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That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War

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Along with the Civil War, the "Emergency" (i.e. WW2) is often glossed over in the Irish collective memory.

Growing up in Ireland in the 70s and 80s, i heard only echoes of the Second World War. My grandfather would tell me about how the government mandated that coils of barbed wire were put into our larger fields to stop warplanes landing. My family was forced to grow tillage on land which was more suitable for cattle and sheep grazing. Canadian relatives stationed in Enniskillen would tell me about weekend trips to Dublin, where there was little or no blackout, and they would drink in bars with German servicemen who were sitting out the war in the Curragh (but were sometimes let out at weekends to visit Dublin). They also told me of the rumours that U-Boats refueled in Clew Bay. English friends explained how the lights of Dublin allowed German bombers to locate Manchester and Liverpool. Our local castle sheltered some Jewish children from mainland Europe, but that initiative was run by an American, not by Irish people (and it raised controvery in the Irish parliment, so a guarantee had to be given that the Jewish children would not mix with the local people. That castle is right in front of our farm). Following the war, many German people arrived in Ireland where there was little or no anti-German sentiment, and many settled a few miles from where I grew up, starting businesses and creating a lot of jobs. The war was never mentioned of course.

So, I always found that period of Irish history personally very interesting. I was really pleased to find this book. Reading this book answered a lot of questions for me. It answers the question "Why was the government neutral?" (there really was little choice). And, since the book is very strong on the cultural history of the time, it answer the question "What was it like to live in Irish Free State then?". It was also interesting to read about the attitude of Irish-Americans in the US forces to their own neutral homeland, and about Northern Ireland (where there was no conscription, unlike in Britain).

The book is well written and readable. I read most of it on a single plane trip. Highly recommended.

As an event, the Second World War was impossible to escape. Though many countries sought to distance themselves from the fighting, nearly all were affected to one degree or another by the global conflagration. One of those was Eire, the nation that had only recently wrested itself from the British empire but now found itself facing the conflict by its proximity to Great Britain. Though the politics and the policies of Ireland during the war have been the subject of numerous books, Clair Wills has written something different, a "cultural history" which examines the impact of the "Emergency" (the name the Irish government gave to the situation) upon Irish life.

Wills begins by setting the scene with a portrait of Ireland in the 1930s. With it, she underscores just how rural and primitive much of Ireland was, and the growing contrast between the "traditional" Ireland of poor farms and the "modern" Ireland of towns and cities. It was in this context that Ireland was grappling with modernity on its own terms, with much of the resistance dictated by the influence of the Catholic church and attitudes of its adherents. Ireland was also only just beginning to emerge from the shadow of British rule, developing its own identity as a nation and dealing with such legacies as the remnants of the Irish Republican Army.

All of this underscores just how unprepared Ireland was to deal with the emerging war on the European continent. Wills reminds readers that Ireland's stance was no different from that of other small European countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark, none of whom had the resources (let alone the desire) to be drawn into a large-scale conflict. Yet unlike these other countries, Ireland enjoyed the luxury of geography afforded them as an island nation and the indirect protection of British arms. Such protection could not shield them completely from the war, however. Bodies of sailors from sunken ships washed up along the southern coast, the result of fighting in the Atlantic which curtailed Ireland's trade with the outside world and forced the rationing of numerous commodities. Propaganda filled the airwaves, as both sides sought to nudge Ireland to their side, counteracting the government's strenuous effort for "balance" that belied any moral judgment of the conflict.

Throughout this account, Wills uses the lives and stories of writers to shine a light on how individuals reacted to the conflict. What emerges is a country in the conflict but not of it, a haven for many people (including soldiers who would head south from wartime Northern Ireland for relaxation without the fear of the nightly blitz) and a land encased in a cocoon of denial to others. She also looks at the motivations of the thousands of Irishmen and Irishwomen who crossed over to join the conflict, and the concerns of the thousands who were caught up in it against their will. While somewhat repetitive in the later chapters, Wills describes all of this with great insight into the effects of the Emergency upon both the Irish people and their efforts to define themselves as a new nation in the world, making it a book well worth reading.

Clair Wills's That Neutral Island shows how World War II dragged Ireland into the twentieth century and that century's social and political struggles.

Wills describes how the Taoiseach (prime minister) Eamon de Valera used the policy of neutrality to neutralize the IRA, which was still blowing up movie theaters and trying to kill Irish police in its war against the partition. In December 1939, after the war started and when the Irish were as afraid of a German invasion as the British were, the IRA stole a million rounds of ammunition from a magazine fort. But tipsters (or informers, depending on your perspective) helped the police recover most of the ammunition. "The war had put the conflict between the state and the IRA on a different footing."

The de Valera government produced rural "Step Together fairs" with propagandistic tableaux and dramas reminiscent of medieval morality plays.

Most Irish agreed that there was no choice other than to remain neutral. They couldn't defend against a German invasion, and there were advantages to both Britain and Nazi Germany in Ireland's staying one of the "small countries" that didn't officially take sides.

One TD (member of parliament) did call neutrality a policy of "dishonour,"
"not in the true interests, moral or material, of the Irish people." But he was in the minority.

Most Irish seemed to agree with de Valera: "Ordinary prudence is not cowardice."

In 1933 there were over 100,000 "Blueshirts," members of one of the Irish fascist parties. Even when undisguised fascist ideology went out of fashion as the war went on, many right-wingers (influenced by the Catholic clergy) held up fascist countries as an example: "True to Catholic traditions, Ireland, Spain and Portugal may yet be the salvation of the world . . ." (The Donegal Democrat newspaper)

One of the most interesting stories Wills tells is of the Irish writer Francis Stuart, a "romantic outcast." Born Protestant, he converted to Catholicism. One of his novels, the futuristic dystopia Pigeon Irish, was "one of the strangest books to be written about Ireland in the last century," and it "attracted the attention of the ultra-Catholic nationalist fringe."

Stuart went to Germany and broadcast radio propaganda (urging continued neutrality) on Irland-Redaktion from 1942 to 1944.

Stuart reminds me of the French fascist writer Robert Brasillach, who, besides writing for pro-German papers during the Occupation, made a propaganda visit to the German army during the war. Since de Valera's government enforced their idea of neutrality strictly, Francis Stuart was able to return to Ireland after the war and live to be an old man, unlike Brasillach, who was executed for treason despite appeals by Resistance fighters to de Gaulle for clemency.

Wills describes a huge irony - - it was de Valera's actions after the war was over that disgraced his neutral policy much more than anything he did or didn't do while the fighting was going on. (The 1944 election supported de Valera and his policy.)

Hitler's death was announced on May 1, 1945, and on May 2 de Valera paid an official condolence call on the German Envoy to Ireland. This was two weeks after the first reports from Buchenwald.

De Valera was dipolomatically correct but politically clumsy. A lot of Irish already felt guilty that their "neutrality" was really "collaboration by omission."

The subtitle to Clair Wills's book is "A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War." It may be "a" cultural history, but Wills shows there were many "cultures": traditional and modern, Catholic and Protestant, anglophiles and England-haters, supporters of both sides in the civil war.

But one of the main divisions seems to be between Irish who wanted their country to be part of the rest of the world and those who wanted their "dark" back.