The isolation of Ireland

In late February and early March 1944, as troops were being massed in Britain and Northern Ireland for the invasion of France, neutral Ireland came under the heaviest Allied pressure since the start of the war. On 21 February the American minister in Dublin, David Gray, handed the Taoiseach (prime minister), Éamon de Valera, a note in which the United States demanded the removal from the country of the German minister and the Japanese consul. The Irish government refused, and the British responded by suspending travel between Britain and Ireland. Winston Churchill explained its purpose in the House of Commons: the aim was to isolate Ireland from the rest of the world during “the critical period which is now approaching”.

Some chronologies place Churchill’s statement under 4 March. According to the record of parliamentary debates (Hansard), however, the Prime Minister spoke on the matter on 14 March 1944, in reply to a question from the MP William Davison, and the travel restrictions had been announced in the press a day earlier, on 13 March. At the beginning of March the Irish reply to the American note was still being prepared. The crisis as a whole ran from the note of 21 February to the announcement of isolation in mid-March.

A “friendly” neutrality and its limits

Ireland declared its neutrality at the start of the war and held to it consistently. De Valera refused the British access to the Treaty Ports, which in the autumn of 1940 led to a sharp dispute with Churchill (Ireland refuses to open its ports); he protested against the arrival of American troops in Northern Ireland in January 1942 (Americans in Northern Ireland); and he did not break off relations with Germany even when German bombs fell on Irish towns and villages (German bombs on Ireland). Throughout the war a German legation headed by Eduard Hempel and a Japanese consulate operated in Dublin.

This neutrality was nonetheless, as most historians acknowledge, well disposed towards the Allies. Irish military intelligence cooperated with British counter-intelligence, German agents dropped on the island were quickly rounded up, and Allied airmen who made forced landings on Irish territory were increasingly sent quietly across to Northern Ireland, while Germans were interned. Strict censorship of the press and communications was meant to hinder the passing of military information. The German legation had a radio transmitter but – as the Dublin government later stressed – had long been forbidden to use it, and by the spring of 1944 the set had been in the hands of the Irish authorities for several months.

For the Americans and British preparing Operation Overlord, however, this was not enough. Between Ireland and Northern Ireland, where American troops were stationed and training, ran a land border crossed every day by thousands of people. Workers, soldiers on leave and travellers constantly crossed the Irish Sea. It was feared that news of troop concentrations and invasion preparations might reach the legation in Dublin and from there – if only by diplomatic bag or courier – Germany. In December 1943 a German aircraft dropped two parachutists with radio sets over Ireland; they were caught within hours, but for Washington this was proof that the Germans still regarded the island as an intelligence base.

Gray’s note

At 3.30 p.m. on 21 February 1944 David Gray, who was related by marriage to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s family (he was the uncle by marriage of his wife Eleanor), handed de Valera a note drafted in the State Department under Cordell Hull. It recalled the Taoiseach’s words of December 1941 that Ireland could be no more than a “friendly neutral” towards America, and went on to state that Irish neutrality, contrary to the government’s intentions, “operates in favour of the Axis powers”. In Washington’s view, the island’s position – close to Britain and separated from Northern Ireland, where important American bases were located, only by an “undefended boundary” – gave Axis agents an “almost unrestricted opportunity” to gather military information and pass it to Germany.

The note did not question Dublin’s good faith in combating espionage. It pointed out, however, that the German and Japanese diplomats enjoyed immunities which in other neutral countries had served as cover for intelligence work, and it mentioned the legation’s transmitter and the December parachutists. Since military operations were being prepared in Britain and Northern Ireland on which “the lives of thousands of United Nations soldiers” depended, the US government asked for the recall of the German and Japanese representatives, adding that it hoped for a complete break in diplomatic relations with both countries; it regarded the removal of their representatives as the “absolute minimum”.

The next day the British representative in Dublin, Sir John Maffey, delivered a similar note supporting the American demand. According to the account Gray sent to Washington on 23 February, de Valera received the American note coldly and declared at once that he would not give such an order, while with Maffey he let his emotions get the better of him: he spoke of Britain and the United States colluding against weak neutral states and asked whether the note was an ultimatum. Dublin feared that a refusal might serve as a pretext for seizing the ports or even for sending troops in from Northern Ireland; according to some accounts the Irish army was placed on a higher state of readiness. On 29 February, however, Gray gave assurances on behalf of his government that the United States did not intend to resort to military or other measures, and repeated Roosevelt’s words of February 1942 that there was “not the slightest thought or intention” of invading Ireland.

De Valera’s refusal

The Irish government discussed the wording of its reply over several meetings. On 2 March officials of the Departments of External Affairs and Justice and the director of military intelligence, Colonel Dan Bryan, conferred on tightening controls on the border with Northern Ireland; they concluded that no measures could give complete protection against leaks and proposed a permit system. On 6 March the government approved the draft reply prepared by de Valera, and the text was handed to the Americans over the following days (7 March is usually given).

