The requirement that students must unlock social media profiles when applying for US visas reminds us that Irish sentiment is out of step with the White House when it comes to international affairs.
The new American ambassador, Edward Walsh, is not the first to find himself at odds with Irish opinion makers – during his 1984 presidential visit, TDs and senators listened to Ronald Reagan’s remarks on Central America in stony silence.
Such challenges do not compare, however, to the acrimony between Éamon de Valera and David Gray, then US president Franklin D Roosevelt’s man in Dublin during the second World War. Before Germany surrendered, Gray had been told by the State Department Ireland would not be invited to participate in the inaugural conference of the United Nations in San Francisco.
De Valera’s courtesy call on the German minister, Eduard Hempel, to express his condolences after Hitler’s death caused outrage in Britain and the US, but at home it reinforced the perception that neutrality was administered impartially.
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The extent of Ireland’s co-operation with the Allies remained secret, and Winston Churchill’s personal remarks about de Valera’s policy on VE Day – the Irish government had stayed out of the war “to frolic” with the Germans “to their heart’s content” – incensed public opinion.
De Valera’s dignified response on radio won him admiration, and identified neutrality with Irish independence.
Following his visit to Hempel, a gesture his senior officials saw as grotesquely ill-judged, the taoiseach received fiercely critical letters from Irish-Americans. One serviceman in the Philippines wrote, “I have a mother in Ireland, I also have brothers fighting this war, but I guess Dr Hempel means more to you. Have no more time, got to fight the Jap.” Other letter writers wrote of “great embarrassment” and feeling “ashamed”.
On the other hand, the tactful British representative in Dublin, John Maffey, thought that de Valera’s pose as the elder statesman in his reply to Churchill – skilfully working on “all the old passions” – represented a setback for Britain’s approach to Ireland.
Gray arrived in Dublin in February 1940, three months before Hitler’s tanks rolled over the Netherlands, Belgium, and then France. Like Roosevelt, the inexperienced American representative had no sympathy for Ireland’s neutral stance – even though the US stayed out of the war until Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December the following year.
Gray could not understand the diplomatic balancing act de Valera had to perform to avoid antagonising the two nearest belligerent powers. As one of his critics put it, the American representative “brandished the big stick too much”.
Relations between the two deteriorated when Frank Aiken went to Washington in April 1941 in an effort to ease the supplies squeeze enforced by Churchill.
De Valera’s close cabinet colleague, responsible for co-ordinating defensive measures, did succeed in purchasing two ships, but only after a fraught meeting with the president.
According to an Irish source, Aiken insisted that Ireland had to contend with a twin threat of “aggression” – from Britain, and Germany.
The pro-British Roosevelt thundered “nonsense” and pulled the tablecloth to land his lunch on the floor. Furious with the reception Aiken received during his visit, de Valera believed Gray had misrepresented him to the president.
But their relationship reached a critical point in February 1944 when the American envoy asked de Valera to recall the German and Japanese representatives. The taoiseach saw the “American note” as an ultimatum and rejected it as undermining Ireland’s neutrality. When Hitler took his own life in April 1945, Gray demanded the keys of the German legation before its records could be destroyed ” – de Valera rejected this too. T
he cessation of hostilities in Europe did not mark the end of this period of testy US-Irish relations as Gray stayed in Dublin until 1947.
Sceptical about the benefits of joining the UN, de Valera told the Dáil in June 1946 that Ireland “was losing nothing” by not applying for membership.
“But all changed in a matter of weeks,” his biographer Ronan Fanning writes, “as the cold war deepened”. Soviet efforts to have their Eastern European satellites admitted as members of the UN led to the British and the Americans supporting the applications of neutral European countries.
However, the Soviet Union used its Security Council veto to reject Irish membership – ostensibly because diplomatic relations had not been established. This refusal caused little upset in Dublin, creating, as one leading civil servant put it, “neither surprise nor disappointment”.
A Soviet spokesman later stated at the UN general assembly that states such as Ireland and Salazar’s Portugal could not be regarded as “peace-loving” because they had “supported fascism” during the war, and, he said, they maintained “particularly friendly relationships” with Franco’s Spain, “the last offshoot of fascism in Europe”.
Ireland finally became a member of the UN in 1955.
