TONY GRAY'S book is by no means a conclusive analysis of a remarkable period in fairly recent Irish history. More a memoir than a factual study, it lights, magpie fashion, on various colourful bits and personalities, uses the newspapers of the time as its mother lode, and dives unerringly for the good story, irrespective of its foundation in truth or fantasy.
Which makes for a most entertaining read, both for those who lived through the period, and for those coming new to it who are eager to know what their fathers and mothers did during the war. My own memories of the time are vague, but I can still summon up the oily feel of the gas masks hidden on the top shelf of the wardrobe, the persistent smell of burning wood for the never extinguished sawdust barrel, the awful taste of senna leaves to keep us regular after consuming black bread, and the grieving in Wexford town when the merchant ships, the Menapia, the Eden Vale and the Kerlogue were sunk by German torpedoes.
Gray was still a teenager in 1939, and he recounts how he got his first job as a fledgling reporter in The Irish Times, hired by the legendary editor of the time, R. M. Smyllie, to be the guardian of his office door and to write "pups" short, punchy paragraphs to be fitted in wherever there was a vacant space at the drop of a hat.
The author of a study of Smyllie, Gray recycles here a number of the best anecdotes about the man and his coterie, including how he fought a never ending battle as to the paper's leading articles with the quiet but determined Alec Newman, how he got around the strict censorship laws, and how he instituted and held court over a gaggle of the brightest and most eccentric minds in Dublin in the snug of the Palace bar.
The sections dealing with the political background are desultory, the author not appearing to have any particular fondness for Taoiseach Eamon de Valera. He does concede, however, that Dev made the right choice in making Ireland neutral, and that it needed an incredible perspicacity of statesmanship to keep it so.
A great fear at the time, it seems, was that Germany would form a bond with the IRA to take the six counties by force, so, to keep in with Churchill and Great Britain, towards whom he was more "neutral", Dev brought many restrictive Emergency Powers Acts into practice. During this period, a number of IRA men were executed or died on hunger strike.
The chapter dealing with German spies in Ireland illustrates the black humour inherent in the attempts by the war mongers to form a network. Gray gives an account of the farcical arrival of Herman Goertz, parachuting into Co Meath clad in his Abwehr uniform and, incredibly, being able to stroll about without being noticed or captured.
He was helped by Iseult Stuart, and then by a well known Dublin businessman called Stephen Held. The fact that Goertz was then able to drop out of sight for almost two years adds to the bizarreness of an episode that ended in tragedy when he poisoned himself with a cyanide capsule when informed he was about to be repatriated to Germany.
The book deals with a number of other topics such as rationing, the forming of an auxiliary army known as the LDF, the reliance of home produced fuels such as peat and turf, the difficulties of travel between Britain and Ireland, relations between the North and South, and the inward looking and self regarding barrenness of intellectual discourse engendered by the insularity of Ireland's position vis-a-vis the rest of the world.
Behind all the fun and the Dublin Opinion cartoons, however, there lurked a real fear that the country would be invaded by one or other of the combatants. As early as May 1940, a National Defence Council had been set up, representing all the main parties in the Dail, and in July a Special Order was instituted providing for the formation of an alternative government in the event of belligerent action obliterating the sitting one. So there was a certain amount of realism existing amid all the fake posturing and playing at war games.
