THE IRA's 1939 campaign to destroy electricity pylons and telephone lines in England is remembered today, if at all, for offering Brendan Behan, one of those involved, the opening lines of Borstal Boy.
In it, Behan relates his landlady’s screeches as British police arrived at his lodgings to seize him, leaving him to make a foiled attempt to escape with a suitcase packed with potassium chlorate, gelignite and detonators.
However, the bombers’ campaign, which led to 61 explosions in the first four months of the year and more than 150 by year’s end, was treated with deep concern in London, and also in Dublin by Fianna Fáil taoiseach Éamon de Valera.
In a letter written within days of the attacks beginning, now released from the National Archives in London to BBC Radio 4, a British official told a colleague Dublin was “seriously concerned about the recent outrages”.
However, there was a problem. Dublin was anxious to do everything possible “in punishing the offenders, they feel that, for political reasons, it would be impossible for them to take overt action which could be treated as persecution of well-meaning, if misguided, patriots”.
Backed by the IRA chief of staff, Seán Russell, the campaign was orchestrated by an ESB employee, Jim O’Donovan, who wanted to change British public opinion by hitting infrastructural targets, but not cause loss of life – an ambition that was not realised.
Known as “the S-Plan”, with S standing for sabotage, O’Donovan ruled out attacks on water mains and gas pipes, which “apart altogether from ethical considerations” laid down by the Hague Convention would do “our cause infinite harm”.
Fourteen attacks on pylons and lines were made in the first three days, but the IRA’s campaign ran into trouble after a copy of the S-Plan fell into the hands of the Metropolitan Police after they had made dozens of arrests.
Unable publicly to support the British, de Valera sought advance notice “in some private way” from London about the jail sentences to be meted out to the perpetrators “who, so far as they aware, appear merely to be the cat’s paws” for more senior figures, such as Russell.
“The ground for this would be that it would be embarrassing for them in Dublin if there were a number of prisoners here who could be made the subject of popular agitation in Ireland for release on the grounds that they were ‘political prisoners’,” said the letter.
Instead, Dublin wanted to destroy the reputations of the leaders, particularly Russell, who had travelled to Moscow with Gerry Boland in 1925, where they met with the future Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin.
In the National Archives letter, the unnamed British official wrote: “As regards Russell, it is believed that some ten, or twelve years ago he was in Soviet pay as an agitator; if there is any information which could be made available to show that this is the case, or that at the present time he is in receipt of pay from foreign sources, it would be of the greatest possible assistance to the Dublin authorities in dealing with him, since it would practically eliminate the risk of his being treated as a patriotic martyr if they were able to show that he was merely a paid foreign agent.”
Last night, University of Staffordshire lecturer Tony Craig said the letter showed that de Valera, “like every taoiseach after him, from Lemass to Reynolds and onwards, kept to the same line: that they did not want bombings in England”.