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In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939-45

af Robert Fisk

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932289,076 (4.2)Ingen
When the Union Jack was hauled down over the Atlantic naval ports of Cobh, Berehaven and Lough Swilly in 1939, the Irish were jubilant. But in London, Churchhill brooded on the 'incomprehensible' act of surrendering three of the Royal Navy's finest ports when Europe was about to go to war. Eighteen months later, Churchill was talking of military action against Ireland. He demanded the return of the ports and the Irish made ready to defend their country against British as well as German invasion. In Northern Ireland, a Unionist Government vainly tried to introduce conscription. Along the west coast British submarines prowled the seas searching for German U-boats sheltering in the bays; British agents toured the villages of Donegal in search of fifth columnists while their German counterparts tried to make contact with the IRA. This is a fasinating study of Ireland during the Second World War. "Anybody interested in Irish affairs will have to get Fisk's book." Literary Review… (mere)
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While Ireland was politically separated nearly a century ago into two distinct regions, the extent of that separation has waxed and waned with events. And in surveying that divide, there was no time when it was greater than during the Second World War. For six years the northern quarter of the island that was still a part of the United Kingdom was engaged in battle with the Axis powers, while the independent remainder maintained a careful neutrality in the hope of avoiding any involvement in the fighting.

This neutrality, however did not mean that Ireland could avoid a conflict that was taking place right outside its borders. Just off the coast – sometimes within view of people on the shore – German U-boats sank merchant shipping and battled British escorts. German and British warplanes often flew overhead, and occasionally crashed onto Irish soil. Both sides pressured Ireland to join the war as an ally, while simultaneously threatening to invade the country with their forces. And while Ireland was able to avoid any formal commitment to the fighting, its citizens suffered from the German blockade and faced wartime restrictions that could be as stringent as those of any belligerent power.

Ireland’s handling of “the Emergency” (as it was termed) was so sensitive that nearly four decades after it ended many government files related to it were still classified. This did not deter Robert Fisk, though, from diligently exploring archives and interviewing survivors to construct a history of the island’s experience of the conflict. Primarily centered on the politics of the period, it tells the story of how three governments – Éamon de Valera’s in Dublin, Winston Churchill’s in London, and the Ulster Protestant regime in Belfast – responded to the demands of the war while pursuing agendas that were often at direct variance with each other and which reflected the perseverance of longstanding animosities on all sides.

Fisk begins his book by describing the turnover of the three “treaty ports” by the British to the Irish in 1938. A remnant of the British military presence in southern Ireland, it took place amid considerable controversy in Westminster, as Churchill and others questioned the wisdom of doing so at a time when war loomed in Europe. The transfer proved a sore point in British-Irish relations in the war, as the British repeatedly sought throughout the war to restore access to the ports, which would allow them to better protect British convoys crossing the North Atlantic. Though de Valera’s refusal to do so was prompted by the need to maintain Ireland’s neutral stance, Fisk underscores his ardent nationalism as an equally important factor, as having only recently gained Ireland’s sovereignty he was unwilling to risk it in service to Britain’s war with Germany.

Ireland’s reluctance to participate in the war is a recurring theme of Fisk’s book. Having won independence less than two decades previously, most Irish were uninterested in entangling their country’s fate with that of the British. This was especially true in the summer of 1940 when Britain’s fate looked its bleakest, at which point some British leaders even floated the idea of winning Ireland’s involvement by offering de Valera his heart’s greatest desire: the six counties that made up Northern Ireland. De Valera’s rejection of it was shaped by his memory of John Redmond’s decision as Irish Nationalist Party leader to support Britain’s involvement in the First World War in return for Irish home rule, a decision which ultimately cost his party the support of the Irish Catholic voters who made up its base. As the ultimate beneficiary of Redmond’s political error, de Valera was not about to repeat his mistake.

This suited the politicians in Ulster just fine. Fisk portrays the Stormont leadership in Belfast as surpassing even de Valera in their parochial concerns. Like him their approach to the conflict was shaped by the experience of the First World War, in which thousands of Ulstermen who volunteered to serve in the British Army were slaughtered on the Western Front. Worried that conscription would expose the shallowness of Ulster’s commitment to Britain, the Stormont government were only too happy to use de Valera’s reluctance to join the war as a contrast with their own loyal service to the empire, even if that service was only voluntary and their loyalty contingent on British support for the continued partition of the island.

