Irish troops marching during "The Emergency"
Photo: World War II Wiki The View
Apart from communal worship and family festivities, the Christmas season provides a moment of peace, rest and reflection. There is more opportunity to read a book. Prior to Christmas, the publishing industry brings out many new books suitable for gifts, some celebrating effort and achievement individual and collective.
One such book is The Emergency: A Visual History of the Irish Defence Forces 1939-1945 (Wordwell), by Daniel Ayiotis, Director of the Military Archives, and John Gibney and Michael Kennedy of the Royal Irish Academy. It illustrates the mobilisation to defend Ireland’s independence, integrity and neutrality during World War II. Modern weapons were scarce, and the ability to sustain prolonged resistance limited. Ireland’s guerilla reputation was some deterrent, and the knowledge that any invasion would have triggered a hostile reaction in America. Remoteness from theatres of conflict, except the Atlantic, also helped.
First duty
The first duty of leaders is to protect their people from death and destruction, which was globally on a colossal scale. At an Armistice Day service in St Patrick’s Cathedral, a sermon preached to a congregation including the president claimed that even if neutrality were expedient it was immoral, as there could be no neutrality between good and evil.
Decisions of peace and war can never be purely about morality. The pitfalls of entering into conflict cast in those terms were very evident in the Iraq war. There is often an unspoken assumption that Ireland, rather than exercising its independence, should have followed Britain, without considering its interests or exposure or realistically what it could contribute.
As Eamon de Valera warned in 1955, a small country has little influence on either the decision by great powers to enter a war or the terms on which they end it. The vital priority was to maintain internal peace, so soon after the civil war, and given burning resentment over partition. The 1922 Irish Free State Constitution, pre-checked by the British for conformity with the Treaty, in Article 49 asserted the right to remain neutral, stating: “save in the case of actual invasion, the Irish Free State (Saorstát Eireann) shall not be committed to active participation in any war without the assent of the Oireachtas”, a clause replicated in the 1938 Constitution (Article 28.3).
The British anxious to recover use of the ports handed back in 1938 vainly tried in 1940-41 to persuade the Irish Government that German invasion was imminent.
Every neutral, not just Ireland, but Sweden and Switzerland, had to have some regard for its powerful neighbours”
A German invasion of Ireland would only have happened simultaneously with an invasion of Britain. In perilous times, great diplomatic skill, backbone and judgment were required to keep the country safe, as well as unity of purpose and participation, for example, in the part-time LDF.
Every neutral, not just Ireland, but Sweden and Switzerland, had to have some regard for its powerful neighbours. Despite an unbending public image, Ireland was a friendly neutral to Britain and later America.
The Emergency highlights a ‘most secret’ memorandum of May 1941 by the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs Joseph Walshe, outlining the “help given by the Irish Government to the British in relation to the Actual Waging of the War”. It listed the information being given to the British, or communicated in a way that could be easily intercepted, the internment of spies, the Donegal air corridor, large numbers who volunteered to join the British forces, as well as workers who had gone to Britain, and the export of surplus production to Britain.
The white stone landmarks for aircraft, such as the recently excavated ‘EIRE 7’ near Dalkey Point, were numbered at American request in 1943.
Dublin fire engines were dispatched to Belfast, when it was bombed.
There has been little public acknowledgement of this more nuanced history by either the British or the Americans since. Equally, Northern Ireland’s indispensable role in providing safer waters for convoys and facilitating the assembling of US forces for the Normandy D-Day landings (their timing guided by weather reports from Belmullet) deserves more recognition in the Republic.
The main difference highlighted was the British desire to relax censorship and gain more favourable coverage versus the strong Irish conviction that it would be counter-productive, with Mr Walshe’s hand-written comment, “chaos – as the view most strongly pressed will be for ejection of British”.
Mr de Valera’s two most controversial actions were his 1943 St Patrick’s Day broadcast on the virtues of the simple, frugal life, intended to bolster national morale, and his condolences to the German ambassador on the death of Adolf Hitler, balancing his condolences a fortnight earlier to the unfriendly US minister in Dublin on the death of President Roosevelt.
Ireland was spared invasion, but in the famous exchange between Mr de Valera and Winston Churchill in 1945, when the latter claimed that Britain could have been justified in seizing Irish ports and airfields to guard its southern approaches from hostile aircraft and submarines, Mr de Valera pointed out that treating Britain’s necessity as a moral code meant that no small nation adjoining a great power could be permitted to go its way in peace.
Criticism
Other great powers had behaved like that, when Germany invaded neutral Belgium and the Netherlands in May 1940, and when the Soviet Union annexed Eastern Poland and the Baltic States and attacked Finland in 1939-40, which he criticised in 1947.
Important lessons were learnt from the failed policy of appeasement and the brinkmanship that led to World War I, but also the unviability of a system of isolated small states. The morality of holding on to large nuclear arsenals capable of inflicting mass destruction has been challenged by the Pope.
Pope Francis on December 6 was awarded the St Columbanus Medal from Carlow College St Patrick’s, accepted on his behalf by the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Jude Thaddeus Okolo., from College President Fr Conn Ó Maoldhonaigh and in the presence of college patron Bishop Denis Nulty of Kildare and Leighlin. The citation highlighted Pope Francis’ “consistent and courageous leadership in addressing the plight of migrants and refugees in contemporary society”, and his exhortation to “welcome, protect, promote and integrate”.