Irish Soldiers who deserted during WWII to join the British Army & Starvation order

War-time neutrality was conducted as a pragmatic policy, based on a widespread consensus and on Ireland's realisation of the futility of the "collective security" notion of the inter-war period. Neutrality was about keeping us "out of the war" and avoiding the threat of renewed civil conflict and foreign occupation, which belligerent involvement would bring.
Neutrality put Ireland's interests first and it was the supreme test of the State's new-found sovereignty. In the words of Joseph Walshe, secretary of the department of external affairs: "Small nations like Ireland do not and cannot assume the role of defenders of just causes except their own.''
Certainly, neutrality was not pursued out of high-minded principle, but was an expression of realpolitik, which allowed for "a certain consideration" for Britain's interests in Eamon de Valera's phrase. For all that, it was a genuine policy, seriously conducted until the end, even to the bizarre extreme of De Valera's ill-conceived expression of condolences on the death of Hitler. Moreover, there was no jumping on bandwagon towards the end of the conflict.


http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/review-documents-on-irish-foreign-policy-volume-vii-19411945-edited-by-michael-kennedy-catriona-crowe-et-al-2489399.html

Viscount Cranborne, the British Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, wrote a letter to the British War Cabinet regarding Irish-British collaboration during 1939-1945:[44]
“

1. They agreed to our use of Lough Foyle for naval and air purposes. The ownership of the Lough is disputed, but the Southern Irish authorities are tacitly not pressing their claim in present conditions and are also ignoring any flying by our aircraft over the Donegal shore of the Lough, which is necessary in certain wind conditions to enable flying boats to take off the Lough.
2. They have agreed to use by our aircraft based on Lough Erne of a corridor over Southern Irish territory and territorial waters for the purpose of flying out to the Atlantic.
3. They have arranged for the immediate transmission to the United Kingdom Representative’s Office in Dublin of reports of submarine activity received from their coast watching service.
4. They arranged for the broadening of reports by their Air observation Corps of aircraft sighted over or approaching Southern Irish territory. (This does not include our aircraft using the corridor referred to in (b) above.)
5. They arranged for the extinction of trade and business lighting in coastal towns where such lighting was alleged to afford a useful landmark for German aircraft.
6. They have continued to supply us with meteorological reports.
7. They have agreed to the use by our ships and aircraft of two wireless direction-finding stations at Malin Head.
8. They have supplied particulars of German crashed aircraft and personnel crashed or washed ashore or arrested on land.
9. They arranged for staff talks on the question of co-operation against a possible German invasion of Southern Ireland, and close contact has since been maintained between the respective military authorities.
10. They continue to intern all German fighting personnel reaching Southern Ireland. On the other hand, though after protracted negotiations, Allied service personnel are now allowed to depart freely and full assistance is given in recovering damaged aircraft.
11. Recently, in connection with the establishment of prisoner of war camps in Northern Ireland, they have agreed to return or at least intern any German prisoners who may escape from Northern Ireland across the border to Southern Ireland.
12. They have throughout offered no objection to the departure from Southern Ireland of persons wishing to serve in the United Kingdom Forces nor to the journey on leave of such persons to and from Southern Ireland (in plain clothes).
13. They have continued to exchange information with our security authorities regarding all aliens (including Germans) in Southern Ireland.
14. They have (within the last few days) agreed to our establishing a Radar station in Southern Ireland for use against the latest form of submarine activity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_neutrality_during_World_War_II

Winston Churchill enjoyed a good joke. According to Dennis Kelly, one of Churchill’s former literary assistants, the following was one of his boss’s favorite stories, one that ‘he used to adore telling’: ‘British bomber over Berlin, caught in the searchlights, flak coming up, one engine on fire, rear-gunner wounded, Irish pilot mutters, “Thank God Dev kept us out of this bloody war.”

