Decision to return Treaty ports to Free State in 1938 proved ‘completely wrong’

Britain handed back the Treaty ports in 1938 based on a false belief that their technological advances would stop German submarines, Seán Lemass believed.

Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Britain had retained the use of the ports of Berehaven and Cobh in Co Cork and Lough Swilly in Co Donegal for the Royal Navy.

However, the ports were handed back to the Free State in 1938 as part of the settlement which ended the Anglo-Irish trade war that had devastated Irish agriculture.

The decision to hand back the Treaty ports was widely accepted in Britain and Ireland, but bitterly opposed by future British prime minister Winston Churchill.

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Speaking at the time, Churchill described the Treaty ports as the “sentinel towers of the western approaches” in the North Atlantic. It was “folly”, Churchill believed, to give them back with a war looming.

Lemass recalled that during the negotiations to end the economic war, Britain feared the loss of the ports would leave them vulnerable to German submarines operating in the Atlantic.

All this changed, however, during negotiations with Thomas Inskip, who served a minister for coordination of defence in the British government between 1936 and 1939.

Inskip, a key figure in the United Kingdom's then preparations for a looming war with Germany, believed London had developed a new sonar device which could locate submarines under the water.

Lemass remembered: “This meant the elimination of the submarine as an instrument of war, so they were no longer concerned about their anti-submarine defences or their possession of ports in Ireland or the danger to them of Germans getting re-fuelled in Irish ports, and so that was that.

“Of course, this proved to be completely wrong in the end: radar was certainly a useful device, but the German submarine still became the greatest menace they had during the war.”

Crippling economic war

The Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement ended the crippling economic war between Britain and the Free State which arose out of the decision by the Fianna Fáil government in 1933 to stop paying land annuities to the British government arising out of the pre-independence land acts.

It was settled with a once-off payment of £10 million by the Irish government. Lemass said the money was of “no importance”. The return of the Treaty ports, though, was vital as it turned out to preserve Irish neutrality during the second World War.

The trade treaty also abolished all tariffs between the two countries. Lemass believed the ability of Irish farmers to trade on the same terms as British farmers in the British market would lead to a boom in Irish agriculture.

Unfortunately, the war intervened. Lemass described the war as a “disaster” for the Irish economy as the British introduced war-time controls on the importations of food stuffs a year later and kept them in place for 10 years.

“It would have been much more important if there had been no war because then you could have sat down at once to build up a tremendously strong development programme.

“The sort of political antagonism to Irish industrial development and all the rest of it which had been holding up vis-à-vis Britain would have disappeared.”