Ireland Since 1939 Read online

  By the time of the 1938 Anglo-Irish negotiations, the dominant political tendency in northern nationalism was to look expectantly to de Valera to sort out partition as part of his negotiations with Chamberlain. Healy and other Nationalist MPs had travelled to London during the negotiations to meet de Valera and press him to ensure that partition was put at the centre of the negotiations. De Valera was told that it would be a betrayal if he settled the trade and defence disputes and ignored partition. But, as he had already demonstrated in his opposition to the proposal to allow northern MPs to sit in the Dáil, de Valera's primary concern was with the consolidation and defence of his twenty-six-county state, and he was not prepared to allow a settlement that so plainly favoured the Irish to be delayed or even prevented by pressure from the North.

  Northern nationalist frustration and anger with the Fianna Fail leader over the 1938 agreements with London were intense. Despite this, de Valera was able to get Healy to launch a series of anti-partition rallies in the autumn of 1938. He wanted to use these as part of his anti-partition campaign in Britain and the US,5 but for de Valera the central purpose of the campaign was to establish internationally a clear sense of Irish grievance that would allow him to justify Irish neutrality in the coming conflict. Neutrality was the goal, not unity, and de Valera was hostile to any attempt, whether it came from Downing Street or nationalists in the six counties, to raise the unity issue.

  Alienation from Fianna Fail produced a fusion of its supporters in the North with the group of parliamentarians under the direction of Healy in a new organization, the Six Counties Men's Association. It was supported in the South by republican critics of de Valera, including the former chief of staff of the IRA, Seán MacBride, and the former Blueshirt leader and Nazi supporter, General Eoin O'Duffy. Three of its leading members in the North welcomed the possibility of a German victory, telling the German minister in Dublin that they were prepared to ‘place the Catholic minority in the north under the protection of the Axis powers’.6 Healy was interned in Brixton prison between July 1941 and September 1942 under an order signed by the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, because of suspicions of pro-German activities. Although Healy protested that he was neither anti-British nor pro-Nazi,7 intercepted correspondence with a Fermanagh priest suggested a policy of collaboration in the event of a German invasion.8

  Such pro-German sentiment was strongly developed in the ranks of the northern IRA. While support for the IRA dwindled in the South during the 1930s due to the attractive power of the initial period of Fianna Fail radicalism, the organization grew in strength in Northern Ireland through a mixture of the misplaced hopes generated by de Valera's victory and the attendant intensification of sectarian passions in the North. Although most of the Belfast IRA was outside the city at a training camp in the South when the sectarian violence of 1935 began,9 the organization's role as a communal defence force received a boost, much to the despair of some of the more left-wing republicans in the South who wanted the IRA to bridge the gap with the Protestant working class. The IRA's newspaper had complained that Belfast republicans were ‘on the whole possessed of a bigotry that is dangerous to the cause they have at heart’, and the left-republican Peadar O'Donnell bluntly proclaimed ‘we haven't a battalion of IRA men in Belfast; we just have a battalion of armed Catholics.’10 These rather pious criticisms simply missed the point that for many northern republicans the main enemy was not the abstractions of ‘British rule’ or ‘imperialist domination’ but the six-county Protestant state and what were seen as its repressive and discriminatory manifestations.

  Northern republicanism was able to exploit the state's increasingly repressive response to republican marches and commemorations. Conflicts over the right to march had been a recurrent feature of the social and political history of the North for well over a century. Orangeism's determination to mark out as much as possible of northern territory as Protestant and unionist public space was periodically contested by both Catholic and nationalist organizations. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, which developed in the late nineteenth century as a defender of Catholic interests and a counter to Orangeism, had been closely linked to Devlin's party. Its acceptance of partition, coupled with the resurgence of republicanism after 1916, had seen it go into slow decline.11 Its annual parades on St Patrick's Day and on the Feast of the Assumption in August were largely limited to predominantly Catholic villages and small towns. Although these parades could at times be the occasion of conflicts with local loyalists, they were generally not interfered with by the police. It was very different with public manifestations of republicanism, which were frequently prohibited under regulations of the Special Powers Act, even when they took place in areas like the Falls Road district of Belfast, which were predominantly nationalist.12 Throughout the inter-war period, but particularly in the 1930s, the main manifestation of northern republicanism was the annual commemoration of the 1916 Easter insurrection. These parades, particularly the largest ones in Belfast and Derry, were regularly banned, and as a result the RUC found itself in conflict not simply with a few hundred republicans but with much larger numbers of Catholics who had gathered to watch the parades. In 1937 there were serious disturbances on the Falls Road when, in enforcing a ban, the RUC baton-charged the crowds of spectators.13

