Sir, – John Bellew (May 26th) criticises Eamon de Valera’s decision to chart a neutral course during the second World War when millions of innocent Europeans were being slaughtered by the Nazis.
He asks how this was morally justified, and reinforces his critique of Irish neutrality by suggesting that the Irish State would have been immediately invaded if Operation Sea Lion had come to pass.
This may very well have been true; however, his argument does not acknowledge either the internal Fianna Fáil issue of dealing with a hard-core irredentist cohort that still demanded a united Ireland, or the fact that thousands of Irish families were still ideologically divided, less than two decades after the Civil War.
Neutrality was the only sure way to avoid repeating this tragedy.
This position was forcefully supported by the State’s only Jewish TD, Robert Briscoe, who despite personally believing that an Allied victory was imperative if even a small number of his European co-religionists were to be saved, understood that as long as an English presence remained in Ulster, it was politically impossible to join an English-led war effort.
Briscoe loyally supported de Valera’s stance, and instead attempted to rescue his fellow Jews by ardently embracing the New Zionist Organisation’s attempt to break the British blockade of Palestine. – Yours, etc,
Dr KEVIN McCARTHY,
School of History,
University College Cork.