EAMON DE Valera, fearful an IRA bombing campaign in England could threaten Ireland’s neutrality, urged the British in 1939 to offer information that could label IRA chief of staff Seán Russell as a paid Soviet agent, newly released papers show.
Just days after the attacks began in January 1939, a British official reported the Dublin government was “seriously disturbed over the recent outrages” and was “anxious to do what they can to prevent future” ones. The bombers, orchestrated by Jim O’Donovan, damaged electricity pylons and telephone lines, but they moved on to easier targets, including a street attack in Coventry in August 1939 that left five people dead, after police arrested waves of British-based IRA members.
Two IRA men, Peter Barnes and James McCormack, were hanged in early 1940 for the Coventry attack, with their execution prompting the last of the bombings, on Oxford Street, where two explosions injured 20 people.
In the letter, released by the National Archives in London to BBC Radio 4's Documentprogramme, the unnamed British official reported that Mr de Valera's government could not take "overt action" against the IRA. Seeking notice from London of the sentences facing the arrested bombers, Irish officials said they were "merely the cat's paws" for more senior figures in Ireland, such as Russell and O'Donovan.
Lengthy jail sentences would be “embarrassing” for Dublin if the bombers could “be made the subject of popular agitation in Ireland for release on the ground that they were ‘political prisoners’ ”, the British official reported.
Instead, the de Valera government urged the British to share any information it had that Russell, who had travelled to Moscow in 1925, was “in Soviet pay as an agitator”, the official went on, adding that the British had undertaken “not to disclose the source of this information”.
Information on Russell’s Soviet ties would be “of the greatest possible assistance to the Dublin authorities in dealing with him since it would practically eliminate the risk of him being treated as a patriotic martyr”, the letter continues.
The disclosure of de Valera’s contacts with London, says Dublin City University lecturer Donnacha Ó Beacháin, would have undermined his “image of being the pristine Republican leader who had heroically and unstintingly challenged the British”.
University of Staffordshire academic Dr Tony Craig said de Valera’s “covert anti-IRA stance” was logical because the IRA’s campaign “threatened Ireland’s security and directly contradicted de Valera’s aim to keep Ireland neutral in the coming war”.