Madam, – When new historical documents come to light, care is needed in assessing their actual significance. It is surprising that The Irish Timeswould carry on its front page an almost Army Council perspective of the de Valera government's attempts to help counter a lethal IRA bombing campaign in England in 1939 as an exercise in black propaganda as well as a betrayal of republican principles.
The British report, which seeks to convey official Irish concerns, does not name a source, but it was highly unlikely to have been de Valera himself. So the front page headline “De Valera sought British help to cast IRA leaders as Soviet spies” (March 29th) is not substantiated. The main import of the document is the need for both governments to avoid creating martyrs. It is not clear if the request for any firmer intelligence about whether one of the leaders of the bombing campaign, Seán Russell, had previously been a Soviet-subsidised agitator, not the same as spy, really originated with the writer of the report or from his unnamed Irish official contact, and, if the latter, to what degree it was authorised or own initiative. In any event, it was considerably behind events, given the IRA were in active contact with Nazi Germany seeking arms and support.
Few were either Communist agents or Nazi sympathisers, but simply pro any fellow enemy of Britain. Yet only a few months later in 1939, the Irish Minister (Ambassador) to Spain, Leopold Kerney, representing the same de Valera government, was trying to secure the release of Frank Ryan from the Fascist authorities, and having to debunk “the perverse thinking”, which branded him as a Communist, thinking that emanated from O’Duffy and an ideologue like James Hogan.
De Valera had developed a very constructive relationship with British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, which had led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938, ending the economic war and returning the ports.
Chamberlain was even sympathetic to letting de Valera make a case in England for Irish unity, on which the British were to make proposals in June 1940 at a point of crisis during the war. The IRA campaign in 1939 was destructive of any political initiative in this direction. De Valera grasped from 1920 on that Ireland’s independence was conditional upon its not being used by a foreign power as a base from which to attack Britain.
The IRA campaign started following one of the most lamentably irresponsible acts ever undertaken by any group of former TDs, when an unelected rump of survivors of the Second Dáil transferred to the IRA their fictional claims to be the government of the Irish Republic. This was then treated as a source of spurious legitimacy for all subsequent IRA campaigns.
The maintenance of internal peace and stability through the careful management of public opinion was to be the essential condition of maintaining Irish independence and neutrality through the second World War, together with covert British-Irish and, later, American co-operation. More controversially, some executions in Ireland did create a lasting resentment. The rationale for this was that the very survival of the State was at stake. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – In an otherwise fine letter, Tommy Graham (March 30th) implies that de Valera may have chosen a Soviet smear over a Nazi smear as his preferred option because the Irish, at least in de Valera’s eyes, may have had an “unsettling” sympathy for the latter.
In fact, there is a much simpler explanation for this choice. The National Socialist party was not considered nearly so much a threat to the religion of most Irish people and, moreover, had not yet acquired its reputation for unspeakable atrocities. The Soviets, on the other hand, as Mr Graham observes earlier in his letter, were (in)famous anti-clerics.
Hence this meagre piece of circumstantial evidence does not support any kind of darker conclusion. – Yours, etc,