  The rise in northern nationalist expectations during 1938, first during the Anglo-Irish negotiation and subsequently because of the de Valera-inspired anti-partition rallies in the autumn, produced a predictable increase in conflict with the state and sections of the unionist population. Grass-roots unionist annoyance at anti-partitionist demonstrations where the Irish national anthem, ‘The Soldier's Song’, was sung led to the government introducing a new, regulation under the Special Powers Act banning it, despite the advice of the Inspector-General of the RUC that the enforcement of such a ban would exacerbate communal conflict and disorder.14 As war approached, this pattern of nationalist and republican assertiveness, Protestant reaction and state repression established itself. The IRA's bombing campaign in England inevitably encouraged a unionist identification of nationalist politics as subversive. When the British government refused to extend conscription to the province in May 1939, Sir Basil Brooke blamed ‘the minority in our midst… either afraid or too despicable to take a hand in the defence of the country… prepared to go to any lengths to prevent the loyal and brave men of this country from doing their duty’.15 The IRA responded by a demonstration on the Falls Road, where there was a burning of thousands of recently distributed gas masks.16 When war was declared, Catholic workers at Harland and Wolff were evicted by gangs of fellow employees and Catholic mill girls were forced to quit, while police escorts accompanied Protestant workers leaving Mackies Foundry on the Springfield Road in West Belfast.17

  Anti-state sentiment was not simply a response to repression and discrimination. It was also an expression of an autonomous sense of Irish national identity produced through Church and school and reinforced in the institutions of Catholic civil society from newspapers to sporting and cultural organizations. At its core was a vision of Catholics, whatever their social class, as belonging to a victimized community. A report by the Irish National Council of the YMCA into the experience of young unemployed Catholics attending a work camp near Belfast in 1940 warned of the potentially explosive mixture of economic exclusion, antipolice sentiment and nationalism. The report claimed that ‘quite good boys’ who had been looking for jobs failed to get them in workplaces where the majority of workers were Protestant and where Protestant boys from the camp were being constantly taken on. Talking to the Catholic boys, they came across strong anti-RUC sentiment: ‘To them the police were all prejudiced against the Catholic areas of the city, all laws were bad laws because they were English laws and every moral argument was propaganda.’ One of the best boys in the camp, ‘tidy, clean, above the average in intelligence, a good worker’, was an ardent supporter of the IRA: ‘he firmly believed that we would be better off under Nazi rule.�
��18

  Cardinal MacRory might not have gone quite as far, although the Nazis believed that he was in favour of German action to end partition.19 But he did nothing to encourage any softening of anti-state feeling, declaring that Catholics in Northern Ireland had neither freedom nor justice.20 It is none the less important to register the complexity of Catholic attitudes. It was not true, as F. H. Boland of the Department of External Affairs claimed in April 1941, that ‘the vast majority of Nationalists in the six-county area are absolutely pro-German on account of their unjustified treatment by the British government and its Belfast puppet.’21 A delegation of northern nationalists who met de Valera in October 1940 provided him with a detailed analysis of three strands of opinion within the Catholic community: some supported the IRA, others wanted to assist the northern government in its defensive measures against a possible German invasion, and the third group was content to trust Fianna Fáil and support his policy by not cooperating with Stormont.22

