Irish HistoryIt has become customary to pay tribute to de Valera's handling of Irish neutrality during the second World War. Although this book necessarily covers Ireland's relations with only one side in that conflict, Germany, it depicts with exceptional clarity the tightrope that our wartime Taoiseach had to walk in order to avoid the risk of conflict with one or other of the protagonists.
In hindsight, we may take the view that there was not much risk of either of the combatants invading our state, but that risk was never negligible, and now that we see the full picture it cannot be excluded that a less skilful diplomacy might have provoked one or other of the combatants to embark on such an adventure. Incidentally, it is now evident that one important reason why such an attack was unlikely was the existence of our temporarily enlarged albeit ill-equipped army, for had the combatants not had to face the prospect of resistance by this force of around 50,000 men, the temptation might at some moment have been too much for one or other of them. And the consequence of that in the long-term as well as the short-term does not bear thinking about.
In order to avoid any such provocation it was necessary to dissimulate with the Germans - and to disarm (in the metaphorical sense of the word!) the British by secret co-operation. However, this willing co-operation was never such as to allow them to believe that an uninvited entry to our territory would not be strongly resisted.
That tight-rope walk was never easy, and it was undertaken by de Valera with the help of a very small number of dedicated army officers and civil servants - all of whom, incidentally, had been equally dedicated opponents of his during the Civil War, 20 years earlier.
Three of these diplomats - Joe Walshe and Freddy Boland in Dublin, and Willie Warnock in Berlin almost until the end - had to spend a good deal of time persuading the German Minister in Dublin, Eduard Hempel, and various German officials in Berlin, that we were more neutral than was in fact the case - even making sympathetic noises in their direction at times. But we know now that Joe Walshe was simultaneously passing to MI5 intelligence data from the head of Irish Army Intelligence, Col Dan Bryan - in such a manner as to lead that agency to believe that this was being done without de Valera's knowledge!
Meanwhile, de Valera never disclosed his real feelings to the diplomats of either side, all of whom found him irritatingly inscrutable. However, he did make clear to both sides his adherence to the fundamental principle that Ireland would never allow itself to be used to threaten Britain's security. And on the day before war broke out he demurred at the German approach to Irish neutrality - that it would be respected if it were to be "unimpeachable" - stating bluntly that he could not accept this qualification because, given its geographical location, it was inevitable that the Irish Government should show "a certain consideration" for Britain.
This book offers the best picture we have yet of how much the Germans knew of the "consideration" thus offered to Britain: they knew a good deal, enough for Hempel to complain about but, fortunately, not enough for him or them to realise just how supportive official Ireland was of the Allied cause. What is not clear to me still is how much of what he reported was intercepted and decoded by the British.
Hempel was a man with certain limitations, but his reporting to Berlin was balanced, showing good judgment. He resisted, as far as possible, being dragged into the endless attempts by various competing German agencies to spy in Ireland, in contact with the IRA. His reward was to be the call on his home (not the Legation) by de Valera and Joe Walshe on May 3rd, 1945, to offer their condolences on Hitler's death. Some 30 years later, during a lunch at which there was a discussion as to how the EU states would be represented at Franco's impending funeral, I mentioned to the German and French Foreign Ministers this extraordinary gesture, which certainly had not helped Ireland's relations with the Allies in the immediate aftermath of the War. They both burst out laughing at its quixotic character.
Incidentally, the book mentions an episode early in the war when the Marquess of Tavistock (later Duke of Bedford) approached the German Legation in Dublin about possible peace terms - with the permission of Lord Halifax, then Foreign Secretary. When, in March 1940, Tavistock published a pamphlet about his initiative this caused a controversy, which must have damaged Halifax's chances of succeeding Chamberlain as Prime Minister two months later.
The book says that Tavistock contacted the Legation through "an Irish friend \ turned out to be Craig (or Gregg) of Belfast who had a German wife". The Belfast contact was in fact Jack Gregg, a Presbyterian pacifist who later became deeply engaged in efforts to bring Northern Protestants and Catholics together in an organisation called PACE. Jack was married to Dickie Winternheim; he and I shared an aunt-in-law, and they were close friends of our family. That was why Jack sent Tavistock to the house in Temple Rd, Rathmines, to which my parents had just moved - where it was I who opened the door to him. I never heard afterwards whether it was my father - no friend of the Germans during the War - or someone else, who put him in touch with the German Legation.
Garret FitzGerald is a former taoiseach. His book Reflections on the Irish State was recently published by Irish Academic Press.
Herr Hempel at the German Legation in Dublin 1937-1945 By John P.Duggan Irish Academic Press, 328pp. €45 hbk, €23.50 pbk