Fighting on all Fronts (13 page)

The Irish Catholic hierarchy came out strongly against conscription, even claiming that the population had a “moral right” to resist conscription to the British army.
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Belfast trade union leaders also opposed it, reflecting not just nationalist opinion but the bitter experience many Protestant workers had in the First World War when thousands were sent to their death in the Somme. Such was the scale of the opposition that Basil Brooke, the Unionist minister responsible for recruitment, predicted that there would be significant opposition that would range from “passive resistance to actual rioting”.
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Given this anger, de Valera had little choice but to cancel a trip to New York and declare that the conscription of Irishmen in the province of Ulster would be regarded as “an act of aggression”.
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The level of all-Ireland opposition forced the British government and Unionist politicians to withdraw the threat.

The second—and in many ways more crucial—reason for neutrality was that the Irish ruling class feared that any other policy would have opened up deep divisions in their own society and undermined the stability of their rule. These divisions stemmed from the historic legacy of British colonial rule. Colonialists do not secure their domination simply by military intervention but by winning over a section of the population to becoming their allies. The manner in which Britain intervened in 1922 to split the republican movement and help foment a civil war is a testimony to this legacy. No wonder, then, that Frank Aiken, the minister responsible for the Coordination of Defensive Measures, noted that “it might very well be that we would have another civil war
to decide the question as to which of the European belligerents we would declare war upon”.
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There were also more pragmatic reasons for staying out of the conflict. Intervention on the side of Britain would have led to an outcry from the republican movement. If British troops landed in Ireland to repel a German invasion, there was little doubt that they would be subject to attacks not only from the IRA but also from sections of Fianna Fail itself. Similarly, if the Irish government showed any support for Nazi Germany there was little doubt they would be subject to British military intervention. The small size of the Irish army—which in May 1940 comprised a regular force of 14,000 and a reserve of 12,000—meant that it was not in a position to resist either imperial power.
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Of even greater cause for concern for the ruling class than military defeat was a fear that leadership of the national movement might shift to more extreme republicans. In the event of a German invasion, for example, it was assumed that the Nazis would seek their own allies among the IRA and depose the official representatives of Irish nationalism. Any overt support for the British would unleash a more intense anti-imperialist movement against the Irish state itself. All of this explains why de Valera believed it would be “suicide” to abandon neutrality and why his representative in Washington thought it might even lead to “revolution”.
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Thirdly, despite its repeated reference to the wrongs of partition, Fianna Fail’s aim was to use “the emergency”—as they referred to the Second World War—as an opportunity to create a new identity between 26 county state and its population. In brief, to forge a new 26 county Little Ireland nationalism. As the writer Terrence Brown later noted, “neutrality and the experience of the war times years mobilised Irish opinion for the first time to consider the 26 county state as the primary unit of national loyalty”.
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This project worked at many levels. Despite its rhetorical opposition to British imperialism, the Southern state engaged in covert cooperation with its neighbour. Meetings between the Irish police, the Gardai and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, began for the first time in 1940 and led to an exchange of intelligence.
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The Southern state turned a blind eye to the widespread recruitment to the British army. It came to an agreement with the British government that a dump of civilian clothes be provided in Holyhead so that Irish citizens serving in the British forces could change out of uniform before returning home.
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British pilots who crashed over Ireland and survived could quietly return to their own country while Germans were interned. The British naval attaché was
allowed to travel around Ireland to inspect its coastal defences and de Valera secretly accepted that British warships could pursue and attack enemy submarines in Irish waters. Despite its anti-imperialist rhetoric, de Valera prepared for a long-term accommodation with his “old enemy”.

During the period of the war the Fianna Fail government imposed a strict censorship that was mainly directed at opposition voices in its own society rather than reports from belligerent powers. It worked closely with the Catholic church to impose a deeply conservative, fundamentalist culture on its society. In 1943, for example, it appointed the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin to chair a committee on youth unemployment even though he refused to sit with any representatives of Protestant churches or accept representation from Protestant associations. In 1944 the minister for lands boasted that only 40 foreigners had purchased land in Ireland and “only one of them was a Jew”.
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It launched repeated attacks on British based trade unions—which had continued to operate in Ireland after independence—and sought to effectively render them illegal. It recruited massively to a local defence force and used this to inculcate loyalty to the 26 county state. Its aim was to create a homogenous and parochial 26 county Catholic identity that covered over the class divisions in its midst. It hoped through this to bind workers to its own project of strengthening indigenous capital.

At an official level it was quite successful. Over the course of the war it effectively relegated Fine Gael—its former civil war enemy—to the status of second-rate opposition. Fine Gael’s base was predominantly among the larger farmers who favoured retention of the neocolonial relationship with Britain. Between 1938 and 1943 its share of the national vote fell from a third to a quarter as Fianna Fail used the policy of neutrality to consolidate its hold. Fianna Fail was also successful in forging links with a section of the union bureaucracy, grouped around the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. Its opposition to British based unions and its call to rally round the Southern state in its hour of need found vocal supporters in these groupings. However, on both the North and South of the border the ruling class faced opposition from two major groups—the republican movement and militants in the unions.

On 12 January 1939 the Army Council of the IRA addressed the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, demanding “the withdrawal of all British forces stationed in Ireland”. When the deadline passed the IRA began to
implement the S or Sabotage Plan that was a blueprint for the paralysis of English public utilities and transport infrastructure.
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What followed was a low-key guerrilla campaign on three fronts.

