Ireland refuses the use of its ports

On 7 November 1940 the Irish head of government (Taoiseach), Éamon de Valera, interrupted a debate on agricultural surpluses in Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Irish parliament, to make a short statement on the international situation. He was replying to Winston Churchill, who two days earlier had told the House of Commons that the lack of access to the ports on Ireland’s southern and western coasts was “a most heavy and grievous burden” on Britain’s war at sea, and to the press campaign that followed those words in Britain and the United States. De Valera left no room for doubt: “There can be no question of the handing over of these ports so long as this State remains neutral.” Nor could there be any question of leasing them – they were Ireland’s own. Any attempt at pressure, from whatever quarter, Britain included, “could only lead to bloodshed”.

War chronologies record under this date that it “becomes clear that Ireland will refuse” Britain the use of its ports as naval bases. The description is accurate, with one qualification: Dublin had been refusing since the start of the war, and London knew it well. On 7 November, however, the refusal was made public for the first time, from the floor of parliament, in answer to a public statement by the British prime minister, and it closed the matter for the rest of the war.

The Treaty Ports

The dispute concerned three deep-water anchorages that the British had kept for themselves when the Irish Free State came into being. They were Berehaven in Bantry Bay at the south-western tip of the island; the harbour at Queenstown, that is Cobh, in Cork Harbour on the south coast; and Lough Swilly in County Donegal in the north-west. Article 7 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921 obliged the Irish to make them available to the Royal Navy in peacetime and, in time of war or of strained relations with another power, to give the British whatever harbour and other facilities they might require. The memory of the First World War was fresh: in 1917–1918 British and American destroyers based in Irish ports, above all Queenstown, had escorted convoys and hunted U-boats in the Western Approaches to the British Isles.

For Irish republicans, however, foreign garrisons on their own coast were a denial of sovereignty. When de Valera came to power in 1932, he wrote to London that Britain’s right to demand the ports in wartime made Irish neutrality a “mockery”. For the next six years the two countries fought an economic war. It was ended by the agreement signed in London on 25 April 1938 by de Valera and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Ireland made a one-off payment of £10 million in return for Britain giving up the disputed land annuities, the tariffs imposed during the economic war were lifted, and a separate agreement annulled Articles 6 and 7 of the 1921 Treaty. The British handed over the ports unconditionally. Chamberlain judged that Dublin’s goodwill was worth more than bases that could not in any case be held without troops if Ireland were hostile. The fort on Spike Island in Cork Harbour was handed over to the Irish on 11 July 1938, Berehaven on 29 September and the defences of Lough Swilly on 3 October, a few days after the Munich Agreement.

In the House of Commons Churchill, then a backbencher, protested vehemently. On 5 May 1938 he recalled that in 1922 he had himself negotiated these very provisions of the Treaty with Michael Collins, and that the Admiralty had assured him that without the Irish ports it would be very difficult, “perhaps almost impossible”, to feed the island in wartime. He called them “the sentinel towers of the Western Approaches” and calculated that flotillas operating from Lamlash on the Scottish island of Arran instead of Lough Swilly, and from Pembroke Dock in Wales instead of Berehaven and Queenstown, would lose some 200 and 400 miles of radius respectively, counting the journey out and back. He also asked what guarantee the government had that Ireland would not declare neutrality if Britain found itself at war with a powerful enemy. Most members at the time thought these fears exaggerated.

Neutrality under pressure

Churchill’s fears came true sooner than he had expected. On 2 September 1939 de Valera declared neutrality in the Dáil, and parliament proclaimed a state of emergency, known in Ireland from then on simply as the Emergency. Thanks to the Statute of Westminster the state, though still formally linked to the Crown, could decide on war and peace for itself, unlike the dominions, which followed London. Neutrality enjoyed almost universal support at home, including that of the opposition. For de Valera it was proof of full independence, a way of avoiding a fresh split in a society that remembered the civil war, and at the same time a response to partition: the Dublin government had no intention of fighting alongside the state that retained Northern Ireland. The weak army, which in 1939 numbered fewer than 20,000 men, could not have defended the country against either of its great neighbours, and ports handed to the British would have made Ireland a target for German air raids.

From the outset, though, this neutrality was lopsided. De Valera had said for years that he would not allow the island to be used as a base for an attack on Britain. The Irish coast-watching service reported submarines and aircraft, British airmen who came down in Ireland were often allowed to go home, and Irishmen joined the British forces in their thousands. At the same time the Dublin government did not close the German legation, headed by Eduard Hempel, and scrupulously avoided any gesture that Berlin might regard as taking London’s side.

