Irish History: The corpus of Irish history has room for an authoritative synthesis on Ireland and the second World War.
This book partially achieves that objective. It is a work based on a wide trawl of official state archives, personal papers and published sources. The author presents his central thesis in forthright terms, a thesis that is provocatively phrased and challengingly argued. Dr Girvin is no admirer of the radical nationalism of Eamon de Valera as expressed in a speech in 1945 which "shared much with the militant nationalism of Nazism and fascism; such sentiments had brought Hitler to power and given him the means to destroy the continent and his nation".
According to the author, de Valera frequently insisted, "state, people and party in Ireland were closely associated if not identical, and if he held this view about Ireland why should it not also be applied to Germany?" Girvin concludes that such attitudes "could lead, as it seems to have done in the case of de Valera and his closest colleagues, to a public attitude amounting almost to disdain for the Holocaust and indifference to the actions of the Nazis".
He argues that Ireland or Eire, terms the author irritatingly and confusingly uses interchangeably throughout, could have done more to support the Allies short of going to war. Eamon de Valera and his closest advisers answered no to any such policy change, writes Girvin. Towards the end of the war, Ireland might have moved closer to the Allies and shifted from its policy of "absolutist neutrality". The failure to do so was at best poor diplomacy, "at worst it was myopic in the extreme". One reason why that was so is as follows: Irish neutrality had "little to do with national interest" and "everything to do with ideology".
Girvin also argues that the decision of the government not to adopt a more flexible approach to the Allies towards the end of the war suggests to him "that the policymakers (a fairly small group around de Valera) were neutral to the war's outcome. This seems a morally questionable position at best, but it is one that the Irish state has in effect asserted ever since". There was very little evidence that Ireland "was prepared to risk neutrality if that was what was required to support democracy".
The opening chapter provides strong evidence for that argument. Here Girvin evaluates de Valera's visit to the German minister in May 1945 to express his condolences on the death of Hitler. But was his visit atypical of his behaviour and actions during the war years? Frederick H Boland, deputy head of the Department of External Affairs, opposed the visit literally on bended knee. It shocked the Dublin Jewish community to the core - a community with which de Valera had enjoyed a good and close working relationship during the war years. The visit did not prevent the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, and his son Jacob from coming to Dublin to express their gratitude for de Valera's supportive actions during the war in the cause of trying to bring to safety groups of Jews identified by Rabbi Herzog.
When evaluating allegedly pro-Axis inclinations of de Valera and his small band of advisers, it is important to examine who was in that group. Joseph Walshe, Secretary of External Affairs, was unquestionably very windy in the summer of 1940. He was, as is stated in the book, convinced the British were going to lose the war. He was not pro-Hitler but he was very supportive of Pétain and the Vichy regime. Walshe was one of a number of advisers and not necessarily the most influential. It may be my fault but I could not find a reference in the index to Maurice Moynihan - the most senior civil servant working with de Valera in the Department of the Taoiseach from the 1930s until the 1950s. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Moynihan, the secretary of the Department of the Taoiseach, who lost a brother in the first World War, was not indifferent to the outcome of the war and certainly was not pro-Axis. He was a far more influential adviser than Joseph Walshe, even on matters of foreign policy. Frederick Boland, mentioned above, was not ambivalent in his attitude to the outcome of the war.
Moreover, the Irish diplomats Seán Murphy and Con Cremin, neither of whom are, as far as I could see, listed in the index, worked hard in their respective diplomatic posts at Paris, Vichy and Berlin to keep Dublin informed about the complexities of continental European wartime politics. Reports from Seán Murphy in Vichy, which argued consistently that France had not been defeated, provoked a serious policy debate in Dublin in the autumn of 1940 - the outcome of which was to arrest any possible policy lurch towards the Axis powers. That was the decisive outcome of the internal policy evaluation in the latter part of 1940. Walshe lost the policy debate. Irish policy did not anticipate a German victory.
