Like authors and composers, periods of history move into and out of fashion. By the end of 1940, Irish neutrality was very definitely out of fashion with the British but popular - James Dillon excepted - with Irish nationalists on both sides of the Border. While Winston Churchill accused the 26 counties of "skulking" and a British newsreel warned that history might blame Eamon de Valera for helping Hitler "to fulfill the bloodbath of the New World Order", demonstrations in Dublin in support of neutrality provided conclusive proof that de Valera understood public opinion.
There was, of course, a smugness about the state's abstention from the most titanic battle of the century. By the end of 1942, an Irish newsreel was assuring cinema audiences across Eire - as it was still called - that they were heroic. "Yes, it's been a hard war," the commentator announced as footage showed bombs exploding on the cities of Europe. "Sacrifices have been made by rich and poor alike. Nobody has minded that. No sacrifice, no hardship can ever be too great when the reward is our own homeland." This language might be appropriate to the defenders of Stalingrad, hardly to a people whose largest military exploit was an exercise on the Blackwater river and whose transportation system was such that a train from Killarney took 23 hours to reach Dublin.
George Bernard Shaw, who in 1939 had called neutrality "crack-brained", proclaimed in 1945: "That powerless little cabbage garden called Ireland wins in the teeth of all the mighty Powers." Churchill personally abused de Valera. Britain had magnanimously declined to invade the 26 counties after its refusal to hand over the Treaty ports, he said, "and left the de Valera government to frolic with the Germans . . . " Then came the Taoiseach's visit of condolence to the German legation on the death of Hitler, an act which took on "the smear of turpitude" in the eyes of John Maffey, the British representative in Dublin.
And it was that small, critical, explosive gesture which has often defined Irish neutrality - indeed, the country in the 1940s - for later generations. If Dev was proving Eire's independence and sovereignty by visiting Dr Eduard Hempel - and after all, the very maintenance of neutrality was an expression of sovereignty - had he not also demonstrated the small-mindedness of a nation which stood aside from the great moral conflict of the century? As another British newsreel maliciously advised audiences in 1942: "Take good stock of this man de Valera - never did any man's speeches more faithfully reflect his character. He has what the Irish prize more than other peoples - a long memory."
Never mind that one of Dev's most powerful historical memories was the slaughter of Irishmen in the trenches of France and Gallipoli. The isolation of Irish men and women in the second World War would forever be remembered in F.S.L. Lyons's symbol of Plato's cave, its occupants living "with their backs to the fire of life and deriving their only knowledge of what went on outside from the flickering shadows thrown on the wall before their eyes by the men and women who passed to and fro behind them." In the aftermath of the Emergency - itself a word of dubious merit - the 26 counties would be punished with exclusion from the United Nations. If the country wished to stand aside from a war for "humanity", then it could be banned from the responsibilities of peace.
In the decades that followed, wartime neutrality maintained its ability to stain Ireland. The North fought while the 26 counties stood aside. U-boats had supposedly moored in the west of Ireland to take on fuel and food. "There are degrees of neutrality, just as there are degrees of unfaithfulness," Nicholas Monsarrat wrote in his epic on the Battle of the Atlantic, The Cruel Sea. "One may forgive a woman an occasional cold spell, but not her continued and smiling repose in other men's arms." In Britain's hour of desperation in 1940, Churchill appeared to offer de Valera Irish unity, in return for Irish participation on the allied side in the war - and Dev turned it down.
By the late 1980s, the wartime experience did not seem quite so shameful. De Valera had protected his new state. Participation in the war would have rekindled civil conflict. By staying neutral, Dev's Ireland forged a policy that allowed her, much later, a unique role in the United Nations. If neutrality had not been upheld, how could peace-keeping soldiers have been sent to the Congo, to Cyprus, to Lebanon? Then, within a decade, the Anglo-Irish agreement, Ireland's obsession with European integration and the subsequent "peace process" in the North led to more introspection - and the old smear of turpitude returned.
Wartime Eire had been anti-Semitic (though no more so than many other countries at the time: the Nazi Wansee conference noted that there were 4,000 Jews to be murdered in Ireland). Nazi spies were on the loose. And back came the false U-boat stories - resurfacing for more oxygen in the British press only three years ago.
Now we have Irish troops in the Balkans, Irish special forces in East Timor, serious talk of participation in the Western Defence Union. So how could the Taoiseach have turned down that offer of unity 59 years ago? When I suggested in a BBC documentary interview earlier this year that de Valera was right to have refused the 1940 offer because post-war Stormont approval would have to be obtained, this sequence was cut from the film. Dev was wrong, was the documentary's message. Dev was small-minded. Ireland's Hated Hero was the title of the programme.
The more I look at those old newsreels and yellowing copies of The Irish Times, the more I prowl through the Irish and British files on Ireland in the 1940s, the more I've talked to the dying survivors of that age, the more I realise that Ireland in the 1940s was about Dev. "A petty leader raking over old muck heaps . . . vain and ambitious," Maffey wrote of him angrily in 1941.