The fall of France in June 1940 brought matters to a head. The Germans now stood on the Atlantic coast, and London feared that after Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium it would be Ireland’s turn, to be used as a back door for an invasion of Britain. The British already had a precedent: in May they had occupied neutral Iceland. In June the minister Malcolm MacDonald – the same man who had negotiated the return of the ports in 1938 – travelled to Dublin. In several meetings between 17 and 26 June he put forward an offer drawn up by Chamberlain: the British government would solemnly accept the principle of a united Ireland, and a joint body including Belfast would work out the details, if Ireland abandoned neutrality, or at least admitted British troops and warships to its bases. De Valera did not believe that London could impose unity on the Northern unionists; besides, the promise was conditional and deferred, whereas the abandonment of neutrality was to be immediate. On 4 July the Irish government rejected the offer. It remained secret until 1970.

Instead, the two sides began to talk about something else. Irish officers and British officers from the command in Northern Ireland secretly agreed the so-called Plan W: in the event of a German landing, British troops would cross the border, but only at the invitation of the Dublin government. The German staff, meanwhile, was preparing its own study for a landing in Ireland (Fall Grün, Case Green), conceived, in the view of most historians, rather as a supplement and diversion for the planned invasion of England. Neutrality did not protect Ireland from bombs either: on 26 August 1940 German aircraft bombed the creamery at Campile in County Wexford, killing three women; Dublin protested in Berlin. Defending itself on two fronts, the Irish government expanded the army, which by mid-1941 numbered around 41,000 men, and the local defence forces, preparing both for a German landing and for a British attempt to seize the ports by force.

“A most heavy and grievous burden”

By the autumn of 1940 the threat of a German invasion of Britain had receded, but in the Atlantic the worst phase of the war for the British was beginning. Since 17 August the German blockade of the British Isles had been in force, U-boats were operating from French bases on the Bay of Biscay, and in October, over a few nights, they had sunk more than thirty ships from convoys SC 7 and HX 79. After the fall of France the Admiralty routed almost all ocean shipping to Britain through the North Channel between Northern Ireland and Scotland, because the southern routes along the Irish coast had come within reach of German aircraft and warships based in France. The fiercest struggle for Britain’s supplies was therefore being fought in the north-western approaches, a few hundred miles west of Ireland.

On 5 November 1940 Churchill gave the House of Commons a lengthy review of the war situation. He spoke of the Blitz, of aid for Greece, of the Mediterranean. The gravest danger, however, he said, was the renewed rise in U-boat sinkings in the Atlantic approaches to the islands. “The fact that we cannot use the South and West Coasts of Ireland to refuel our flotillas and aircraft and thus protect the trade by which Ireland as well as Great Britain lives, is a most heavy and grievous burden and one which should never have been placed on our shoulders, broad though they be.” He added that the fleet was at its lowest ebb in destroyers and escort vessels, and that the fifty ships received from the Americans under the destroyers-for-bases deal were only now entering service. On the same day, out in the Atlantic, the German Admiral Scheer shattered convoy HX 84, escorted by the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay, and in the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt was winning election to a third term.

Churchill did not demand the ports outright, nor did he announce any measures. The members who spoke after him, however, were more explicit. Hastings Lees-Smith, the Labour MP acting as Leader of the Opposition, recalled that three months earlier he had already argued that access to Berehaven and Lough Swilly would transform the war at sea overnight, and said that the world should know how much Britain was paying for its principles. The Conservative Archibald Southby urged that the matter be put to Ireland bluntly: if it wished to go on trading with Britain and enjoying the privileges of a member of the Empire, it must make the bases available, even without entering the war. Others contrasted Dublin’s refusal with the bases Britain had just leased to the Americans. In the following days part of the British press took up the same tone, and the American newspapers followed. Rumours also spread that German submarines were taking on fuel and food in secluded Irish inlets.

De Valera’s reply

On Thursday 7 November de Valera rose in the Dáil. He began calmly: he was prepared to accept the British prime minister’s words as a mere, perhaps natural, expression of regret, but he could not remain silent in the face of a press campaign in Britain, echoed in the United States, whose aim was to induce Ireland to hand over or lease the ports. He recalled that his government’s aim had always been good relations with the neighbouring island, and that the 1938 agreement had settled every point at issue except one, the partition of Ireland. He acknowledged that returning what had been taken meant a sacrifice for the one giving it back, but justice had demanded it, and until now neither the British government nor the British people had questioned Ireland’s right to stay out of the war.

