This is more a debatable than a factual question, so I’ll move this thread to GD.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
It’s not often I get to correct tomndebb, but he is wrong on one point: Ireland did have an army. A brief history of it is here.
As should be apparent from reading that page, however, it wouldn’t have been the most effective army in the world, and it’s not clear why anybody thinks its participation in the war would have made much of a difference. It’s arguable that Britain would have been a more effective combatant had it had the use of Ireland’s ports, but I really don’t see why, given the (very recent at that point) history between the two countries, anybody should be surprised that Ireland wasn’t in a hurry to allow that.
williambaskerville answered the OP’s question pretty well. I’d just like to re-emphasise the points that in practice, Ireland’s neutrality was easily more favourable to Britain; and that public opinion in Ireland was such that entry into the war would have caused a very, very serious internal crisis.
I am not entirely sure of the veracity of this - ruadh will no doubt let me know if this is revisionism - but I’ve read, and seen on several documentaries, that Churchill offered De Valera the 6 counties of Northern Ireland in exchange for use of two deep-sea ports in Co. Cork (ostensibly for use by the US merchant navy, but under control of the UK armed forces).
(Not very authoratitive) cite.
In another documentary I’ve seen, this telegram was presented as a spiteful, mocking gesture by Churchill, rather than a genuine offer, though he had left the way open for negitiation before the US entered the war.
In hindsight, it’s clear that a lot of Troubles could have been avoided, but I have read that Dev had the dual problems that a) he had no way of trusting ‘perfidious Albion’, and b) he was convinced that this would be negotiating with the loser.
If this is indeed true, it indicates just how seriously the issue of neutrality was treated.
Churchill did indeed make that offer, jjimm. It was turned down mainly because Dev knew how hollow of an offer it was. Even if Churchill intended to deliver - which itself was questionable - there were plenty of others in the British and Stormont governments who would never allow it to happen.
huh?
Ireland, rich? really?
Ireland was nearly a third world country when they joined the EU in 1972.
Only after 20 years of EU grants (a lot of which were squandered by incompetent politicians) did the Irish economy finally kick off.
can you please explain where you got the idea that Dev exploited the misery of the world to get Ireland rich?
And as far as the Irish army goes, it’s a defense army , not an offense one.
jjimm - I don’t think it was solely up to Churchill to make that call (to give back the 6 counties). I don’t think the Unionists wouldv’e been very happy about that. And besides, the Freestate had been endorsed by the population through a referendum, so even though Dev may have wanted them back (he had no qualms about the civil war his stubbornness threw the country in), I doubt he could’ve convinced the rest of the government.
Neutrality has been at the core of the Irish Republic since its foundation, there was no way the Irish would compromise that.
Not for a war that had nothing to do with them.
50.000 irish died in WWI, fighting for Britain.
You can’t blame them for not wanting to do it a second time around.
My Grandfather was in Burma with the British Army. Many Irishmen joined up and for many different reasons.
In his case it was for a steady well paid job. He wanted out of Inner city Dublin tenements. He went away a well balanced young family man, he came back a sick(malaria) abusive alcoholic who was angry with the world and remained that way till the day he died.
I’d like to see cites for Ireland getting rich off the war. Rationing was in place in Ireland as well by the end of the war and the descriptions my Grandmother gave me weren’t that uplifting.
Dublin was also hit by German bombs, not intentionally but hit all the same. My father was blown out of his cot when a wayward German plane dropped bombs on Dublin. The US joined when they were attacked. Maybe if we were attacked we may have changed our policy but we weren’t and we didn’t.
Public opinion was very anti-Britain at the time. The memorial arch at the gate of Stephens Green for the dead of WWI was and is (by some) call Traitors Gate. Lot’s of young Irish men took “The Kings Shilling”.
While Ireland remains neutral to this day we do commit troops for UN action. 30,000+ have served in the Lebanon over the last 30 years for example (cite)
Whoa… you’re labouring under a few pretty serious misconceptions about the Free State (which ceased being called that in 1937, btw).
First, it wasn’t approved by a referendum to the population, but by a majority in the Dáil and then through a civil war.
Second, the Dáil majority who “endorsed” the 26 county state didn’t do so because they wanted it that way, but because they thought it was the best deal that they would be able to get. It’s important to remember here that the Anglo-Irish Treaty included a provision for a Boundary Commission which Collins et al. believed would result in the remaining six counties being gradually absorbed into the new state. Without this provision (which of course was ultimately betrayed by the British) the Treaty would never have been signed.
Finally, Dev was the leader of a party formed from the republican side in the civil war. If anything, his Government would therefore have been more likely to accept an offer that promised to reunite the country … IF they could believe it was a genuine offer.
ruadh I do wonder if Dev was wrong in not bartering neutrality for the Northern Irish counties. If the terms and conditions of the offer were well known in America and UK, it would have been I believe impossible for the greatly weakened UK to keep hold of Northern Eire against a ‘peaceful’ take over by a few thousands of Irish nationals with American friendly observers. UK lost much of its overseas interests at the end of the war.
I instead wonder if Dev wasn’t simply unsure if Hitler would be stopped from invading U.K., and that the U.S. might be forced to abandon Europe, in which case Eire’s neutrality would have been far prefferable to alliance with the Allies.
It is my understanding that the offer was made before the US entered the war. Churchill sent his sarcastic telegram after Pearl Harbour. He knew that with the US involved he no longer needed the Treaty Ports although they would have still been quite helpful to the war effort.
I’ve also heard that there was talks about taking Ireland by arms but Monty who had been stationed in Cork during the War of Independence warned against it because it would have taken too many men to combat the guerilla tactics the Irish had by then perfected. I don’t know how accurate this info is though.
Yep, the next day in fact. Bippy there’s no reason to think Dev was just hedging his bets. The Germans weren’t fooled by his pretence of strict neutrality and he knew it. Ireland just did not want to, or see any reason to, enter the war. This seems so simple to me - why do so many feel the need to find an ulterior motive for it?
Well, there was certainly some support in Britain for the idea that the ports should be seized by force. Off the top of my head I can’t recall any specific references to guerrilla tactics being the reason this wasn’t followed through, but it would have been obvious to all involved that Ireland wouldn’t just hand the forts over and Britain wasn’t really in a position to fight a war on two fronts.
A couple of points
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The UK could not defend Ireland in 1939-41. They acknowledged as much to Ireland at the time. England was not sure they could defend the UK after the fall of France, let alone dividing the RN and RAF over a much wider area. (Yes, now we know that Operation Sealion was a joke, and a bad one at that, but in 1940 confidence was not so high in the UK - the UK even contemplated breaking out the chemical weapons should the Germans land). In addition to having to fight any German invasion UK forces protecting Ireland would likely have to deal with an uncooperative (read: actively hostile) IRA. A neutral Ireland can be a secure flank for the UK. An inadequately defended one is a potential base for the Germans.
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The UK did not have the surplus arms and munitions to arm the Irish to adequately defend themselves, especially post Dunkirk when they had to rearm their own units and the threat of an invasion became real. Historically the US was reluctant to arm the Irish, FDR being somewhat annoyed by their neutrality. Probably a belligerent Ireland could be armed by the US, though in 1940 there might be neither the surpluses available nor time for thorough training before any hypothetical German invasion.
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The neutrality that Ireland maintained was extremely pro-allied. Downed axis airmen/seamen were interned. Downed allied airman and seamen were quietly repatriated (and sometimes their aircraft as well. Irish coast watchers transmitted sightings of German ships in the clear - effectively helping the allies track the Kriegsmarine. The Irish government suppressed the IRA to prevent them from making (much) trouble for the UK in northern Ireland. The Irish government shut down a German embassy radio transmitter to prevent the Germans from using it for any possible espionage purposes. As this article indicates ( http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicspast/story/0,9061,1085012,00.html ) there was extremely close cooperation between UK and Irish intelligence services throughout the war.
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In response to Germans bombing of Northern Ireland the Irish government provided firefighting equipment from its cities, as well as making arrangements for power generated in Ireland to be transmitted to Northern Ireland. (Dublin was also bombed after this aid was provided, accidently according to the Germans)
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The Irish government allowed thousands of its citizens to enlist with commonwealth armed forces.
The only major disadvantage to Irish Neutrality was the loss of the (former) treaty ports on the western seaboard of Ireland. There is some complaining that between the extra hundreds of miles traveled to Northern Ireland and the ability of submarines to silhouette ships against these non blacked-out cities probably cost the allies a number of ships and their crews, lost to the u-boats. Even so, a certain reluctance on the part of the Irish government to hand them over after so recently regaining them (mid thirties IIRC) is understandable. I doubt that the postwar US government would be able to browbeat the UK into giving up anything that the UK goverment thought was necessary to its survival (especially if that utility were recently proved). Was the US able to force any European government to back down from a course of action (say, regaining lost colonies) after the end of the war? Yes, the Irish vote might be important in the US but if the ports were viewed as critical to the fight against communism their return might be contingent on NATO membership or something similar.
As with pretty much all of the European neutrals, the Irish took as pro-allied a position as was tenable without provoking German hostilities.
What more would Irish belligerence have gained the allies that was worth the nightmare risk of a German-occupied Ireland between the UK and the US?