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/support/the-churchill-centre/publications/finest-hour-online/833--winston-churchill-a-eamon-de-valera-a-thirty-year-relationship

Sir, – Robert Widders and Peter Mulvany should read the Dáil Debates for April 29th, 1980 (http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0320/D.0320.198004290013.html) to see how the British treated the puppeteer Eugene Lambert who they wrongfully accused of deserting from their army 34 years earlier. Eugene was arrested as he stepped off the ferry at Dover on his way back from France on a family holiday, brought forthwith before a magistrate, and jailed there and then. And the alleged offence was supposed to have taken place in Omagh, one year after the Nazis were defeated, and peace had been reigning for 34 years before they arrested him!
Our minister for foreign affairs was told by the British that the arrest was part of a campaign to find and punish any British army deserters going back over a long time. So there was no policy of pardon there, whether peace had broken out or not!
There are numerous defence provisions voted for by the people of Ireland in Bunreacht na hÉireann which require citizens to give loyalty to the State, and which legitimise the defence and Emergency laws and provisions made by the State. During the Emergency the State was the only authority to decide how it would conduct national defence, and how to deal with threats from both the Nazis and the Allies. It is outrageous to suggest that any individual or group can be justified in taking unilateral military action which they, rather than the State, think is an appropriate national defence action. Taking such unilateral actions is properly seen as rebellion or mutiny, particularly when, as in this case, the numbers of individuals reach into the thousands.
The loyal comrades of the deserters had every right to feel resentful when they had to fill the “bearna baoil” vacated by those from whom they expected comradeship and loyalty in return. This is one reason why the taking of an oath of allegiance to a foreign country by a soldier while still under an oath to Ireland is prima facia evidence of desertion. – Is mise,
MICHAEL HEERY,


http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2011/0701/1224299846662.html

Elizabeth Bowen was a British writer who
happened to be born in Ireland, and to inherit a
Cromwellian property in Co. Cork. Britain was an Empire
and a great many of her well-known writers were born
in the Empire. For example, Kipling was born in India
and Orwell in Burma. Bowen was Irish only if one takes
Irish as a subset of British – as was done, of course, for
centuries.
She adopted an Irish persona for espionage
purposes during the War. But in various memoirs,
written without an ulterior motive she made it clear that
she was not milk and watery British but English. The
part of the world that made her buzz was Kent.
She was English Churchillian. After the rejection
of Churchill in 1945 England was no longer English
enough for her. She could not stand it when the lower
classes came to the top. So she retreated to her
property in Ireland – not because it was Ireland but
because it was not Welfare State England.
Her espionage reports to Churchill are objective,
well informed and well written accounts of Irish opinion
during the War. It is a great pity that more of them are
either withheld or destroyed. But they are espionage
reports to her Government, written frankly in the
confidence that they would remain secret.
*
Following the inaugural Bowen/Trevor Summer
School in Mitchelstown in 2007 an exchange of letters
took place in the Irish Examiner. The most well-known
contributor was Martin Mansergh TD.
Why does Mr Mansergh get so exercised about
Elizabeth Bowen and her activities here during WWII?
5
The facts of the matter are now indisputable. At
the beginning of the war she immediately volunteered
her services to the British Government to do espionage
work in Ireland. She befriended people under false
pretences, reported in secret,, got paid for it, wrote
about 200 reports (according to her biographer, Heather
Bryant Jordan) - approximately one per fortnight - and
delivered a number of personal reports too sensitive to
be put in writing. She deceived all her Irish
acquaintances and was well pleased with what she did.
James Dillon was mortified and humiliated when the
truth was brought to his attention in 1974.
Innumerable other English writers and artists did
similar. It was their patriotic duty and they cannot be
criticised for doing so. She succeeded in her main aim of
helping to get Churchill to resist his instincts to invade
and so helped him avoid a costly bloody nose. Southern
Ireland always was ‘unfinished business’ for him and he
was ‘bulling’ for another go after the failure of his Black
and Tans. She was also successful in never having her
cover blown.
And now we have the extraordinary situation of a
legislator here seeking to maintain her cover! What
does it say of his priorities and judgement? And he is no
ordinary member of Fianna Fail, he is “Fianna Fail’s
most venerated elder statesman”, no less, according to
the Irish Independent (January 4, 2008).
To seek to make his case he has to turn Irish
history, and common sense, inside out and upside
down. Elizabeth Bowen becomes someone else. In fact
she becomes some sort of monstrosity because she did
all the above and was neither a traitor nor a spy but
was an agent for both governments. The logic of this is
that the Irish government needed someone to go
around the country deceiving people in order to inform
itself about how people felt about neutrality!
Furthermore, that they got the British government to
pay for this and never asked for a copy of any of the
reports! She becomes not just a double agent in the
6
normal sense, more a duplicate or parallel agent. The
logic gets more bizarre the more one thinks about it.
A good example of Mansergh’s methodology is
the way he tries to get an ultra-revisionist book “The
Emergency” by Professor Brian Girvin further revised to
seek to prove his case that it was really the Irish
Government that set Bowen up for her spying.

