376 – Moore of This

In fact, Irish citizens are still allowed to join the British army (and I assume the other British armed forces, although I don’t know that for a fact), despite not being a Dominion, having long left the Commonwealth, etc.

This came up when the Royal Irish Rangers were amalgamated with the UDR to create the Royal Irish Regiment. For fairly obvious reasons, people from the South would not generally be OK with joining the successor regiment to the UDR, and the Royal Irish Rangers still had a certain, if much reduced, tradition of recruitment from the Republic.

Irish neutrality during the war is, like most things in Irish history, a complicated topic. The following are some key points (but no more than that).

(1) Being neutral was and is more than a matter of that particular war. Ireland has been neutral as a matter of general policy since the foundation of the State — the country does not join military alliances, and spends extremely little on defence. This is widely perceived in Ireland as a foundational moral principle, with affinities to pacifism (although not identical).

(Personally, I have some sympathy for this, although I do think Irish people are often a bit smug and self-righteous about it — there’s no shame in taking advantage of the country’s advantageous geographical position, but one should recognise that it would be a much harder question for many other small countries. It is a topical question right now, because Micheál Martin has, in the context of the Ukraine war, suggested a certain move away from neutrality towards greater participation in pan-European defence.)

(2) As later during the Cold War, Ireland’s neutrality was skewed heavily towards one side, in this case Britain’s side. The standard example of this is the treatment of pilots and other combatants who ended up on Irish soil — Germans were kept in Ireland, British and other allied personnel were sent across the border to NI. But there was a lot more to it. Partition was important — because Allied forces had Northern Ireland to operate from, there was not the same need for bases in the rest of the island as there would have been if there had been a united Ireland. This meant that the British, despite Churchill’s well-known anger about the Irish stance, could generally afford to be relaxed and accept the Irish position as good enough for their needs.

This is sometimes overstressed — the fact is that De Valera discussed Ireland’s position with the German ambassador, and the Germans were generally accepting of it. We’ll never really know what Ireland would have done if the Germans had pressured the government more vigorously. One of the most famous, or rather infamous, actions of the Irish government was expressing condolences to the German embassy in 1945 on the death of Hitler. More generally, De Valera’s Ireland was dominated by a highly conservative Catholicism in which expressions of anti-Semitism were far from unknown, compounded with a more specifically Irish isolationist nationalism: the country’s record on taking in Jewish refugees is not a good one, partly because they were Jewish, partly because they were foreigners.

On the other hand, internal violence was not a theoretical possibility in Ireland in the 1940s — the country had fought a civil war in the early ‘20s. It is not at all unthinkable that if Ireland had more openly joined the British side, this would have provoked another civil war.

It’s true that Churchill offered De Valera Northern Ireland in return for joining the war, but it would have needed to have been approved by the Northern Ireland Parliament, which would have been unlikely to vote for it.

(3) Speaking of which, the IRA allied themselves with Germany and sought German assistance in attacking the British. Nothing much came of this, because the Germans never really committed anything to the effort. It was not helped by De Valera’s ruthless. suppression of the IRA (done in part to communicate that he was serious about Irish neutrality). But it’s worth remembering if one thinks that violent republicanism has an unsullied left-wing past.

(4) As Alistair notes, on an individual level, large numbers of Irish people (it may have been as high as about 70,000, in a country whose population was a little under 3 million) volunteered to serve in the British army during the war (and it should be remembered that others emigrated to places like the US and served in the war in the armed forces of their new countries).

On the other hand, the volunteers (and again, every single one of them was a volunteer,) who served in the British army were disproportionately Protestant, however (25% from the Church of Ireland alone, at a time when the whole Protestant population was under 5%) and those will mostly have been Unionists with a emotional attachment to Britain. Some of those who were Catholic came from families with traditions of military service (even before the war, about 5% of the British army was from the South of Ireland).

There were other reasons why people volunteered, including the economic appeal of guaranteed full-time employment — but still, despite their large numbers, one has to be aware that the volunteer who served in the British military was not necessarily typical in their attitude to the war. Alistair mentions the treatment of those who deserted from the Defence Forces — it’s also the case that others faced stigma and even abuse upon their return, because they had fought for Britain, and they were generally not celebrated or recognised as having done something admirable, or even remembered very much until recently. (Outside of Protestant institutions, which are a special case for obvious reasons — a friend of mine who’s a Catholic who attended a Protestant school commented on how much it surprised him to see the roll of former pupils who died in the Second World War, because until that moment it had not occurred to him that any Irish person fought in it.)