  Pro-Germanism tended to be secondary to anti-British and anti-Stormont feelings. The support for limited assistance to the government was strongest in Belfast, where the city's two Nationalist MPs were willing to sit on a defence committee created by Craigavon in the summer of 1940.23 Although the Catholic community had been united in opposition to Craigavon's call for conscription, there is some evidence, particularly for Belfast, that a tradition of service in the British forces, a product more of economic necessity and the desire for action and adventure than of loyalty to the state, asserted itself during the war.24 Northern Ireland's only Victoria Cross in the Second World War was won by a Catholic. The Irish News, Belfast's Catholic daily, maintained the Redmondite tradition and referred to IRA men who raided banks and post offices as ‘bandits’.25 Its coverage of the progress of the war was pro-Allied. Thus, although it was in Belfast that the IRA concentrated its efforts to disrupt the war effort and that it obtained its main martyr when Tom Williams was executed for the killing of a Catholic RUC man in West Belfast on Easter Sunday 1942, its Catholic community was not unified in hostility to the war effort.

  The strong republican current that had been manifested in the early years of the war went into recession as the conflict progressed. This reflected the vigorous repression North and South and the disorientating effect of the ‘Hayes Affair’ in June 1941, when the Chief of Staff of the IRA was arrested and interrogated by his own comrades, who believed he was a police informer.26 The devastation of large parts of Belfast in four German air raids in April and May 1941 may have weakened the pro-German convictions of some northern Catholics. Brian Moore, whose novel The Emperor of Ice Cream portrays that grim and chaotic time in the city's history, has described how the Blitz destroyed his surgeon father's Axis sympathies: ‘My father, who was pro-German, when he saw what the Germans were able to do, when he saw what modern warfare was really like, when they blow up your home, that was all, things were over.’27 Cardinal MacRory, concerned that anti-British sentiment had been undermined by the Blitz, warned the German minister in Dublin that more attacks would stir up anti-German feeling.28

  Although Craigavon's government had ensured that any possible Catholic participation in the Home Guard was minimized by basing it on the B Specials, there was some shared wartime experience when people took on civil defence activities and became air-raid wardens, firefighters and rescue workers.29 The halting of Orange marches during the war – its critics claimed it was to avoid the embarrassment of the large numbers of loyalists of fighting age who had not joined up – substantially reduced possible occasions of sectarian conflict. The effective ending of unemployment by 1943, as a result of the massive expansion of the North's traditional industries brought about by wartime demand, softened the material edge of Catholic grievance. The Nationalist Party in Belfast had, since Devlin's death, become increasingly identified with the interests of the Catholic middle class of solicitors, teachers, doctors and publicans. Its conservatism at a time when even Northern Ireland was being affected by the UK-wide swing to the left lost it two of its councillors, who joined the Northern Ireland Labour Party in January 1942.30 However, the interpenetration of class and sectarianism in the life of the city meant that the Nationalists' appeal to a predominantly working-class constituency could also be outflanked by more militant forms of anti-partitionism. When the sitting Nationalist MP for the Stormont constituency of Falls died in 1942, his proposed successor was defeated by Eamon Donnelly running on an abstentionist ticket. This reflected Catholic anger at the execution of Tom Williams, who was a native of the constituency. When a few months later the Catholics of West Belfast had a choice between an NILP candidate and an abstentionist for the Westminster constituency, they voted massively in favour of Jack Beattie of the NILP, who won the seat. Beattie was a strongly anti-partitionist socialist, and he was seen as the candidate most likely to defeat the Unionist Party, which held the seat. Nevertheless, his victory indicated that the city's Catholic working class was inclined to express its nationalism in a pragmatic and left-of-centre way.