Fisk tells this story in a book that is less a single coherent narrative than it is a series of interconnected essays focused on particular aspects of his subject. This occasionally results in a degree of repetition and some bouncing around in the chronology of events. The main problem with his book, however, is with its age, as there has been considerable scholarship on the Ireland and the war since its original publication in 1983 (such as Clair Wills’s superb That Neutral Island on the cultural history of Ireland’s wartime experience), much of which has drawn upon the documents unavailable to Fisk when he originally conducted his research. That a more up-to-date study has yet to be written speaks to the quality of Fisk’s book, which despite its age remains the best overview of Ireland’s involvement in the Second World War. ( )
  MacDad | May 25, 2021 |
An excellent read, a succinct diagnosis of the War Years from an Irish and British perspective. Fisk highlights how Britain countenanced the invasion of Ireland and how they were willing to hand over Northern Ireland despite the wishes of the Unionist Government there. The book demonstrates how Britain's Foreign Office throughout her history has worked solely for Britain's best interests. Fisk's books on the Lebanon and Afghanistan continued in this vein. ( )
  thegeneral | Mar 10, 2007 |
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When Michael Heseltine launched a not-too-oblique attack on Irish neutrality in the course of a visit to Northern Ireland on 4 May, he was – presumably – unaware of the fact that he was reopening a book which both Churchill and de Valera had decided peaceably to close almost exactly thirty years ago. That at any rate would be the charitable explanation. Within hours of his remarks, the Dáil had been adjourned in uproar, the Irish ambassador in London was being told to protest to Whitehall, and the front pages of the newspapers were awash with ancient quarrels.

Anyone interested in exploring this now apparently pivotal aspect of Anglo-Irish relations will find Robert Fisk’s book both absorbing and provocative. Subtitled ‘Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality’, it begins its main narrative in 1938, with a brief look back to 1921, when the British military authorities insisted on the retention of the so-called ‘Treaty Ports’ in what was to become, eventually, the Irish Republic, but was then known as the Irish Free State.

The nature of the British authorities’ interest in these ports – the ‘sentinels of the Western approaches’, as Churchill was to call them – is admirably documented by Mr Fisk. What is not quite so clear from his narrative is that they were only part of Britain’s strategic equation. The other part was Northern Ireland, as recently released British official papers make clear. British policy in the period immediately prior to the Anglo-Irish Treaty was not conditioned solely by the intransigence of the Ulster Unionists: the Chiefs of Staff had made it clear that, from a defence point of view, creating a secure military bridgehead in Ulster was of vital importance. In 1932, when the question of the Treaty ports came up for review, it may well have been the existence of that bridgehead in the North-East which allowed the Chiefs of Staff to describe the ports as an ‘awkward commitment’. It was, as Fisk points out, the first time that the military had ever wavered in their defence of the territorial imperative. An opening was created for de Valera which enabled him to secure the return of the ports. Plainly, it would have been impossible for the Irish to maintain their neutrality during the war had the ports stayed in British hands. Less plainly, the surrender of the ports reinforced the importance, in strategic terms, of Northern Ireland remaining under effective British control.

Churchill, who had been curiously unemphatic about the ports in discussions with his government colleagues before 1921, was under no illusions in 1938. He had bitterly opposed their transfer, and resentment at Irish neutrality fuelled the sharp attack on de Valera in his victory broadcast at the war’s end. He believed passionately that this neutrality could, at one stage, have cost the Allies the war, and had no doubt that it prolonged it. He saw the maintenance of the policy by de Valera as little more than the personal foible of a twisted nationalist consciousness (he was backed up in this view by Maffey, his envoy in Dublin). It was not until 1953 that the two leaders finally met, in a reconciliation which was as low-key as their 1945 confrontation had been dramatic.
 
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When the Union Jack was hauled down over the Atlantic naval ports of Cobh, Berehaven and Lough Swilly in 1939, the Irish were jubilant. But in London, Churchhill brooded on the 'incomprehensible' act of surrendering three of the Royal Navy's finest ports when Europe was about to go to war. Eighteen months later, Churchill was talking of military action against Ireland. He demanded the return of the ports and the Irish made ready to defend their country against British as well as German invasion. In Northern Ireland, a Unionist Government vainly tried to introduce conscription. Along the west coast British submarines prowled the seas searching for German U-boats sheltering in the bays; British agents toured the villages of Donegal in search of fifth columnists while their German counterparts tried to make contact with the IRA. This is a fasinating study of Ireland during the Second World War. "Anybody interested in Irish affairs will have to get Fisk's book." Literary Review

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