"By far the most rigid, obstinate man I have ever negotiated with as well as being the most charming and genial," British MP Malcolm MacDonald described him to me just before his own death. "He would get up in the morning desiring to do something he knew to be wrong," Dillon recalled for me at around the same time. "But he never did anything which at the time of doing he believed to be wrong. When he acted, he would act ruthlessly and inflexibly and never look back."
But in a world gone mad, rigidity, obstinacy, ruthlessness, inflexibility were qualities necessary to defend a nation. Aiken called neutrality "a condition of limited warfare", with belligerents regarding it "with hatred and contempt". Neutrality is rarely an act of honour. But did Dev - or Ireland - have any choice? When Britain sought Eire's alliance in war, only 20 years had passed since the west of Ireland had been under Crown martial law, only 17 since the end of the Civil War. And if Eire had been bombed, would its cities not have been pulverised, as Belfast's heart was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1941?
In fact, Northern Ireland's "participation" in the war was less than it seemed. The Catholic population did not support it, there was no conscription and its military volunteers were fewer than its government claimed - the true figure appears to be 37,282. But Lord Craigavon, John Andrews and Sir Basil Brooke could portray their statelet as essential to Britain's survival - the Royal Navy could use Belfast and Derry. "We hope," Brooke lectured a British audience at the Guildhall, "that you now realise that we are necessary to you." But if its role in the war had obtained a short-term if not indefinite lease of life for the Protestant state, with its shipyards and aircraft industry, this was secured with a loyalty that was directed more towards the North than to the British Empire. When Craigavon discovered Sudetenlike proposals by Neville Chamberlain, who remained in the cabinet after standing down as Prime Minister, for Irish unity in 1940, he rushed off a telegram to London, stating that "to such treachery to loyal Ulster I will never be a party".
When Belfast suffered its 1941 calvary, the morale of its bombed survivors collapsed while the Northern Ireland home affairs minister, the mean-spirited and alcoholic Dawson Bates, urged the opening of camps for thousands of refugees whose "personal habits . . . are sub-human". No wonder the moderator of the Presbyterian church was to warn that "if something is not done now to remedy this rank inequality, there will be a revolution after the war". Brooke intended to avoid any such civil unrest, whatever the cost to Britain's wartime allies. Secret communications - I found them in the Northern Ireland Public Record Office in 1978 but they were swiftly closed afterwards - show that Brooke was fearful of British plans to farm out thousands of Polish troops to the North after the war. The Poles had fought alongside Northern Irish regiments at Monte Cassino, but could not return to their now-Communist homeland. Brooke refused to have them. The Poles were Catholics.
De Valera underestimated - ignored - the Protestants of Northern Ireland and the way in which the war would strengthen the bond between Belfast and London, the way in which his own neutrality would emphasise the North's "loyalty" (though 42,665 men from Eire - a 1945 Whitehall statistic - fought in the British forces). The British Treasury acknowledged that Britain had to make up the gap in public services between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Not long after the declaration of the Irish Republic, Westminster confirmed Northern Ireland's integral position within the UK. In the Republic the "Emergency" may still be remembered in stories of glimmermen, of German bombs on North Strand Road and secret agreements to hand back downed British airmen. This is nostalgic and true, but it avoids one of the most indelicate but necessary questions of the 1940s: if the second World War was really perceived in Eire as an immoral clash of power blocs, both as guilty as each other, what were the moral values of de Valera's Ireland?
It is routine, now, to invoke Dev's 1943 panegyric about cosy homesteads, athletic youths and comely maidens, of a war portrayed as a conflict of materialism in which saintly Ireland stood apart - even more justified in doing so when imperial England allied herself with atheistic, communist Russia. A Catholic church that supported Franco might be in danger of what Elizabeth Bowen - in one of her secret reports to the British Ministry of Information - called "Catholic-Fascism" or "phariseeism". Thus Belsen could be compared to Katyn, Auschwitz to Nagasaki.
The Minister for Justice at the time, Gerald Bowland talked like this. And distance from war bred a sense of unreality; in 1945, first prize at a fancy dress ball in Kilkenny went to "the Beast of Belsen". The first newsreels of the Nazi extermination camps were now being shown. Hitler's regime was seen to be evil, and a visit of condolence - however much it was "balanced" by similar expressions on Roosevelt's death - carried implications far greater than a mere demonstration of Irish sovereignty.
There was a perspective lacking, a moral imperative that escaped de Valera. But he was surely right to reject the 1940 offer of unity. It contained no guarantees. It was made at a moment of near-panic in London and without any recognition of the unhealed divisions in Irish society. De Valera's refusal, like Eire's neutrality, was not courageous. But it was politically the only choice. The 26 counties in the 1940s was not in the business of deciding the outcome of a world war. In the end, it seems, neutrality was sacrosanct not because it represented something spiritual or un-materialistic but because it was based on the self-interest of a vulnerable, still-wounded young state - the very same self-interest of which Ireland always accused the belligerents. Unfashionable it may now be in a nation which can support a war for "human values" in Europe. Unrealistic it was not.
Robert Fisk is Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent and author of In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45 (Gill & Macmillan)
Online: The Irish Times - www.ireland.com
All of the articles published so far in this series are available at The Irish Times on the Web: www.ireland.com/newspaper/ special/1999/eyeon20/
