For a man who led a country that stood aside from the second World War, Éamon de Valera had a good war.
He maintained Irish unity in the face of real threats. The internment and executions his “Emergency” implemented, effectively disposed of a violent republican rump he had previously tolerated. Even in the North, the IRA would not recover from that until British intransigence brought it to life in the Troubles.
He maintained a good relationship with Britain, despite occasional cries of “betrayal” from Winston Churchill. Throughout the war Ireland shared Intelligence with Britain.
The presence of G2 officers at intelligence meetings in London is well documented, if not in Irish archives. There it was last seen in skips outside Government Buildings in 1960s, disposed of due to “lack of space”.
RM Block
While Dev couldn’t improve Ireland’s economic situation, he engineered the self-sufficiency that let the country survive with minimal hardship. The relationship with the US was less successful. Once the US joined the war, it was Roosevelt rather than Churchill who was most unhappy about Irish neutrality.
Irish neutrality, always one-sided, whatever about the show, was a choice de Valera made cautiously and, I think, wisely. Maybe it was his only option. His distaste for fascism was real and he displayed it repeatedly in the League of Nations. It was compromised by his hostility to communism, in ways that owe as much to his Catholicism as his republicanism. But he was far from alone in Europe and the US in inconsistency and uneasy conflicts of interest.
However, as de Valera emerged from his good war, he made an “unforced error”. On Hitler’s death, he made a personal visit to the German legation, to offer condolences to the ambassador, Eduard Hempel. The decision was strange. We are used to deflecting it, as Dev did himself, because of Winston Churchill’s response.
Churchill was noted for intemperate rants fuelled by lunchtime alcohol. Such a rant came in the wake of Dev’s “I’m-sorry-for-your-trouble” trip. He accused Ireland of “frolicking” with fascists while the world burned. His words were violent, insulting and contemptuous. And, usefully, they gave de Valera a get-out-of-jail card.
A Department of Justice memo records 18,000 head of cattle going to Europe, mostly to the British and American zones in Germany, but there was much more
He replied with a still-impressive speech, dignified and temperate, about the rights of small nations. He was playing the man not the ball. Churchill’s churlishness didn’t justify personal commiserations on Hitler’s death. And it was not in Britain that offence was loudest.
From the New York Herald Tribune: “Despite greater events, there is still time to glance and gasp at the spectacle of the prime minister of Eire marching solemnly to the German legation to present his condolences on Adolf Hitler’s death ... Neutrality can go rancid when kept too long. Has the moral myopia of the neutrals ... blinded them to all ethical values?”
So, why do it? I think there are several reasons, some naive, some not. Oddly, Dev was stuck, diplomatically, in a world that owed more to the 19th-century British foreign office than 1945. He believed he owed Hempel something. And there was truth in that.
Hempel had maintained, in Berlin, a sense that Ireland should be supported, despite its co-operation with British intelligence. He helped keep up the fiction that Ireland’s neutrality was pro-German and damaging to Britain.
But if diplomatic protocol and personal debts mattered, a note would have sufficed. The visit was a political show. Dev had a point to make, not to the world but Ireland. A complex wartime relationship with Britain would not be part of Irish history. Normal service had to be resumed. Separation and division were back. It needed hammering home. Dev hadn’t worked out he didn’t need a sledgehammer.
Meanwhile, leaving all that behind, he embarked on a project that came to mean a lot more and showed real concern for the people of Germany. In 1945 it took the Allies some time to realise the huge problem facing them was a starving population in a land where everything had been destroyed.
They would have to put off Eisenhower’s dictum: “Germany will not be occupied for purposes of liberation but as a defeated nation.”
The need was to prevent millions from starving to death.
The Red Cross was well aware of the danger, and it was with the Red Cross that Ireland began to send aid to Germany and elsewhere. It was on a small scale, but generous for a nation with its own problems. The records are scanty, coming mostly from Civil Service reports, but de Valera was driving it. And the quantities of aid were not insignificant.
A Department of Justice memo records 18,000 head of cattle going to Europe, mostly to the British and American zones in Germany, but there was much more.
There was temporary refuge for hundreds of German children, though the department could be selective about Ireland’s generosity: “Our practise has been to discourage any substantial increase in the Jewish population ... They are a potential irritant in the body politic and this has led to disastrous results from time to time in other countries. The Minister, whose freedom from racial or religious prejudices or whose desire to help people in distress will not be questioned, agrees that caution is necessary.”
Whether the civil servant who wrote this saw the Holocaust as a “disastrous consequence” is unclear. However, de Valera would have none of it. He refused to accept any distinction between children brought to Ireland on the basis of ethnicity.
But even with a few glitches, de Valera’s policy of providing aid and assistance, without bias or selectivity, helped shape a fundamental aspect of how Ireland came to relate to the world.
The idea that the country punches above its weight in these areas is, perhaps, one of Dev’s most important and least recognised legacies. We should not pretend his infamous visit to Eduard Hempel was anything less than a grave misjudgement or excuse it. But what came next mattered more.
The City in Year Zero by Michael Russell is published by Constable
