Madam, – It is deeply ironic that Éamon de Valera, albeit for legitimate raisons d’état, should seek to smear Seán Russell, the IRA’s chief-of-staff and one of the architect’s of the 1939 bombing campaign in Britain, as a Soviet spy (Front page, March 29th).
Yes, Russell was on an IRA delegation to Moscow in 1925, but so too was Gerald Boland, later Dev’s minister for justice and scourge of the IRA in the 1940s. According to Tim Pat Coogan, the Soviets asked their guests, “How many bishops did you hang?”, and when the answer was none, they replied, “Ah, you people are not serious at all”. The liaison proved equally disappointing to the IRA: the expected “Moscow gold” was never more than a pittance.
Of course the real threat in 1939 came not from the Soviets but from the Nazis, who had been in touch with the IRA since 1937, as outlined in David O’Donoghue’s recently published The Devil’s Deal: the IRA, Nazi Germany and the double life of Jim O’Donovan, an abstract of which appears in the current issue of History Ireland. Was Dev aware of these links, and if he was why did he consider a Soviet smear more effective than a Nazi one, an unsettling question given his acknowledged insights into the hearts of the Irish people? – Yours, etc,