Neutrality, he said, had been chosen because it was the right policy for a nation without adequate air defences, and no one who understood what modern war meant could be in any doubt about that. For years he had said that Ireland would not allow its territory to be used for an attack on Britain, and it had not gone back on that pledge. Before the war the government had tried to buy arms in America, in Britain and on the Continent so as to be able to defend that neutrality. He dismissed the rumours about supplying submarines with a sharpness rare for him: the claim that German submarines, or any other submarines, were obtaining fuel or provisions on Irish coasts was, he said, a lie – and he added that the British government knew it to be false. Ireland had organised an extensive coast-watching system. Historians confirm that no U-boat used Irish inlets as a supply base.

Then he came to the heart of the matter. There could be no question of handing over the ports while the state remained neutral, nor of leasing them. “They are ours.” They lay within Irish sovereignty, and as long as Ireland stayed neutral there could be no question of giving them up on any terms whatever. Any attempt by either side – by any of the belligerents, by Britain – to bring pressure to bear could only lead to bloodshed. As long as his government held office, it would defend the ports against anyone who attacked them, as it would any other part of the national territory. He remarked bitterly that it would be strange if the reason for an attack on the ports were that someone found them useful: if that was a good reason, it was a good reason for anyone, and there was no need to say for whom else. He ended with a warning addressed to his own people: Ireland might face a grave crisis, and if so it would meet it in the conviction that its cause was just; and if it had to die for that cause, it would die in a good cause.

The speech was aimed at three audiences at once: at London, so that it should have no illusions about the cost of using force; at Washington and Irish-American opinion, on which the Dublin government counted as a barrier against British pressure; and at Berlin, so that it should have no pretext for accusing Ireland of partiality.

What the ports were worth

Whether the ports really could have changed the course of the Battle of the Atlantic, as Churchill and Lees-Smith claimed, remains a matter of debate. From Berehaven and Cobh British escorts and aircraft would have started some 200 miles further west than from the nearest bases in Britain and Northern Ireland, and Lough Swilly, as Churchill had pointed out in 1938, covered the approaches to the Mersey and the Clyde. After the fall of France, however, the main struggle shifted to the north-west, and the convoy route ran along Ireland’s northern coast. So the British built bases where they could: at Londonderry on Lough Foyle, which from 1941 became one of the most important escort ports; on Lough Erne for flying boats; in Scotland; and in Iceland. From early 1941 Dublin quietly allowed flying boats from Lough Erne to fly over a narrow strip of Irish territory in County Donegal, shortening their route to the Atlantic. Some historians believe that a base at Berehaven or Cobh would have been most useful for covering convoys bound for Gibraltar and Africa; others stress that with new escort vessels, radar and long-range aircraft the Irish ports were losing the importance they had had in the previous war. What is certain is that in the autumn of 1940, with escort ships desperately short, every mile of range mattered – and that was precisely what Churchill’s complaint was about.

Place in the war

The statement of 7 November closed the question of the ports, but not the quarrel. Churchill regarded Irish neutrality as ingratitude and in the following weeks chose economic rather than military pressure. In December he ordered measures against Ireland to be prepared, and in his letter to Roosevelt of early December asking for material aid on a vast scale he also mentioned the Irish bases, hoping for Washington’s good offices. From the turn of 1940 and 1941 Britain cut the shipping space and supplies allotted to Ireland, including fuel, animal feed and fertiliser, on the grounds that if Ireland would not help protect the ships, it should share Britain’s shortages. The Irish responded by creating a merchant fleet of their own, while at home petrol, coal and flour ran short. Relations improved only in the second half of 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union and London began recruiting Irish workers for its factories.

Hitler, who at the beginning of December 1940 discussed occupying Ireland with Admiral Erich Raeder, was told that without command of the sea and the air it would be impossible. German bombs nevertheless fell on Ireland several more times, most tragically on the night of 30 to 31 May 1941 in the North Strand district of Dublin, where around thirty people were killed; and after the raids on Belfast in April 1941 de Valera sent Dublin fire crews to the North. After the attack on Pearl Harbor Churchill telegraphed him: “Now is your chance. Now or never. ‘A Nation once again’” – quoting the title of an Irish patriotic song and hinting at unity in return for entering the war – but de Valera refused this time too. Ireland stayed neutral until the end of the war, in practice increasingly well disposed towards the Allies. The ports of Berehaven, Cobh and Lough Swilly never served the Royal Navy. In a broadcast on 13 May 1945 Churchill reproached Ireland with the fact that Britain had never laid a hand on it, “though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural”, and three days later de Valera answered him on the radio in one of the most famous speeches of his life. The refusal of 7 November 1940 remained the most important act of Irish neutrality – and a demonstration of how much in the Battle of the Atlantic depended on geography.