Where a trick may have been missed
Paul Bew
IRISH SECRETS: GERMAN ESPIONAGE IN WARTIME IRELAND, 1939-1945 by Mark M. Hull Irish Academic Press, £39.50. pp. 496, ISBN 0716527561 MI5 AND IRELAND: THE OFFICIAL HISTORY by Eunan O'Halpin, with a foreword by Christopher Andrew Irish Academic Press, £45, £18.50 (paperback), pp. 192, ISBN 0716527545, ISBN 0716527537 (paperback) Both these important books have a common message: during the second world war Britain was potentially very vulnerable to German spying operations in neutral Ireland. However, senior Irish intelligence officers, in particular Colonel Dan Bryan and the brilliant code-breaker Dr Richard Hayes — who later produced the magnificent multi-volume National Library of Ireland Guide to Irish Manuscripts — saw the danger. They worked well with their British counterparts such as Cecil Liddell to minimise the risks to British interests and Irish neutrality. Fortunately those who spied for Germany were, in the main, incompetents. Even the best of them, Hermann Gortz, achieved in Mark Hull's phrase 'nothing but a history of failure as a spy'. Then there was the couple who made a point of frequenting the Swastika Laundry in Dublin; the agent whose first act was to ask an Irish policeman to take him to the IRA; the doctrinaire Dutch Nazi Jan van Loon and Joseph Len ihan, the 'turned' Abwehr agent whose MIS case-file was appropriately codenamed 'Basket'. Hull even speculates that Admiral Canaris, who was anti-Hitler, may have deliberately selected low-graders, but he rightly resists such a conclusion. The truth is more dull; before the war neither Berlin nor Dublin devoted much attention to the strategic significance of Ireland. Though there was a German plan to invade Ireland it never went to the top of the in-tray of the ruling elite. London knew that the election of de Valera in 1932 implied a need for more systematic intelligence-gathering in Ireland but did nothing for years. The
German foreign ministry closed its Ireland office as early as 1943.
The Germans may have missed a trick. Hull's work shows that it was not just the IRA that worked intimately with the Nazis but that the iconic names of the broader Irish Republican tradition (Caitlin Brugha and Dan Breen TD) offered practical support and sympathy to the spies. General Hugo McNeill and other senior Irish army officers had worryingly close relations with the Nazis — artfully disclosed to the British by Hayes and Bryan. This is a matter of general political culture. As Henry Patterson has pointed out recently in Ireland Since 1939 (Oxford 2002), Frank Aiken, the minister for the co-ordination of defensive measures, had responsibility for censorship; yet the Dundalk Examiner, his own local newspaper in which he was a shareholder, was permitted to publish an editorial praising the Nazi organisation as 'the natural protector of the Catholic Church'. In May 1945, the Irish premier de Valera, with knowledge of the Holocaust, expressed his sympathy to the German legate Hempel on the death of Hitler. Eighteen days earlier, as Hull recalls, he had ignored the death of Roosevelt.
Professor O'Halpin's valuable edition of the recently declassified British official history of MI5's Irish section is, in effect, the founding text of what in Ireland is known as the 'pragmatic pro-neutrality argument'. As Christopher Andrew makes clear in his introduction, the document is an antiChurchillian critique. It argues that Irish neutrality on balance helped Britain. The thesis essentially is that de Valera could not have brought a partitioned Ireland into the war on the British side without creating massive internal Irish conflict; in that event, Ireland's contribution of 42,665 men and women to the British armed forces and many more to her industrial labour force would not have been made. Meanwhile, potential intelligence problems were sorted out by an unusually high degree of co-operation; a remarkable level, indeed, given traditional Anglo-Irish tensions.
But such an account suppresses two key questions. In a context in which a move to end neutrality was linked to a firm British statement of support for Irish unity it might not have been beyond de Valera's political capacity to deliver a majority of the electorate: certainly Sir Basil Brooke, later to be for 20 years the Unionist prime minister of Northern Ireland, told his son that, faced with a choice between 'western civilisation' and Irish unification, he would have had to accept Irish unity. Secondly, this MI5 document does not face up to the full strategic thrust of Churchill's argument that the Irish 'treaty ports' (given up by Britain in 1938, much to his anger) were vital to British security. Berehaven, after all, was beyond the range of German divebombers and long-range fighter air cover; it would have offered superb anchorage for British ships waiting to counter German surface raiders trying to break out to attack the Atlantic convoys. With facilities in Ireland, the effective air reconnaissance essential to anti-submarine warfare would have been much easier. Denial of the Irish ports to the Royal Navy was reckoned by the Admiralty to have cost 368 ships and 5,070 lives during the war. As the MI5 document does at least concede, 'There can be very little doubt that when de Valera decided to adopt the policy of neutrality, entailing, as it did, the refusal to grant the British navy the use of the Eire ports, he provided the British people with an overwhelming case for the maintenance of partition which he himself would so much have liked to have seen ended.'
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