After enduring the horrors of two World Wars, John de Courcy Ireland, now 90 'and a half', firmly believes in Irish neutrality. He tells Lorna Siggins why he is genuinely worried about the threat of nuclear war
Men many decades younger might find it hard to endure, but travel on this State's rundown rail service to the west is Dr John de Courcy Ireland's idea of heaven. Even at the age of 90 "and a half".
Advancing years, and the physical constraints that accompany it, are only minor impediments when the spirit is still untameable. A first class seat on a plane is, by contrast, not to his liking - even if he could afford it.
"One always likes to travel slowly," he explained in Galway recently, where he attended a meeting of a Heritage Council committee, and thought nothing of taking the train from Heuston by himself.
He has always preferred to journey by rail or by sea, and has taken countless passages on freight vessels to and from this island. And yet this is a man who simply cannot, will not, waste time. He pioneered research on the many Irish who took part in discovery, or who served in foreign navies and merchant shipping lines. He has many books to his name, a plethora of international awards for his work on maritime history and his contribution to the voluntary lifeboat service from countries as far apart as Argentina and Yugoslavia.
That his home State should have taken that bit longer to acknowledge him is not something that he broods over at all. In fact, his response was one of pure delight when Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Council honoured him recently with a civic award. "To think of the innumerable attacks we had made on the council down the years!" he laughs.
The Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has also paid tribute to a distinguished president and founder, with the unveiling of a peace plaque in the Dún Laoghaire People's Park. The plaque was commissioned in honour of both Dr Ireland and his late wife, Betty, who died just over two years ago after a lifetime of political activity.
And it was "Bet", and only Bet, that he wished to talk about when asked to speak on that occasion. "Anything that I ever did for the cause of world peace was done through inspiration from her," he said. "Few, if any, can remember the world Bet and I grew up in on these islands," he explained. "The 1914 war had psychologically far greater effect - particularly on children - than the one begun in 1939."
It was this shared experience that provided the foundation for a friendship which developed after a chance meeting in a café in Oxford in 1931. At the time, Dr de Courcy Ireland was a young student who needed a change of clothes after exploring the canal system. An employee of the café, Betty Craig had an Irish mother, a father from Yorkshire and a sound heart, and many of her customers were social activists, such as G.D.H. Cole and Michael Foot. They were married at the age of 21.
Both had relatives who had gone to war and not returned. In Dr de Courcy Ireland's case, it was his father, of whom he has no memory. He had been born in India, where his father was serving. On the outbreak of war in 1914, his father was sent to China, but became ill with typhus and died. "Don't let that boy join the British army," were among his last words to his wife.
Dr de Courcy Ireland remembers the terror he felt when he was bundled into an air raid shelter in London at the age of six. He also experienced raids in Belfast and in Derry during the second World War. "But what Bet remembered best of all, and I recalled well too, was the number of unfortunate men to be seen in every big town, and particularly near every hospital, dressed in blue, and as like as not struggling with crutches, having only one foot", and with bandages around head, neck, and arm - if there was an arm.
His abhorrence of conflict, and his own political development, was reinforced by experiences he had while travelling in his late teens, after leaving Marlborough College and before going to Oxford University.
Signing up as steward on a cargo vessel bound for Argentina, he was distressed by the poverty he witnessed in Brazil. He often relates the story of how he tried to speak Spanish to a docker, and remarked on the beautiful cathedral built near the port. The docker said he wished it would burn to the ground. When the young steward asked him why, the docker took him to his house. The floor was beaten earth, it had no water or electricity and it was within a 100 yards of the cathedral.
The morality of war was the subject of many discussions then in that café, where the Foots assured him that "even if Ireland did squeeze fair trading terms out of London (and at this time the Anglo-Irish Trade War of the 1930s was brewing), Ireland's troubles would not be over".
Their early married life was spent in Manchester, and in Donegal just a year before the second World War, and then in Dublin, where his first job was as a teacher at St Patrick's Cathedral Grammar School. They had three children - his second, Moneen, is his tireless companion now. During a visit to Dublin when he was still teaching in Manchester, he met and was inspired by James Larkin, and subsequently joined the Labour Party, along with Larkin and his son.
However, when young Jim was elected president of the party's Dublin executive, William O'Brien and company began a witch hunt. In 1944, half-page advertisements were taken out in the press stating he and Larkin junior had been trained in Moscow to burn churches. It was a difficult time for him as a teacher in a Protestant national school.
He believes he is the only person to have been thrown out of the Labour parties in both the North and the Republic and spoke out publicly against the Soviet Union over the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Yet he has been a lifelong socialist, and was an early supporter of Democratic Left before it merged with the Labour Party.
"I despair of the Labour Party now," he says.
"Fianna Fáil was returned to power in this recent election because the left is totally divided," he sighs. "It seems to be incapable of getting together on one subject and fighting on that, and this infuriates me." Sinn Féin, standing in the wings, has exploited these divisions, in his view, and he finds this to be quite frightening.
He is virulently opposed to the Nice Treaty, and believes that the Labour Party should be, too. He is not impressed by the declaration of neutrality secured by the Taoiseach, and contrasts Ireland's approach with that of Denmark.
"The Danes are genuinely neutral, and will not be bound by anything, whereas we are tied to the idea of this rapid reaction force" he says. "Ireland's stance is not neutral, and that is something that the Danes recognise."
The Government's anxiety to ensure approval of the Nice Treaty in the second referendum may, in his view, be one of the reasons for a rather soft approach to reform of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The new Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Dermot Ahern, has spelled out the Government's opposition to the proposed reforms, but for Ireland to have any real influence, it may require a diplomatic initiative involving the Taoiseach. That may already be too late.
"And yet this is our only chance to have some real influence on the future management of this resource." He is also critical of the amalgamation of the marine department with communications and natural resources, and describes it as "sinister".
"On the one hand, there may be a fear inside the bureaucracy of the civil service that the Department of the Marine, as it was, was becoming too important and might overshadow other departments. And then there are those in the business community who are not prepared to back the idea of our own merchant marine." He would like to see a figure for the cost of paying foreign shipowners to transport goods to and from this island.
'I am convinced it must be in the millions, if only someone would sit down and work it out. The blessed Swiss, landlocked, have a merchant marine. They are very good business people, and they know it pays to have one." He is heartened by the many steps taken, if somewhat belatedly, to recognise the importance of the marine environment at a time when the terrestrial environment - and Ireland's agricultural community dependent on same - is in a state of turmoil.
Yet, as he watches two small children playing during the course of this interview, he finds it hard to be optimistic - about this island, and about the state of a world which has taken some steps forward, but many steps back, since he first became politically aware.
The nuclear scientists' "clock" is now at seven minutes to midnight, he says. He makes a point of reading Le Monde once a week, and notes the concern about Bush's general policy on arms.
"I wish I felt that young people realised what an unmerciful thing a nuclear weapon is," he says. "But I don't think they do. I think they may feel it has nothing to do with them, and what happened during the last war is far too back. But I worry about it, I really do."
Books by John de Courcy Ireland include: Ireland's Maritime Heritage (1992), The Admiral from Mayo: a life of William Brown of Foxford, founder of the Argentine Navy (1995); and History of Dún Laoghaire Harbour (2001)