| Paying a Terrible Price for Neutrality
By Ronan McGreevy
After the VE commemorations of last weekend Ronan McGreevy looks at
how Ireland dealt with its neutrality and how those who chose to fight are
remembered.
The American newsreader Tom Brokaw called them “the greatest generation”.
They were the farm boys, the mechanics, the schoolteachers, the artisans
and the artists who grew up in a time of peace and prosperity in the early
1920s, but were marked by the Depression and then the Second World War.
They had, what Franklin D. Roosevelt called, “a rendezvous with destiny”
which they fulfilled with courage and fortitude. When they returned from
war, they heralded the longest peacetime boom in American history.
Our generation has been lucky that we were never called upon to fight
a war. We are probably the most privileged generation that has ever lived
and yet there is a gnawing feeling of unfulfilment.
Jeremy Paxman got it right a couple of years ago when he said we were
a generation that had “never been tested”. Bob Dole criticised Bill Clinton’s
policy advisors has being men “who never grew up, never did anything real,
never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned”.
That description could easily pertain to us too. Watching the VE Day
commemorations over the weekend, it is a question that many will ask of
themselves. How would we behave if we were called upon to fight?
The generation that returned home from the Second World War did so with
renewed purpose. Every country in Western Europe which participated in the
war went on to have a post-war boom in the 25 years afterwards. Ireland,
on the other hand, entered a period of dreadful stagnation which only ended
in the 1960s.
Could our non-participation in the Second World War be the reason why
Ireland performed so poorly in those years and if Ireland had taken part,
would the generation that fought have been so tolerant of the mediocrity
and insularity when they returned home?
We do not know the answer to the latter question, but we do know that
the Second World War is the reason that the Irish community is as large
as it is in this country.
There has been Irish immigrants to Britain since the 1600s, but mass-migration
didn’t begin in earnest until the war began.
Britain needed Irish labour to rebuild the country both during and after
the war and so the immigrants kept coming.
Between 1940-1950 270,000 Irish people left the country, mostly to go
to Britain. That figure rose to 400,000 during the 1950s.
In 1999 the Public Records Office published secret MI6 files about Irish
neutrality which challenged the conventional wisdom.
Irish labour, MI6 said, was critical in rebuilding bombed-out airfields
during the Battle of Britain. The Irish also built the artificial Mulberry
harbours which were used in the D-Day landings.
MI6 then reached a startling conclusion. Ireland was a greater contributor
to the British war effort neutral than it had been if it was a willing participant
because of its labour supply and the extraordinary number of southern Irishmen
who fought in the British Armed Forces — estimated then at 110,000.
This conclusion is at odds with those who, like Winston Churchill, maintained
that Irish neutrality was a grave handicap for the Allies especially during
the Battle of the Atlantic.
It is only in recent years that the hidden history of Irish participation
in the Second World War has become well-known.
We invited Irish Post readers to recall their experiences of wartime
Britain and many of you wrote in.
Ten years ago at the 50th anniversary commemorations, John Bruton, the
then Taoiseach recalled the bravery of the 10,000 Irishmen who died in the
Second World War.
“In recalling their bravery, we are recalling a shared experience of
Irish and British people. We remember a British part of the inheritance
of all who live in Ireland.”
Those were generous words of praise and not before time.
We cannot change the reality of wartime neutrality, but the Irish state
could do more to acknowledge the thousands of men and women who went against
the conventions of the tribe and participated in the most just war of them
all.
One wonders how Bertie Ahern felt attending the VE Day commemorations
in Moscow on Monday when you measure 27 million Soviet dead against the
reality of the Emergency as it was laughably called in Ireland.
Neutrality was just about the right call in the Second World War for
Ireland. Any other course of action would have caused a civil war and we
would have participated in a war we were powerless to influence.
Nevertheless, there was a heavy post-war price for that course of action.
Without the dynamic of the war, Irish society carried on much as it did
while the rest of the world moved on.
The price was paid by the hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants who
had to leave the country. Many of them are readers of this newspaper.
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