Roy Foster: belief

Transcript context

…How much permanent cultural influence do you think it had that the Republic did not fight in World War II? Again, a very incisive and interesting question. Many Irish men, and I think they probably were men, did sign up to fight for the Allies. Many Irish women went over and worked as nurses and doctors in British hospitals during the war. In my wife’s family, that’s very true. In my own family, four of my uncles fought for the Allies. But when they came back after 1945 to Ireland, they were not welcome. Certainly they were not welcome to talk about their experiences. There was a kind of doublethink in that — I think the vast majority of Irish people were engaged in what might be called a pro-Allied neutrality. Certainly Allied airmen who were shot down over Ireland, for instance, during the war, if they were from the Allied side, were quietly repatriated to Britain. If they were Germans, they were interned. There was a different approach. Too much emphasis is put, perhaps, on de Valera’s correctness in going to pay his respects on the death of Hitler at the German embassy — or the German legation, as it was — in Dublin at the end of the war. You can’t really read from that that he was essentially pro-Nazi, though some Irish republicans certainly were. He simply felt that as a head of state, he was doing exactly what he should do when another head of state died, in whatever circumstances. But this is often raked up against Ireland, implying that Ireland was pro-German during the Second World War. It wasn’t, by any means, but preserving a position of neutrality was I think probably politically inevitable for de Valera. I think one interesting fact is that so very few politicians in Ireland from the opposition’s side ever queried it. I can only think of one, James Dillon, the Fine Gael leader, who was very much antineutrality and believed that Ireland should have entered on the side of the British. It was, I think, as I’ve said, a pro-British neutrality, but a neutrality nonetheless. It’s one of those subjects in Irish history which has recently been coming into focus — and the histories and the treatment of those people who did volunteer to fight on behalf of the Allies and came back to a cold welcome. Or, if they were soldiers from the Irish Army who’d gone to fight for Britain, they were actually disciplined when they came back. This is now coming under view, and a number of very interesting studies have been written about it. It’s one of those many issues in Irish history, like the abuse of children and women in the so-called industrial homes run by the Catholic Church. It’s one of those no-go areas that is very recently coming under examination by a new generation of, I think, very impressive Irish historians. After the war, the Republic switches its electoral system to a version of the single transferable vote. Why did they do that, and how has it mattered for Irish politics?…

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