In England itself the bombing began with explosions at seven major power plants and was followed up with other periodic targets. About 160 “outrages” followed in subsequent months, according to a report presented to the British cabinet.
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Then on 25 August a city centre bomb in Coventry killed five people and injured dozens of others. A British crackdown ensued and IRA activists were quickly arrested. Two of them, Peter Barnes and James McCormack, were eventually executed for the Coventry bombing, even though they had taken no part in it. Soon afterwards the campaign in England fizzled out.

In the six counties of Northern Ireland there was a louder echo from this campaign. In 1938 the Belfast IRA had nearly 500 members but they had not planned a military campaign in the province.
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Instead they resorted to tactics of militant civil disobedience and small-scale armed propaganda to undermine the British war effort. This meant a wider engagement with the nationalist section of the population who saw themselves as a discriminated minority. On the night of 1 to 2 September, when the first blackout was ordered in Belfast, a number of bonfires were lit in West Belfast. Gas masks were also collected from local houses and publicly burnt. Members of the Territorial Army were also attacked and relieved of their uniform.
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The Unionist government responded in time-honoured fashion and immediately introduced internment. Eight hundred republicans were eventually rounded up and were initially joined by a small number of communists, who at that time were arguing for a class war against imperialism. The republicans responded with prison riots demanding political status and these were accompanied by bombings and riots on the outside. Particular targets of the IRA were cinemas showing “offensive” British newsreels. They also infiltrated the British army camp in Ballykinlar and staged a daring arms raid to capture rifles. By 1942 the campaign had escalated to armed attacks with two Royal Ulster constables shot dead at the Easter Weekend in April. But while IRA activities provoked a wave of sympathy from the nationalist population, it did not lead to any major uprising against British rule. It was the wider mass opposition that helped force the authorities to give up on the idea of both military conscription and compulsory registration for labour. The Westminster authorities calculated that they could do without substantial social resistance in their colony while engaged in a war to supposedly free oppressed nations.

Ironically it was in Southern Ireland that the greatest level of confrontation took place between the IRA and the state. The IRA’s very formal declaration of war on Britain arose from a peculiar piece of political theology. The IRA Council was, according to its own belief, the rightful government of Ireland as power was conferred on it by the First Dail of 1919-21, the elected democratic assembly that proclaimed itself the parliament of a united Ireland. De Valera’s government regarded this as a piece of nonsense but took more seriously the IRA’s declaration of war on Britain because it challenged its own rule. It responded by setting up a Special Court and a Military Tribunal to arrest and try republican suspects. When the war broke out supplies of guns to the IRA from the US began to dwindle and they in turn responded by staging an armed raid on the main arsenal of the Irish army. On 23 December 1939 they seized 13 lorry loads of ammunition, the bulk of the Irish army’s reserve supply. The government responded with an Emergency Powers Act and this led to the internment of hundreds of republicans.

This set the scene for a brutal attempt by the de Valera government to finally crush the IRA. Just as in the North, the interned republicans demanded their right to political status and began a hunger strike. The Irish government ignored them and a riot broke out where imprisoned republicans were badly beaten. Two republicans then died on hunger strike and in response to further riots, soldiers opened fire without warning, shooting one prisoner in the back. This brutality led to a spate of IRA attacks on the Special Branch, the newly formed political police that Fianna Fail had recruited from their former republican comrades. The state in turn responded by executing two republicans, supposedly involved in shooting Special Branch officers.

There was some sympathy for the republicans but their activities were largely met with indifference. There was no mass opposition because de Valera was able to don the mantle of anti-imperialism, protecting a small country in its hour of need and standing up to the bullying tactics of Churchill. Even while he was smashing the IRA, de Valera continued his rhetorical republican attacks on perfidious Albion. He called for the lifting of the executions of republicans in the North and condemned the hangings of Barnes and McCormack—even though he would execute republicans himself. The double speak of de Valera was part of a wider strategy of detaching republican militants from the IRA and winning them to Fianna Fail. By and large de Valera was successful. In 1933 the IRA had 12,000 members but by 1938 it had shrunk to just 2,000.
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The decline of the IRA was the result of two factors. After a decade of isolation following their defeat in the civil war their former comrades in Fianna Fail appeared to be enjoying success in dismantling the Anglo-Irish Treaty and gaining popular support. Some of the IRA membership, therefore, drifted over to the constitutional road. Second, under attack from the Catholic church the IRA leadership turned on its left, who then split off to form the Republican Congress. This left a more militaristic hard core behind which was increasingly tempted to form alliances with Nazi Germany, especially at the start of the Second World War when their military victories appeared to augur a new era.

The link up with Germany was presented in purely instrumental terms. Sean Russell, who stayed in Germany for a period, claimed that “I am not a Nazi. I am not even pro-German. I am an Irishman fighting for the independence of Ireland. The British have been our enemies for hundreds of years. They are the enemy of Germany today. If it suits Germany to give us help to achieve independence, I am willing to accept it, but no more, and there must be no strings attached”.
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However, the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” argument disguised a significant drift rightwards in the IRA that had begun from the mid-1930s. The leadership promoted ideas about social credit and distributionism as an alternative to its left wing. It defined itself as anti-communist and so when its members were later interned they appealed to the Catholic cardinal to remove a known communist, Neil Gould Verschoyle, from their midst less he contaminate good Catholics. The cardinal naturally obliged by writing to de Valera who duly had him transferred.

Contacts between the IRA and the Nazis had begun in the US through the IRA support group, Clann Na Gael. This led to promises of financial support for the IRA bombing campaign in Britain. The IRA in turn responded by claiming that “if the German forces should land in Ireland, they will come as friends and liberators of the Irish people”.
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They praised Germany for helping to establish the Catholic government of Franco in Spain. The IRA’s
War News
also occasionally engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric, attacking the influx of Jewish refugees, claiming that they were “like the English, when they are strong—they bully and rule”.
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