An Irishman's Diary

I’ve been belatedly reading A Yankee in De Valera’s Ireland, the memoir of David Gray, war-time US ambassador in Dublin. It was first published only last year, more that half a century after he wrote it. And it’s not especially enlightening – his contempt for Irish neutrality and his all-round Hibernophobia have long been well known. But one detail, at least, I found fascinating.

It emerged during a lunch Gray hosted in 1940 for an unnamed Fianna Fáil TD. This itself was unusual, because the dim view he took of the Irish in general was even darker in the case of the then-ruling party. “Probably no national legislative body had so many back benchers as ignorant of so much as the Irish Dáil in 1940,” Gray wrote. “This was especially true of the Fianna Fáil members.” With something approaching generosity, he goes on to qualify that criticism slightly, suggesting it was our parliamentary system that turned such people into “Yahoos”.

But in any case, having lunch with this particular Fianna Fáiler, he plied him for information about what the Germans were offering Ireland in return for support or neutrality.

Whereupon the TD told him that, although he was unaware of deals with the government, he understood that, in the event of German victory, the IRA had been offered a 32-county Ireland “and two English counties besides”.

Which English counties, unfortunately, the TD couldn’t say. Nor does Gray subsequently enlighten us. And clearly it’s of only academic interest now, if that. But personally, I would love to know what the territories selected for IRA invasion were, and why.

Was it Devon and Cornwall, maybe, because of the celtic link? Or Cumbria and Lancashire, for a combination of the scenery and Manchester United? And what did the IRA plan to do, anyway? Turn them into an Irish Pale, to keep out the wild English? Or use them as a base for expansion, pushing the natives further and further eastward, “to hell or to Norfolk”? I don’t know.

It must have been a good lunch, anyway, although Gray can hardly have enjoyed it as he did his meetings with James Dillon, then deputy leader of Fine Gael.

Dillon was one of his favourite Irishmen, against admittedly limited opposition. Not only was he an intellectual and an orator. He was also great company. And crucially, he opposed Irish neutrality, his pro-war stance having recently seen him returned as TD for bellicose Monaghan.

There was perhaps only one thing Gray didn’t like about Dillon: his indifference to whiskey. The diplomat tried to “reform” him, by means of the embassy’s best 12-year-old Irish. But all Dillon ever wanted to drink was tea. “He would even demand his tea at 10 o’clock in the evening according to the custom of the early 19th century,” marvelled the ambassador.

Occupying the opposite end of the spectrum in Gray’s affections was the then taoiseach. And yet, like many people, he struggled to work de Valera out. He even fretted, given Dev’s deadpan manner and habit of avoiding eye-contact, that he might be misreading his anti-Nazism, until an incident involving another resident of wartime Dublin reassured him.

As Gray put it a letter to president Roosevelt: “[De Valera] has a German (Jew), a Nobel prize winner who fled Germany, engaged for his Institute for Advanced Studies, Professor Schrödinger. This man is now in abject terror in Ireland, fearing that the Gestapo is going to get him, and de Valera is more concerned over him than many more important matters. In asking me if I could help [. . .] he spoke of the Germans in a way that left no doubt as to his feelings.”

A frustrated mathematician himself, de Valera was famously wont to attend IAS lectures and take notes. But Gray revelled in a lesson of simple arithmetic he claimed to have given the taoiseach in 1940. The subject was how Ireland would be defended in the event of German invasion, to which Dev replied that there were 10,000 British troops “up there”: his implication being that they could be invited over the Border if necessary.

Gray gleefully informed him that there was at a maximum only 8,500 troops, mostly trainees, in Northern Ireland, “Anyone with a bicycle and a sheep counter can go about and verify this.” De Valera was suitably shocked, or so Gray suggests. “Good God!” he has him exclaim. And the taoiseach must surely have made eye contact with him then, at least, although the ambassador doesn’t say.