Sir, – Prof Diarmaid Ferriter (Opinion Analysis, February 4th) depicts Ireland’s wartime neutrality as a pragmatic response to difficult circumstances and as an assertion of Irish independence. He also urges us to view the war through the eyes of the time rather than in retrospect.
One contemporary view was that of Robert Brennan, Irish ambassador to the United States. In a speech in 1942, he compared neutral Ireland to the medieval Ireland of saints and scholars who kept the light of civilisation burning during the dark ages.
He speculated that after the second World War, Ireland might be called once again to a mission of enlightenment.
Brennan’s comments reveal that the Irish political elite – and a good part of the population, too – considered neutrality to be morally superior to the position of all participants in the war, including the anti-fascist Allied coalition. Such was the hubris that led Éamon de Valera to deliver his condolences on the death of Hitler.
Had Irish neutrality been a purely pragmatic stance, it would have been abandoned when it was safe to do so in 1942 or 1943, when the country could have aligned itself with the Allies. Such a policy shift would have obviated many of the negative consequences of neutrality noted by Prof Ferriter, such as the country’s postwar isolation. It would also have asserted unequivocally Ireland’s independence not only as a sovereign state but as a free and democratic one.
Prof Ferriter chides Minister for Justice and Defence Alan Shatter for politicising the historical debate about Ireland’s wartime neutrality but he must surely be aware that his own contribution to the discussion is political, too, and part of a long tradition of attempts to justify neutrality by reference to the complexity of the situation. It is the job of historians to represent past reality in all its complexity. But we also have a responsibility to analyse that complexity to get to the heart of the matter. – Yours, etc,