Along with every other country in Europe, but uniquely amongst Commonwealth members Ireland did not join the war. People ask what countries in Europe were neutral in the First World War and the answer is all of them except the belligerent and that’s not being smart. The two that started…well Poland was obviously no longer neutral, it had been invaded; Austria had been annexed in the Anschluss. The United Kingdom and France were at war with Germany, everyone else was neutral when Germany invaded other countries they stopped being neutral and became invaded. Ireland is often described at the time as being neutral, but perhaps a better phrase is Garret Fitzgerald’s ‘non-belligerent’. Because while we weren’t actually at war there was a huge of commerce with Britain, both in people who went to work in the war in the war industries, the British soldiers having gone to fight in the war proper and trade; we sold tonnes of stuff to Britain. The period in Ireland, is normally called as “The Emergency”, and that is normally said to be some sort of euphemism; it’s not because de Valera’s constitution enacted a couple of years previously, Sub-section 3º of section 3 of Article 28 of the Constitution, said:

In this sub-section “time of war” includes a time when there is taking place an armed conflict in which the State is not a participant but in respect of which each of the Houses of the Oireachtas shall have resolved that, arising out of such armed conflict, a national emergency exists affecting the vital interests of the State.

And the day before war was declared, on 2 September the same de Valera said to the Dáil that he was proposing, ‘That Dáil Éireann hereby resolves, arising out of the armed conflict now taking place in Europe, a national emergency exists affecting the vital interests of the State’ – the same exact phrase from his constitution of two years previously.
He went on to say “I do not think it is necessary for me to add anything to what I have already said. I think it is evident to everybody that the circumstances contemplated by the amendment of the Article of the Constitution do, in fact, exist”.
Now the commentators on the war, Eunan O’Halpin, being one of the very good ones, in his book ‘Defending Ireland’, he said that the Government basically accepted the conventional wisdom of the time that aerial bombing of civilian targets would be an inevitable and rapidly decisive tactic in the European war. That’s actually not true; there were huge sections of Europe that knew nothing about aerial bombing. Spain did because the Luftwaffe had practiced their aerial bombing in the Spanish Civil War. And it suddenly struck me while reading this that de Valera did too, because de Valera had two very good opportunities of finding out what happened in Spain. He would have known people who served in Eoin O’Duffy’s Irish Brigade and he would have known and indeed locked up some of his own ex-colleagues who fought in the International Brigade with Charlie Donnelly and Mick O’Riordain. ..........................

Where over a few short nights we had mines dropped in Enniskerry, bombs in Drogheda, bombs in Bettystown, bombs in Terenure in Dublin, eight at the Curragh Racecourse, ten near Duleek, and eight in Carlow where three people were killed and finally three more in Oylegate in Wexford. So we had 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 bombings over ten days or 8 of them over two. In the Knock Row in Waterford, three people were killed. Now later that night, that’s the night of 3rd January 1941, Dublin was bombed again. And the rather terse report in the Military Archives on the first major bombing in Dublin since, basically since the Rebellion and the first serious event since the Civil War,................................................................................

Uniquely in wartime bombings and this includes the North Strand Bombing, uniquely the Irish Army were of the view that this bombing was deliberate. There is in the Military Archives in Rathmines a large file called the 2nd World War Bombings on which I base much of what I’m talking tonight and Commandant D.J. Murphy and Captain T.J. Hanley mentioned the earlier bombing of the Rosslare-Fishguard boat, and saw in the set of attacks an attempt by Germany to disrupt or destroy the supply of food to Britain, and a punishment for the breaking off of trade with Germany by the creamery management in Campile, which they had done earlier. So going back to the non-belligerent, not alone were we supplying Britain with much-needed food but we had stopped selling to Germany.