The reply confirmed the refusal the Taoiseach had already given orally on 21 February. The Dublin government expressed surprise that so grave a note had been sent at all and recalled that removing the representatives of a foreign state at the demand of another government was universally regarded as “the first step towards war”, and that accepting the American proposal would be a “complete betrayal” of the government’s democratic mandate. Neutrality, de Valera wrote, expressed the united will of the people and parliament and was the logical consequence of Irish history and of the “forced partition” of the country. The government also listed its security measures: expanded observation forces, censorship of the press and communications, arrests. All the German parachutists had been caught quickly, and ten foreigners and two Irishmen suspected of espionage were being held in Irish prisons. The note, Dublin stressed, did not point to a single instance of negligence. Finally, the government recalled that Irish attitudes to Britain had changed for the better during the war precisely because the British had not violated Irish neutrality.

Around 10 March the contents of both notes and of the Irish refusal reached the American and British press. Some historians believe that Gray had counted on such a disclosure from the start, wishing to undermine de Valera’s standing among Irish Americans and to deprive him of arguments in the dispute over partition after the war. On 13 March Dublin decided not to publish any further explanations so as “not to continue the controversy”.

The travel ban and Churchill’s words

The British authorities did not wait long. On 13 March the press announced that the London government was suspending ordinary travel between Britain and Ireland. The ban covered the whole island – both Ireland and Northern Ireland – and affected thousands of people: soldiers on leave, teachers, nurses and whole families who could not return home. At the same time postal censorship was tightened and telephone and telegraph communications were restricted. The Dublin authorities pointed out that the ban did not apply to traffic across the land border or to Irish workers going to work in British factories, who made up the majority of travellers. According to information the Irish government passed to its minister in Washington on 14 March, the British had decided on the ban for security reasons several weeks earlier, and presenting it as retaliation for the rejection of the note was a last-minute idea.

On 14 March the Conservative MP Sir William Davison asked the Prime Minister in the House of Commons whether, in view of Ireland’s rejection of the American request, supported by Britain, he considered the existing measures adequate against “a centre of espionage in the British Isles”. Churchill replied that the initiative had come from the United States, which was concerned about the danger to American troops, and that the British government had given it full support. The travel restrictions, he said, were “the first step in the policy designed to isolate Great Britain from Southern Ireland, and also to isolate Southern Ireland from the outer world during the critical period which is now approaching”. He added that such measures were painful in view of the many Irishmen fighting bravely in the British forces, but since the lives of British, Dominion and Allied soldiers were at stake, the government had to ensure the security of the coming operations. He also warned that if the Allies suffered a disaster that could be attributed to the presence of German and Japanese representatives in Dublin, a gulf would open between Britain and Ireland that “even generations would not close”.

When Davison pressed him on whether the border between Ulster and Ireland ought to be closed because of the activities of the Irish Republican Army, Churchill replied that he preferred that day to confine himself to a general statement, and that all necessary measures would be taken as required. Some chronicles present his words as an announcement that the border would soon be closed, but he did not say so explicitly, and the land border remained open in the months that followed. Asked about Ireland’s relationship to the British Commonwealth, the Prime Minister conceded that the position of “Southern Ireland” was in many respects an “anomaly” that even eminent lawyers would find hard to define. On 31 March the Belfast MP Douglas Savory spoke in the Commons of dozens of letters from people in Northern Ireland whose lives the ban had made difficult, but he appealed to their patriotism and supported the purpose of the decision.

Popular chronologies record that on the night after Churchill’s statement the RAF sent 30 aircraft to Düsseldorf. The operations record of RAF Bomber Command confirms that on the night of 14–15 March 1944 thirty fast de Havilland Mosquito bombers attacked the Ruhr city without loss. It was one of the small nuisance raids which, between the great attacks by heavy bombers, were meant to keep the German air defences under constant strain; the following night more than 860 bombers attacked Stuttgart.

Its place in the war

The German minister and the Japanese consul remained in Dublin until the end of the war, but the isolation of the island served its purpose: the secret of the preparations for the Normandy landings was not betrayed, and no leak through Ireland harmed the invasion. Paradoxically, neutral Ireland contributed to its success: weather reports from the Irish meteorological station at Blacksod on the west coast, passed to the British under an earlier agreement, by many accounts helped Dwight Eisenhower’s meteorologists in early June to forecast the brief break in the weather in which the invasion set out on 6 June. The travel restrictions were eased only after the successful landing.

The crisis over the American note strengthened de Valera at home. When his minority government lost a vote in Dáil Éireann on 9 May 1944, the Taoiseach called an early election, and on 30 May Fianna Fáil regained an absolute majority; many historians link this result to a wave of support for neutrality after Washington’s pressure in February. Neutrality remained to the end, for de Valera, a symbol of the state’s sovereignty. After Hitler’s death, on 2 May 1945, the Taoiseach offered his condolences to Hempel, provoking outrage in Britain and the United States, and on 13 May 1945, in a victory broadcast, Churchill said that Britain, although it could have done so, had never laid a hand on Ireland and had left the de Valera government “to frolic with the Germans and later with the Japanese representatives to their heart’s content”. De Valera’s reply, delivered three days later, in which he recalled that a small nation had for centuries resisted a stronger neighbour, has gone down in Irish history as one of his most famous speeches.

The dispute of the spring of 1944 showed the limits of Irish neutrality: in practice well disposed towards the Allies, but unyielding on symbolic matters such as the presence of Axis diplomats in Dublin. For the Allies, who were preparing the largest amphibious operation in history, Ireland at that point ceased to be a political problem and became purely a security problem – and it was treated exactly as Churchill had announced.