thus the Dundalk Examiner, of which he was a shareholder, was permitted to publish an editorial praising the Nazi organization as ‘the natural protector of the Catholic Church’, while statements critical of the Nazis for the persecution of Catholics in Germany and Poland made by the Bishop of Münster and the Irish Bishop of Achonry were censored.66 Aiken ensured that the sufferings of Stalingrad's population were kept from the pages of Ireland's newspapers lest they elicit pro-Soviet sentiment. Reports of atrocities from German-occupied Europe, starting with the first stories of Gestapo executions of ‘mental defectives’ and mass executions of Polish Jews in early 1941, were stopped. This was justified by Aiken on the grounds of the use of atrocity stories by Allied propaganda in the First World War and by his contention that the Soviet record was as bad as that of the Nazis.67

  The leaders of Fine Gael and Irish Labour shared such sentiments. When Dillon spoke in the Dáil in favour of the unity of ‘all Christian men’ to repel the Nazi threat, his leader William Cosgrave repudiated his views, claiming that ‘the British were not thinking of the Ten Commandments.’68 Labour's William Norton berated Dillon for his pro-Allied line: ‘when the propaganda machines of the belligerents were working overtime to mislead the people of the world it was good Irish policy to mind our own business.’69 They thus contributed to the high moral tone of neutrality and unintentionally to de Valera's political dominance as the policy's champion. To forsake neutrality risked a major domestic convulsion that would have damaged Fianna Fail more than Fine Gael. This may help explain why, even after the US entered the war, and the chances of a German invasion receded with other neutral states adopting pro-Allied shifts in policy, Ireland maintained the policy unaltered.70 A sense of Irish superiority to two sets of morally equivalent belligerents, while it might have provided a source of psychological su
pport for de Valera's neutrality policy, would contribute powerfully to the state's international isolation at the end of the war as well as deepening the sense of embittered alienation from the South amongst northern unionists. The moral myopia associated with the state's promotion of neutrality was most flagrantly exposed in de Valera's infamous visit to the German minister in Dublin to present his condolences on the death of Hitler.

  Much of the recent discussion on neutrality has tended to reject the harsh judgement of F.S.L. Lyons, who used the metaphor of Plato's Cave to suggest that during the Emergency the Irish relegated themselves to a shadow world.71 An account of Irish culture during the period has dismissed the allegation that the South remained ‘insularly indifferent to the war and uninformed or incurious about its course’.72 Yet the author, who was a schoolboy in Wexford during the war, relates that he was able to follow the North African campaign and the battle of Stalingrad only by listening to the BBC.

  A similar point was made during the war by Sean O'Faolain, the novelist and commentator who in the 1940s provided an outlet for dissent and social criticism as editor of the Bell. Responding to charges from, amongst others, the American historian Henry Steele Commager that de Valera and the Irish people were ignorant of the war and blind to the moral issue at stake, he noted that ‘British and American radio, news services, newspapers, periodicals and books’ were all available in Ireland.73 The problem with this debate was that the critics tended to focus not on the reality of everyday life in Ireland, where it was indeed possible to find out about the war from external sources, but on the official policies of the Irish state, which led to such absurdities as the banning of the import of a book on the persecution of the Catholic Church under the Third Reich.74

  O'Faolain lamented some of the effects of neutrality: ‘Our people, are, it would seem, self-absorbed to an amazing degree, so self-absorbed as to be cut off, in a way that one would hardly have thought possible in this modern world of constant inter-communication, from all detachment, critical sense, a sense of proportion and even a sense of humour.’75 Neutrality from this perspective encouraged the most self-satisfied and parochial elements of Irish society and would pose a major problem of adjustment when the state wished to reintegrate itself into the wider world. It also deepened the division on the island and made the ending of partition even more unlikely than it had appeared in 1939. As O'Faolain put it, the different relation to the War North and South ‘must increase the gap beyond bridging by creating two completely discordant modes of life’.76 MI5's assessment of neutrality was stark: ‘he [de Valera] provided the British people with an overwhelming reason for the maintenance of partition.’77

  Social Conflict during the Emergency

  Despite the strong national consensus in favour of neutrality and the government's rigorous use of censorship to marginalize dissenting opinions, the period was characterized by the emergence of considerable social and economic discontent, which for a time seemed to portend a radical shift in the nature of political opposition in the state with the Irish Labour Party displacing Fine Gael as the major anti-Fianna Fáil force.

  Within the government there was acute concern that Britain's wartime priorities, not to mention resentment over neutrality, could have severely disruptive effects on the economy, which was dependent on the British market to take the vast bulk of its exports, and which imported much of the fuel, machinery and raw materials for its manufacturing industries from Britain. In the month of Dunkirk, de Valera met with Irish bankers to solicit assistance, pointing to the possibly subversive potential of the large pool of urban unemployed,78 while in July 1940 Seán Lemass, who had been moved into a new Ministry of Supplies, tried to persuade the cabinet of the need for a strongly interventionist and progressive set of economic and social policies. These would be necessary, he argued, to deal with the inevitably very high level of unemployment in the event of the state's total economic isolation.79 Luckily for the economic conservatives in the cabinet, for instance Seán MacEntee and the officials of the Department of Finance, who saw the Emergency as a golden opportunity for a national exercise in belt-tightening, British resentment at neutrality was not allowed to obstruct the important contribution of Irish farmers, economic migrants and recruits to the anti-fascist struggle.

