Madam, - Re last week's "Neutrality left Ireland isolated in a just war", one might have expected this kind of distorted thinking some decades ago, but not now when the historical documents available.
Dr Geoffrey Roberts suggests that "Ireland's neutrality was morally unjustifiable". If Ireland had been truly neutral, I would agree. My father was killed-in-action while serving in the US Army in Germany in January 1945 and, for myself, I have long believed that he died in a noble cause.
At the outset of the war de Valera told the British that he would give them all the help he could short of war. He did refuse bases, but he argued that they would not help the war effort. Maybe he was just trying to rationalise his policy, but time proved that it was true. In 1943 David Gray, the US Minister to Ireland, met Roosevelt and Churchill in Hyde Park, New York, and persuaded them to ask for Irish bases in order to get de Valera's refusal on record.
The US Joint Chiefs of Staff and their British counterparts blocked this request because they did not wish to take any chance that de Valera would comply, as they concluded that Irish bases would be a liability. They did not wish to take any chance of Éire being brought into the war.
John D. Kearney, the Canadian High Commissioner to Ireland, accepted that de Valera did give all the help he could short of war, and if the Allies did not want this country in the war, then it naturally follows that the Irish government did all it could for the Allied cause.
Gray, who had been notoriously indiscreet, had not been informed of the secret co-operation with the British until after the US entered the war. Then he admitted that this co-operation went beyond what might reasonably have been believed possible.
The OSS (the wartime forerunner of the CIA) sent a number of spies to Ireland; all but one was uncovered. Once they were uncovered the Irish offered to co-operate with them in any way possible. "The Irish worked with us on intelligence matters almost as if they were our allies," wrote J. Russell Forgan, the acting head of the OSS for Europe.
The OSS had nothing to do with the request to remove the Axis diplomats from Dublin in 1944 because it knew that this was a purely political ruse. But when the White House considered sending a follow up note, W.J. Donovan, the director of the OSS, warned Roosevelt on March 30th, 1944 that "the cooperation in intelligence matters offered and given by the Irish has been very full."
He went on to state: "Information received included the following subjects among others: German agents in Ireland, their training, instructions, equipment (including radio equipment) and ciphers; radio activities, illicit radios, interception, and direction finding; the Irish Republican Army; complete lists of Axis nationals, persons of Axis origin, and Axis sympathizers in Eire, their jobs and where possible their views and activities; Axis diplomatic and Consular representatives and their known contacts; map of the Coast Watching System; reports on shipping activities; Axis propaganda; submarine activity off the Irish coast to the extent known; Irish prisoners of war in Germany and known activities of Irishmen in Germany; political groups in Ireland with Fascist leanings or ideologies; interviews with persons who had recently left the Continent including the Irishmen recently parachuted by the Germans into Ireland; of German aviators interned; lists of and interviews with survivors of a naval action off the Bay of Biscay picked up by an Irish ship."
Among the "others" that he did not mention in writing was the fact that de Valera had secretly agreed to allow Irish diplomats in Berlin, Rome and Vichy to be used as OSS spies.
Such co-operation made a mockery of neutrality and, thus, the silly arguments put forward last week. - Yours, etc.,
T. RYLE DWYER, Ph.D., St. Brendan's Park, Tralee, Co Kerry.