  In Derry, despite the bitter Catholic resentment at the gerrymandered system of the city's government, the war years saw a lessening of local antagonisms. As in Belfast, this had a material basis in the unprecedented wartime prosperity of the local shirt-making and shipbuilding industries and the substantial amount of work associated with the creation of the US naval station, which became the Allies' most westerly base for repair and refuelling.31 Local asperities were temporarily displaced with the influx of tens of thousands of American servicemen, whose superior resources and novelty value made them attractive to local women and earned them the resentment of Derry men irrespective of religious denomination. The city's Catholic bishop encouraged his flock to participate in the war effort by involving themselves in civil defence activities,32 and, as in the Great War, Derry men of both traditions enlisted in the British forces.33 Unlike Belfast, where the war years saw the emergence of a Labour and republican-Labour challenge to the Nationalist Party, which was maintained after 1945, in Derry traditional forms of nationalism went into temporary decline to be reinvigorated in the post-war period. The local injustice was such a glaring one that, although the worldwide cataclysm would temporarily diminish its significance, its continued existence ensured that by the end of the war Derry Nationalists would be in the forefront of attempts to relaunch a coherent northern Nationalist Party.

  What little we know of nationalism outside Belfast and Derry in the war years seems to indicate a sense of disorientation and a lack of energy or direction. When the Nationalist MP for Mid Derry died in 1941, such was the apathy and enervation in party ranks that the writ for a by-election was not moved until 1945.34 With only one Nationalist MP at Stormont for most of the war, it was unsurprising that Seán MacEntee, a prominent member of de Valera's government, could publicly criticize the Nationalist Party for condemning its supporters to ‘political futility for 22 years’.35

  Stormont and the Challenge of War

  The lacklustre response of Craigavon's government to the outbreak of war confirmed the opinion of the head of the NICS, Sir Wilfrid Spender, that the devolved regime had become a threat to the cause of the Union.36 Craigavon had been reduced by age (he was sixty-nine) and recurring illnesses to one hour of work a day, and his frequent long vacations outside the province did nothing to diminish his paternalist indulgence of the most sectarian and parochial strands of loyalist opinion. The increasingly rigid sectarian tone of unionism in the 1930s had reflected, the liberal Minister of Education, Lord Charlemont, believed, ‘the gradual increase of pressure from independent organisations, leagues, Socialism; all the political expressions of Ulster individualism’.37 When Craigavon called a general election in February 1938, ostensibly as a response to de Valera's raising of the partition issue in the Anglo-Irish negotiations, his main domestic concern was the challenge of a new Progressive Unionist organization. This had been founded in 1937 by a Westminster Unionist MP, W.J. Stewart, who had broken from the
party to challenge the government's record on employment, housing conditions and agriculture. Not for the first or last time did southern irredentism powerfully contribute to the marginalization of challenges to Unionist Party hegemony. Support for the Unionist Party rose from 72,000 in the previous general election to 186,000, while the Progressive Unionists got 47,888 votes and won no seats.38

  The despair of Spender at Craigavon's style of government could only have been deepened by the administration's inability to adjust to the demands of war. In part this reflected the deadening effects of two decades of unchallenged power. By the outbreak of war the average age of his cabinet was sixty-two and four of its seven members had been in government since 1921. John Andrews, Minister of Finance, was born in the same year as Craigavon and, despite signs of physical debility, was to be the Prime Minister's successor. From a family with major interests in flax spinning and railways, Andrews was President of the Ulster Unionist Labour Association and a strong supporter of running the state on communal lines. John Milne Barbour, whose undistinguished record as Minister of Commerce made him the butt of much Labour and Independent Unionist criticism, was seventy-one. Barbour, who had combined his Commerce position with that of Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Finance, was amongst the few in the government (the Minister of Finance from 1921 to 1937, Hugh Pollock, was another) who had been unhappy with Craigavon's Protestant populism. Robert Dawson Bates, one of the younger members of the cabinet at sixty-two, was a rigid and strident proponent of the view that the state's first priority should be to guard against the internal and external nationalist threat. Despite his exaggerated sense of the precarious position of his government, he persisted in living in the northern seaside town of Portrush, seventy miles from his department. The result, as Spender bitterly noted, was, despite fuel rationing, a yearly distance of over 30,000 miles for his large official car and frequent and prolonged absences from his department.39