In relation to the issue of de Valera and the Holocaust, it is instructive to examine the reports of the Berlin legation for the war years. Dr Niall Keogh undertook an analysis of those documents in his doctoral thesis, UCC, 2003. Walshe enquired if "200 Polish Jewish families . . . and . . . 500 Christian children" would be allowed exit visas. On March 24th, 1944, Cremin telegraphed Dublin that the German authorities were anxious to know what would happen to the Jews if they went to Ireland. According to the unidentified German official: "If it was intended that these families should become Irish citizens the German authorities would, I was given to understand, "gladly save us the inconvenience of having so many Jews" [Cremin's emphasis]; Cremin persisted, on instructions from de Valera, in his inquiries. On October 5th, 1944, a senior German Foreign Office official told him that an inquiry had been sent to the authorities of Oswiecim/Auschwitz [about the group of Jews] but no reply was received from that source.
De Valera, who knew about the Holocaust through his friend Rabbi Herzog among other sources, was not indifferent to the genocide of the Jews. At least, that is the judgment of this reviewer after working on files in the National Archives and elsewhere. De Valera's wartime policy did not amount "almost to disdain for the Holocaust and indifference to the actions of the Nazis". The qualifying "almost" above requires convincing proof that is not provided in the text. The challenge to write the history of Ireland and the second World War will be assisted in the next few years by the publication of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy relating to the period 1939-1945.
Already a new generation of graduate researchers, who have been working over the past 15 years on files in the National Archives and in international holdings abroad, have produced doctoral work of the highest quality on specialist aspects of the war - studies of personalities, politicians and policies - available for consultation. Apparently, they are an under-used source.
Such largely unpublished scholarly work has helped us all the better understand the chiaroscuro world of the "Emergency" and of the subtle polices of Eamon de Valera sorely in need of a biographer who will require the depth of a Paschal to complete the task successfully. The study of the Emergency period requires an understanding of the uncertainty and insecurity of the times - when it was not possible to trust the diplomatic bag, telegraphic communications, messages in code dearg, letters or telephone conversations. All were vulnerable to oversight or interception. Therefore the world of diplomacy in Dublin during the Emergency was not a time of philosophical discussion between de Valera and the different foreign ambassadors. It was a world of shadow language and shape-shifting.
Irish neutrality was a choice and it was maintained strictly at one level. De Valera certainly demonstrated great inflexibility. He often feigned intransigence the better to convince the belligerents that he was not taking sides. In reality, Irish neutrality evolved into a strongly pro-Allied policy in deed and in fact. In order to support that view it is necessary to continue to examine the extent of co-operation between Dublin and the Allies at all levels - intelligence, logistics, military training, weather reporting, and so on. The more this area is studied the more partisan Irish wartime neutrality appears in favour of the Allies. Girvin argues the reverse thesis. Readers will find it difficult to remain neutral reading this challenging text. I personally found much to disagree with in this enjoyable study.
In parenthesis, Girvin doubts the veracity of the story related by Robert Brennan that President Roosevelt, exasperated at Aiken's refusal to end an interview in 1941, swept the dinner tray from the table. It is almost certain that Aiken was Brennan's source. He gave me an account of that episode in an interview in 1977 in which he described the abrupt end to the meeting. Neither would I describe Aiken as ever having been "notoriously indiscreet". He was, if anything, taciturn and monosyllabic.
By focusing on such detail, however, one does not wish to detract from the great energy and historical imagination that has gone into the writing of this monograph, particularly the work in the US National Archives. Girvin's book, taken with the growing body of new archival research undertaken and completed by doctoral students and other researchers, will be a very useful resource for teaching purposes and a major asset to those who wish to understand the history of the Emergency in a new and challenging scholarly context.
• Prof Dermot Keogh is head of the history department, UCC, and the author of Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland and a forthcoming book on the making of the Irish ConstitutionDermot Keogh
The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939-45 By Brian Girvin Macmillan, 385pp. £25