  The revival of the British economy after 1935 helped to ease the government's problems in delivering on promises of job creation. The changed international conditions threatened this convenient, if potentially politically embarrassing, way of disposing of the state's surplus labour force. It forced the Irish state into an unprecedented degree of cooperation with Britain, which challenged de Valera's ability to present neutrality as a policy that did not tilt to one or other of the belligerents. At the outbreak of the war the British had introduced the requirement of an identity card for all persons travelling to the UK. The Department of External Affairs cooperated in the running of the scheme, but in the aftermath of the evacuation of Dunkirk controls were tightened, and the government was faced with the choice of allowing such restrictions to disrupt seriously the flow of Irish workers to Britain or, for the first time, negotiating a framework by which the state would facilitate workers who wished to go to Britain. The resultant agreement of July 1941 ensured that well over 100,000 Irish migrants travelled to Britain during the war.80

  The potentially disruptive effect of this exodus on the government's attempt to build a national consensus around neutrality was noted by the state's chief censor: ‘stories picturing thousands of starving Irish workers flocking across to the bombed areas of England or to join the British forces… have simply got to be stopped if public morale is not to be hopelessly compromised.’81 The small group of left-wing activists, largely from the Communist Party of Ireland, who had been struggling to organize the Dublin unemployed since 1939, did their utmost to point out the contradiction between neutrality and the government's covert migration policy. Prior to Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the CPI had denounced the war as an ‘inter-imperialist’ conflict rather than an anti-fascist one, and had been supportive of neutrality while criticizing de Valera for his repression of the ‘anti-imperialist’ IRA. Even before the Irish–British agreement to facilitate migration, these leftists were publicly denouncing official notices in the central Dublin Labour Exchange, asking the unemployed to volunteer for work in England.82 Strict censorship of the press, police surveillance of meetings, and the internment and imprisonment of leading activists all helped to minimize public debate on the true nature of neutrality.

  Police concern over leftist exploitation of the unemployed had disappeared by early 1942. In part this reflected the effectiveness of British construction sites and munitions factories in helping to drain the pool of unemployed, although there were still 70,000 in 1943.83 It was also a result of the Communist Party's shift to an anti-neutrality policy after the Soviet Union entered the war on the Allied side. This brought about the liquidation of the party in the South, where its members entered the Irish Labour Party. Although the vigorous pro-war policies of the Communist Party in Northern Ireland could not be openly espoused in neutral Ireland, the former communists who had dominated the leadership of the unemployed agitation lost any interest in pointing out the contradictions between neutrality and the facilitation of economic migration to Britain.

  Despite the best efforts of Aiken's censorship regime, Éire could not be totally insulated from what was happening across the Irish Sea or in Northern Ireland. British newspapers and magazines continued to circulate, though in reduced numbers. More importantly, many of the 52 per cent of households in large towns and cities and of the 13 per cent in rural areas that had radio sets listened in to the BBC.84 The long history of emigration to Britain and the tens of thousands of men and women who went to work or enlist during the war meant that there was a cross-channel network of personal and familial links, which provided a constant flow of information about conditions on the other island. Closer to home there were no restr
ictions on North–South movement, and there was awareness of the rapidly improving economic conditions in Northern Ireland.85

  Fianna Fáil's ability to present itself as a national movement that paid special attention to the needs of the working class, an image particularly cultivated by Seán Lemass, was severely challenged during the war. Lemass himself was replaced at Industry and Commerce by the acerbic and economically right-wing Seán MacEntee. Prior to the shift of positions, MacEntee had been Minister for Finance and had shared the view of its senior officials that the government's commitments to job creation and increased spending on social welfare were ‘economically unsound’.86 His last pre-war budget in May 1939 had increased direct and indirect taxation, and his successor, Seán T. O'Kelly, introduced an Emergency budget in November 1939 that further turned the screw and sparked a rash of strikes as workers attempted to get wage increases to compensate for the rise in the cost of living.87 The government rallied behind MacEntee's advocacy of a repressive response. A strike by Dublin Corporation workers caused MacEntee to warn the workers that they were posing a revolutionary threat, and the government and the local bishop exerted themselves to help the Corporation resist the strikers.88 Using the argument that exceptional circumstances demanded a move away from peacetime forms of industrial relations, MacEntee imposed a Standstill Order on Wages in May 1940 and outlawed strikes. Although the Order was relaxed somewhat in 1942, restrictions on union rights remained, and real wages dropped by 30 per cent between 1939 and 1943. While the cost of living rose by two thirds during the Emergency, wages increased by a third and pre-war real wage levels were not achieved again until 1949.89