Taoiseach John A Costello had quite the wind in his sails returning from an official visit to the United States in March 1956. He was sufficiently buoyed to tell his coalition government colleagues, “It is impossible to visit America, certainly at the time of the St Patrick’s Day celebrations, and retain any sense that Ireland is a small unimportant island. It is not. It is a country which has made a very large impact on the world and contributed very much to shaping the most important power in the modern world – America.”
Given Ireland’s neutrality during the second World War and the contemporary cold war climate, Costello also noted that his speeches during his trip demonstrated awareness that “there were immensely more important problems before the world than the solution of Partition, despite its great concern to us”. But both the Republican and Democratic parties chased the Irish vote “and are, therefore, more conscious of the importance of Ireland. If we do not act properly in every way and live up to the expectations that now exist in our regard it would be better to forget that the Irish spent seven hundred years of toil and struggle to become a nation and just ... recognise Ireland to be what the late George Bernard Shaw once described her, a cabbage patch thrown into the Atlantic Ocean”.
Costello also relayed his good foreign policy news to the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, informing him he found in Washington a “surprising eagerness to know how we were going to act in the United Nations. It seems to me that we have a great opportunity of putting the Catholic point of view in the deliberations of the United Nations and securing much influence”.
It is easy to be cynical about the grand scale of delusion in Costello’s correspondence, but these were early versions of what became a consistent thread in the presentation of Irish foreign policy. Regarding US president Donald Trump, minister for foreign affairs Simon Harris recently suggested the Irish mission is not to speak truth to power but to speak truth “to partners”, and this means focusing on free trade.
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In other words, the foreign policy script has always been adaptable. Free trade replaced Catholicism as the religion. The primary need now, according to Taoiseach Micheál Martin, is “protecting the economic model we have”, but as seen in his meeting at the White House this week, that can involve eliding the reality that this is not solely an Irish-US but an EU-US issue.
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As for military neutrality, pragmatism has reigned amid parallel episodes of principled action; UN peacekeeping, or sponsoring nuclear non-proliferation or, more recently, offering refuge to the war-afflicted while always emphasising the scale of the Irish diaspora. But for sceptics, the idea of an independent Irish foreign policy is self-serving codswallop, with moral declarations masking defence freeloading.
Amid the clamour for ballooning defence spending, the lack of historic “purity” of Irish foreign policy is worth noting. In September 1945, the department of external affairs summoned senior figures in its diplomatic service for a three-day conference to discuss the postwar dispensation. Taoiseach Éamon de Valera told them: “Two main considerations – the partition of our country and the struggle to maintain and enhance our national distinctiveness as a necessary means of maintaining our separate and State life – must form the background to our activities and must colour our relations with foreign governments.”
Military neutrality was not top of his considerations; in the 1930s he had few qualms about “collective security” and Ireland sending troops to defend small nations if mandated by the League of Nations. What pushed him in the direction of neutrality was the realisation that larger states would not support the smaller ones.
A degree of pride in that neutrality developed, and that does not need to be mocked. Nor should contemporary debate about Irish neutrality be framed by absolutes. Smaller states without the capacity to realistically defend themselves look for the path that suits them, while occasionally finding a stage to promote political rather than military solutions, helped in Ireland’s case by traditionally canny, analytical senior diplomats who are aware peripheral states cannot afford to tie themselves to a single, overarching tenet.
Ireland’s military neutrality has always prompted some derision. Historian Michael Kennedy notes that Irish diplomat Seán Lester, secretary general of the League of Nations from 1940 until its dissolution in 1946, was assigned no role in the new UN as he was “looked on with disdain as a citizen of a neutral state”. Such dismissiveness from military aligned states is likely to become more commonplace. The Irish, in response, should not exaggerate their purity or indulge dictators, but neither do they need to parrot and internalise the dismissals or lampoon those who decry the consequences of the new arms race.
