Wartime neutrality theoretical rather than real

It is difficult for generations born since the second World War to envisage the state of Irish public opinion at the time on …

It is difficult for generations born since the second World War to envisage the state of Irish public opinion at the time on the issue of neutrality. The truth is that attitudes towards the combatants were much more divided than today's generation might think possible in the light of what we know of the Holocaust, writes Garret FitzGerald

The Anglo-Irish conflict still loomed large in the public mind in 1939 - only 18 years previously, in July 1921, the last shot in that guerrilla war had been fired. Much of public opinion in this State remained focused on that recent Anglo-Irish war: for many nationalists, the British were still the enemy.

Moreover, the threat of communism loomed large in many minds, and for many Catholics the persecution of religion in Russia throughout the previous 20 years loomed larger than the more recent conflict with the church in Germany.

My recollection is that a majority of my contemporaries at school, and many of our teachers, were markedly Anglophobic. In the school yard during break I spent much of my time using the Nazi persecution of Christians and Jews in Germany to argue the Allied case, against what seemed majority hostile opinion among my fellow-students. I still retain the notes I used for that purpose, copied out from Pope Pius XI's powerful anti-Nazi encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern).

READ MORE

Similarly, in UCD between 1943 and 1945, Anglophobia was widespread, and my recollection is of finding myself in a minority on this issue in L & H debates. German atrocities were dismissed as propaganda and Nazi anti-Semitism did not then seem to arouse the horror that it has done in retrospect.

Of course, there were many people who passionately held a contrary view. The division of opinion was deep, and fear of what it might lead to if we became engaged in the conflict helps to explain why support for neutrality was so widespread and so strong.

The truth is that, whatever their views on the war, older people with memories of our own Civil War had a deep fear that Irish engagement in the conflict on the side of the Allies might lead to a recurrence of that bitter internecine struggle, from the shadow of which our people were then still trying to emerge.

There was, I believe, a concern lest, in the event of our voluntary involvement in the war, the more republican elements in Fianna Fáil might break away and join with the IRA. That organisation remained a significant force in the early years of the war - strong enough, indeed, to capture the entire ammunition reserves of the Irish Army at Christmas 1939.

(As in the case of the recent Belfast bank raid, that operation proved more successful than had been expected: so much so that the huge volume of ammunition captured could not be successfully hidden. Within a couple of weeks, more had been recovered than had been lost, and the Dáil had voted to introduce internment, which by 1942 had broken the back of the IRA for many years thereafter.)

Of course, other factors had contributed to the decision not to enter the war on the Allied side. One was de Valera's disillusionment with the collapse of collective security through the League of Nations. There was also a sense that neutrality would affirm recently acquired independence and sovereignty. And there was a simple desire to avoid being bombed.

But fear of a recurrence of civil war, this time with outside support for those challenging the authority of the State, was, in my view, a major factor - and it was certainly the factor which rallied to this cause politicians of all parties, including strong supporters of the Allied cause such as Seán MacEntee and my own father, Desmond FitzGerald.

Even the British proposal in June/July 1940 for Irish political unity in return for belated entry into the war on the Allied side did not shake de Valera's resolve to remain outside the conflict. True, he did not turn down this offer out of hand; negotiations continued for several weeks. In finally deciding to reject this proposal, he may have been influenced by the fact that the British government had not consulted the Northern Ireland government about the proposal - and also, perhaps, by memories of how British promises of home rule for Ireland to John Redmond had later been abandoned.

Most of all, however, he may have been influenced by a feeling that a German victory was now inevitable, and that it would be a mistake to join what seemed to be the losing side. That was certainly the view of Joe Walsh, the influential secretary of the Department of External Affairs, who wrote to de Valera a few days after the end of this negotiation to say that if we joined the losing Allied side at that time we would "deservedly" have lost our independence.

Those of us who in 1940 continued to believe in an eventual Allied victory - which at that stage had come to mean victory for a totally isolated Britain - were motivated by fear and hope rather than by rational calculation. We certainly did not foresee Germany's attack on Russia a year later, or Japan's attack on the United States, which together eventually swung the balance against Nazi Germany.

If, for a period, de Valera doubted Britain's ability to emerge victorious, he may be forgiven for that - especially as it did not prevent him from agreeing with Britain at that same moment an arrangement in which, in the event of a German invasion, British forces would be invited to join in repelling them, with the Irish Army being put under British command for that purpose.

Much more in the form of secret co-operation with Britain was to follow - most of which was successfully concealed from the Germans. Our wartime neutrality was, in fact, theoretical rather than real, but it suited both de Valera and Churchill, for opposite reasons, to keep up the charade for several decades after the war.