I’m unable to cite on this at the moment, but re: Switzerland’s apology given for treatment of Jews- Dev’s government did accept some Jewish refugees (although a such a minute number, it might not merit mention- something between 40- 60, if I remember correctly).
Churchill was also involved in the negotiations surrounding the Treaty twenty years previous- I’ve always seen the rejection of the offer by Dev in the following manner: “Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me”
[hijack!]
Of course, DeValera didn’t put himself in a place where he could have been burned the first time. He sent other people.
[End hijack!]
AL
Myles
I’d say the wartime residents of Wicklow, North Strand and Belfast would beg to differ with you on that point.
anyway, you are Kevin Myers and I claim my €5.
Dev stayed out of the war as it would have led to another Civil war. We were in no shape to enter WW2, and the only thing we had to offer was two port towns. It would have been political suicide for Dev to allow British troops into the 26 counties. he would have been viewed as selling out on the principals of his comrades that died for a free Ireland.
As for Ireland getting rich from staying out of the war, thats revisionism of the highest order. how was Ireland complicit in evil if they refused to aid either side?
Our neutrality has always been “bendable” to our “allies”. It was then, and is still now.
In fact, it’s a direct result of it’s “bendability” that we have Shannon Airport.
Pretty much none of the European neutrals got rich off of the war. Even those with resources to sell still had to deal with the fact that all imports were at the sufferance of the allies (by sea) or axis (by land) or both (Switzerland). Food imports were hard to come by and shipping space even moreso.
MMI, the ports were handed back in 1938.
Jjimm, I checked the point about Allied prisoners.
My sources here are a number of books and papers by Dermot Keogh,a University of Cork historian.
You’re right :- it’s incorrect to say that in every case Allied prisoners were handed straight back across the border (althought people generally do). The Irish authorities made a distinction between “operational” and “non-operational” combatants:- “operational” combatants were interned, “non-operational” weren’t. Germans were,without exception, judged to be operational (One German airman was repatriated in 1943 on humanitarian grounds, it’s not clear why). Official Irish military records say of 604 Allied airmen who survived forced or crash landings in Ireland during the war, 97 were interned and 507 were released. (There’s also anecdotal evidence of the local Garda sergeant just driving people across the border, without higher authorities being notified at all.such cases presumably wouldn’t be included in the figures above).
A total of 17 German airmen, all the survivors of Irish crashes, were interned for the duration of the war, with the exception noted above. (One German airman abused his parole, escaped to Germany, and was sent back to Ireland, on the grounds his actions were dishonourable, and endangered conditions for the remaining German internees.)
David Simmons:
'Bout time someone mentioned that the US refused to join in “fighting evil” for the first 2 years of the War. And there’s no guarentee that we would have declared war on Germany even after Pearl Harbor if Hitler hadn’t obliged us.
yeah, knew that. just used the term because i was going towards the civil war, here.
This was obviously a very important deal to negotiate, why then send a man from West Cork who’s never done any negotiating in his life, who was very good at staging the guerilla war against the Black and Tans, but shouldn’t have been sent to London to negotiate that particular deal. Dev was unhappy, yes, that’s why he didn’t accept it and didn’t avoid civil war.
yes, I know he was on the republican side of the civil war, I thought that that was made clear from my comments.
My apologies if it wasn’t.
[Fixed quote tags. – MEB]
Implicit in the OP is the idea that neutrality is somehow dishonorable in itself and needs to be apologized for.
We sometimes divide wars into good wars & bad wars. In hindsight, WW2 was a good war for the allies in that they were clearly fighting a terrible, terrible regime with great capacity for evil. Was it clear at the time that this was so ?
Is neutrality always dishonorable, even in a bad war ?
Wouldn’t we all be better off if more countries were willing to declare neutrality ?
Okay, lemme see if I have this correctly:
Britain offers the rest of Northern Ireland to De Valera if Ireland joins the Allies, correct? But Ireland rejects the offer.
The only thing I can think of is that they didn’t trust the British to keep their promises-as many promises to Ireland had been broken in the past.
Also, if they had agreed, could Ireland have ended up just like Poland-once again stuck with Britain the way Poland ended up stuck with the Soviet Union?
(I have both Polish and Irish ancestry, so I am intrigued by this thought…hmmmm)
Well not just join the allies but give control of certain strategic port to a country who we had very recently fought a war of Independence against and from a republican perspective had fucked their people and country over for 800 years. A hard sell to say the least. Dev was one of the leaders of the '16 rising remember. His US birth was one of the main reasons why he wasn’t executed with the rest of the leaders after the Rising.
Well that or on the loosing side. Remember this was pre Pearl. The British had been pushed out of mainland Europe and were in very bad shape. It was by no means clear the Germany wasn’t going to win. Dev was a lot of things but a fool wasn’t one of them.