http://northstrandbombing.wordpress.com/interviewees/german-bombings-transcript/

But the problem of the place of the volunteers in Ireland’s epochal narrative remained, particularly as republican-nationalist dismissals of them came to have less and less purchase in public and political opinion. One obvious solution was to revise the narrative itself, to argue that Ireland wasn’t really neutral at all during the war, that it was a non-belligerent on the side of the allies, that the country did as much as it could to aid the allied side during the war. Within that framework the volunteers could be lauded as heroes who made a significant contribution to the allied cause, a not to be forgotten Irish dimension of the anti-fascist struggle during the Second World War. This revised narrative of the role of Ireland and the Irish in the Second World War came in the 1980s and 1990s to form the backbone of most historical works on the topic. In press coverage of anniversaries of the war, articles and editorials defending Irish neutrality stood side by side with features on the exploits of Irish volunteers. It is a viewpoint exemplified, by among others, Kevin Myers – a staunch defender of Irish wartime neutrality, but one who spent many years campaigning for public and official recognition of the Irish veterans of World War II. In November 1999 Myers wrote:

Ireland now officially remembers its lost sons of the Great War without embarrassment or shame. It would be no bad thing if people also freely recalled the purely personal and voluntary sacrifice made by many individuals, unsupported by any political campaign and rigorously concealed by the censor – even in their deaths – those whose fight for freedom helped to give us a free Europe.

But Myers underestimated the extent to which the Irish volunteers of World War II had already been fully rehabilitated – politically, historically, and in popular opinion. The contemporary consensus which views both the volunteers and wartime neutrality in a positive light is, of course, largely an updated version of R.M. Smyllie’s position, basically an attempt to harmonise the Irish neutralist position during the war with support for the allied cause.
Officially, the long government silence on the volunteers began to be broken in 1994 when Bertie Ahern (then Minister of Finance) formally opened the renovated and completed Islandbridge war memorial. Kevin Myers commented that Ahern’s presence signified “a change in attitude towards Irishness, in definitions of what it is to be Irish and how many forms of Irishness there can be without betrayal of anybody or anything.”

"De Valera’s statement coincided with the publication of Pope Pius XII’s expressions of sympathy for the plight of Belgium and Holland. But, much like Pius, de Valera was to maintain his silence thereafter"

There were some challenges to de Valera’s nationalistic neutralist narrative – above all by James Dillon, until 1942 deputy leader of Fine Gael . Dillon argued that there was a great struggle against evil unfolding in the world, a struggle which Ireland should be part of. But de Valera’s viewpoint was the one accepted by Fine Gael and the rest of the Irish political elite.

Fine Gael’s strong support for neutrality amounted de facto to an abandonment of its distinct identity as the “commonwealth party. During the war Fine Gael made numerous reaffirmations of its support for Irish participation in the Commonwealth, but, as Hogan pointed out, standing aside when the very existence of the Commonwealth was at stake was tantamount to its abandonment. In this connection it cannot be without significance that it was a Fine Gael-led coalition government that took Ireland out of the Commonwealth and established the Republic in 1948.

Others have pointed to the significance of the fact that between 1939 and 1945 nearly 200,000 workers from Eire migrated to work in the British war economy – most of whom remained in the country after the war.

During the war an estimated 70,000 citizens of neutral Ireland served in the British armed forces, together with 50,000 or so from Northern Ireland.

Brian Girvin quotes Fine Gael leader Richard Mulcahy’s summary judgement in July 1940:

“Dev would have to swerve his party away from their present road. He could only get half. Cosgrave two thirds. We would be left with a divided front. One third of the country opposed to us. This would be a matter of terrible difficulty. The one third of the country would be that part with the greatest possible capacity for nuisance and damage.”

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Before Amery's execution Field Marshal Smuts sent the following letter to Prime Minister Clement Attlee:[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]PRIME MINISTER 14 December 1945.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Mr. Heaton Nicholls telephoned to say that he had received the following cable from Field Marshal Smuts.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"Please convey to Mr Attlee a private and personal message from me as soon as possible in connection with the possible execution of Amery’s son. We have had similar cases in South Africa, in none of which execution has been inflicted, as the acts were more of an ideological than of a criminal character. I am deeply moved by consideration for Amery and his wife, both of whom have deserved well of their country."[/FONT]


[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/john_amery.htm[/FONT]

Belfast wrote: »

The IRA were using foolish logic was "my enemy's enemy is my friend". I think they would have accepted help from anyone who would help them fight the British.

Fratton Fred wrote: »

My point though with regards the difference, is that Joyce left the country he had lived and worked in (and became a political activist in) for the majority of his life to join a nation Britain was at war with and set about to subvert Britain.

I know there is a strong argument that he was unfairly tried for treason, but I don't see his death as being any great loss to the gene pool.