HISTORY : Fugitive Ireland: European minority nationalists and Irish political asylum, 1937-2008 By Daniel LeachFour Courts Press, 285pp, €31.50
IN THE DECADE after 1945, the Irish government granted political asylum to various European ethnic nationalists – Bretons, Basques, Flemings, Croats, Ukrainians and Cossacks. Bretons and Basques had sought refuge in Ireland before the war but some of the minority nationalists who arrived after 1945 were wanted for war crimes and collaboration with the Axis powers.
Many of them claimed to be inspired by the Irish independence struggle but this was a mixed compliment for the Irish government. As Daniel Leach observes, that Ireland sheltered these fugitives at a time when Nazism was reviled seemed to confirm the pro-Axis sympathies of the Irish during the war. As his book reveals, the picture was more complicated.
A common assumption was that the Irish government was motivated by an “inter-celtic solidarity” but Leach argues that while this may have existed in the cultural sphere, practical political assistance from Dublin was non-existent. The true inter-celtic exchange, as Leach highlights throughout the book, was between the Welsh nationalists and the Bretons. When Yann Fouéré fled to Wales in 1946 he was warned about Irish duplicity by the Welsh nationalists who sheltered him, the Irish would promise much but deliver little. The imperatives were, of course, completely different. The Welsh were assisting what they regarded as a persecuted fraternal movement whereas the Irish state had just emerged from a world war whose victors could make life difficult for small neutral states.
Leach places Irish post-war asylum in the context of the Cold War and Catholic anti-communism when the Allied intelligence services and the Catholic Church assisted those who could destabilise communist regimes. This was the murky underworld of the ratlines which spirited away war criminals to north and south America. Leach’s account of Croat Alois Anitch, alias Andrija Artukovic, makes particularly queasy reading. He was deeply implicated in the Ustase genocide of the Serbs during the war and came to Ireland in 1947, helped at every stage by the Catholic Church. When he and his family left Ireland a year later for the United States, they had Irish documentation.
There were political differences between the various minority nationalists. The Basques and the Catalans were left-wing and staunchly anti-fascist, but many of the Bretons and Flemings were conservative Catholics who had collaborated to varying degrees with the German occupiers. Leach illustrates the divisions which opened up within the Irish government over how to treat these exiles. The department of external affairs viewed them as unwelcome guests at a time when Ireland was trying to re-establish itself after the war. The department of justice was more willing to give them asylum.
The personal stories of these exiles and how they fared in Ireland are a fascinating strand of the book. The Basque Gallastegis, who arrived from Spain in 1937, settled in the Irish-speaking part of Meath and their children spoke Irish. The Breton sculptor Yann Goulet obtained Irish citizenship in 1952 but refused to accept the French goverment’s amnesty. He won a competition to design a memorial at the Custom House in 1957 and also designed the Ballyseedy memorial. He opposed Irish entry to the Common Market. Yann Fouéré, whose daughter Olwen is the distinguished actress, had returned to Brittany, was arrested in 1975 and was eventually released after pressure from, among others, Irish TDs. The era of these minority exiles has now passed but their implications for a new generation are thoughtfully described in this book.
Deirdre McMahon lectures in history at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick