A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  Vote, vote, vote for Harry Midgley,

  In comes Collins at the door—I-O!

  For Collins is the one who’s goin’ to have some fun,

  And we don’t want Midgley any more—GET OUT!

  In fact neither Midgley nor Collins won the seat—it was captured by a Unionist. The Unionists, overall, had won a crushing majority. Craigavon had made his point to de Valera.

  Episode 240

  ‘CRYING FOR A HAPPIER LIFE’

  The world depression of the 1930s caused destitution everywhere; and, by western European standards, Ireland was hit hard. In the Irish Free State the numbers on the unemployment register reached 145,000 in 1936. In Northern Ireland 101,967 had no work in July 1935, and in February 1938 29.5 per cent of insured industrial workers were unemployed.

  Harold Binks, a trade union official, remembered seeing barefoot children waiting at the Albert Bridge pens in Belfast to get the unwanted, unsterilised milk from cows about to be shipped to England. The vigorous efforts—not always successful—to ensure the pasteurisation of milk in Belfast were not mirrored in Dublin. There a government committee reported that the Dublin slums were crammed with children crippled as a result of drinking contaminated milk. Dr Robert Collis, a Dublin paediatrician, estimated that about 40,000 people in Dublin were attempting to feed themselves on sixpence a day. He had grown tired of giving medicine to poor children who really needed food.

  People living on the land had a better life expectancy than their city counterparts. But depressed prices ensured that a great many farmers lived in extreme poverty. Northern Ireland’s farms were exceptionally small: a third of them contained ten acres or less. The income of small farmers was reckoned to be lower than an unemployed man received on the dole. In the Irish Free State, which became Éire in 1937, fewer than a fifth of farms were fifty acres or more in size.

  Many of those attempting to make a living on the land gave up the struggle: they voted with their feet by leaving the island altogether. Nearly half a million people—most of them young and from the countryside—left the twenty-six counties during the 1920s and 1930s. The Fianna Fáil governments, eager to uphold rural values, erected 16,526 labourers’ cottages. The same energy was not shown in Dublin. Here, in 1938, 111,950 people lived in 6,307 tenements, half of them deemed to be irreparably unfit for habitation. Governments could not face the expense of buying out the slum landlords. In 1936 the Irish Press, Fianna Fáil paper though it was, concluded:

  If this is the second century of slumdom, it is also the 14th year of a self-governed state, when the babies of 1916 are still, as men and women, crying for a happier life for their babies, crying for simple shelter.

  Dublin Corporation did build 7,637 houses between 1933 and 1939. Belfast Corporation in the entire period between the two world wars put up only just over 2,000 council houses. And even this feeble effort had been attended by scandals involving profiteering and the use of inferior materials. Co. Fermanagh did not see a single dwelling built by public enterprise in these years.

  Overcrowding, malnutrition and general poverty kept death rates from disease alarmingly high. A government survey reported that 60 per cent of Dublin mothers were unable to breastfeed because they were so undernourished. There the infant mortality rate was 90 per 1,000. In Belfast it was even higher: 96 per 1,000 compared with 59 per 1,000 in Sheffield. Anne Boyle, a resident of the Oldpark district, remembered:

  There was so much infant mortality that it seemed as if every week blue baby coffins were coming out of every street. I had three brothers and a sister dead before they were two years old, out of eleven of us.

  At Stormont Professor R. J. Johnstone told fellow-MPs: ‘Maternity is a more dangerous occupation in Northern Ireland than in the Free State or in England.’ He was right: maternal mortality actually rose by one-fifth between 1922 and 1938. And the most feared disease, the main killer of young adults was tuberculosis. Dr Noël Browne, later Éire’s Minister for Health, remembered that his afflicted brother was

  unwanted, crippled and unable to fend for himself or communicate his simplest needs, except to the family; he was unable to mix with his peers. It is impossible to imagine the awesome humiliation and desperation of his life.

  In Belfast Anne Boyle recalled:

  There were twenty-eight in my class at school, and when I was about twenty-five I would say that half of those girls were dead, mostly from tuberculosis…. I remembered the sexton of Sacred Heart chapel, Paddy McKernan; all he had was four daughters, and those four daughters died within a couple of years. They were teenage girls.

  There seemed to be no promise of an end to the Depression. Then on 3 September 1939, when Kilkenny triumphed over Cork in the All-Ireland Hurling Final in Croke Park, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told listeners on the BBC that the United Kingdom was at war.

  Episode 241

  THE EMERGENCY

  On 3 September 1939 Britain and France declared war on Germany. Members of the Dáil and the Seanad had been sitting all night to listen to the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, and to approve his decision that Éire would remain neutral. After supporting an Emergency Powers Bill to give the government special powers ‘in time of war’ to secure the public safety, they came out of Leinster House to attend six o’clock Mass. That afternoon a fierce thunderstorm swept Croke Park as Kilkenny defeated Cork in the All-Ireland Hurling Final. The same storm brought down a British four-engined Sunderland flying-boat, forcing it to land just off Skerries eleven miles north of Dublin. The local Gardaí brought the crew ashore by dingy and, after deciding quickly not to intern the airmen, allowed them to get fuel from the local petrol station and fly away. The incident was not reported in the press. That night the British liner Athenia was torpedoed by the German submarine U-30 off the coast of Donegal with a loss of 112 lives.

  Could Ireland really remain neutral? German U-boats were menacing Allied shipping all around Ireland’s coasts. On 9 September the 6,000-ton Olive Grove was torpedoed off Co. Cork, and on 25 September a U-boat shelled and sank the British steamer Hazleside off Schull; the first man to die was Denis Treacy from Arklow, hit in the face by a shell. Nevertheless, the people of Éire supported neutrality. The only Dáil deputy to argue that Britain should be supported in this war was James Dillon, and he was forced to resign from Fine Gael soon after.

  Certainly Éire’s defences were miserably inadequate. At the beginning of September 1939 the army had only 6,000 regular soldiers, poorly trained and equipped. Plans to mobilise more men largely failed through lack of money, and by May 1940 there were still only 13,500 men. In that year it was reported in confidence that there was ‘almost a complete absence of the most important weapons, namely anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft weapons and automatic weapons’ and ‘a very considerable deficiency of artillery and mortars’. On 15 May 1940 Colonel Liam Archer of Irish Intelligence told Guy Liddell, M15’s Director of Counter-Intelligence, that Irish resistance would not last a week if the Germans landed. Early in 1942 the Air Corps had just six slow-flying Lysanders and three obsolete Gloucester Gladiator fighter biplanes. The navy consisted of one armed trawler, Fort Rannoch, and Muirchú (this latter vessel was in fact the gunboat Helga, used against insurgents in Dublin in 1916 and subsequently bought from the British and renamed).

  At first the principal threat seemed to be the enemy within. On Saturday 23 December 1939 a man called with a Christmas parcel at the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park. When the guard stepped out to accept it, IRA men seized the fort, and over the next two hours, using a dozen lorries, the raiders made off with a great quantity of small arms and a million rounds of ammunition. Though most of the ammunition was later recovered, this was clear evidence that de Valera was wrong when he said that he had broken the power of the IRA.

  On the night of 22 May 1940 the Gardaí raided the Dublin home of an IRA agent, Stephen Held. They discovered a radio transmitter, a uniform, $20,000, coded messages, and evidence that Dr Herman Görtz, a German spy pa
rachuted into Co. Meath, had been staying in the house. It became clear that there was close collaboration between the Third Reich and the IRA. Little resulted from this alliance. Though Görtz remained at liberty for more than a year, most other German spies were quickly captured after arrival. A plan to take two IRA leaders, Seán Russell and Frank Ryan, from Germany to Ireland by U-boat was abandoned after Russell died on board. That there were collaborators ready to welcome the Germans is clear. They included Dan Breen, the War of Independence veteran, and Iseult Stuart; and three northern nationalists, Senator Thomas McLaughlin, Peadar Murney and John Southwell, who decided at a meeting with the German Minister in Dublin, Edouard Hempel, ‘to place the Catholic minority in the north under the protection of the Axis powers’.

  On 26 June 1940 Malcolm MacDonald, on behalf of the British government, handed de Valera a one-page memorandum. The Germans had swept through the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg, driven the remnants of the British army to Dunkirk, and accomplished the surrender of France. Winston Churchill was now British Prime Minister. The paper offered a declaration accepting the principle of a united Ireland if Éire joined the war effort. De Valera was not tempted, mainly because he did not think Britain would be successful in obtaining ‘the assent thereto of the Government of Northern Ireland’.

  On the night of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Churchill sent a final message to de Valera: ‘Now is your chance, now or never, a nation once again.’ But not only did the Taoiseach refuse his request to make the Treaty ports available again to Britain; he even sent a formal protest to the USA when American troops landed in Northern Ireland in January 1942. However, Sir John Maffey, the British Representative in Dublin, quietly came to the conclusion that a neutral Éire was actually, on balance, helpful to the Allies. The Irish army Intelligence unit, G2, headed by Colonel Dan Bryan, regularly sent to Britain weather reports and intercepted German communiqués. Germans who crash-landed were all interned, but in time most surviving British airmen were either put on the train to Belfast or allowed to fly away after their machines had been repaired. Approximately 70,000 southern Irish men and women joined the British armed forces, and no attempt was made to stop them (they won 780 decorations, including seven Victoria Crosses). Travel permits were freely issued, and some 200,000 Éire citizens worked in British factories during the war. And Irish food exports to the UK proved vital.

  Churchill’s policy was to ‘keep Éire lean’. The result was acute shortages of fuel and raw materials. By 1942 more than 26,000 were employed on 803 bogs to supply turf, but this was not enough to prevent power cuts and transport paralysis. German aircraft did accidentally drop bombs on Éire: in the worst incident 34 were killed, 90 were injured and 300 houses were destroyed or damaged in Dublin’s North Strand on 31 May 1941.

  To maintain a strict neutral stance, the government imposed a rigorous censorship on the press, Radio Éireann, the post and telephones. It could not, however, prevent citizens listening in to the BBC. Nevertheless, the people were not informed about the death camps, and when the Sunday Independent published a report on the horrors of Belsen, de Valera described it as ‘anti-national propaganda’. Perhaps the most startling evidence of a refusal to acknowledge Nazi tyranny was a report in the Irish Press on 1 April 1943: ‘There is no kind of oppression visited on any minority in Europe which the six-county Nationalists have not endured.’

  Episode 242

  THE BLITZ AND AFTER

  ‘Ulster is ready when we get the word and always will be,’ Lord Craigavon, Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, had boasted as the war approached. Very soon, however, the government proved itself unequal to the demands of total war. Sir Wilfrid Spender, the Cabinet Secretary, thought that Craigavon was a premier whom ‘true friends would advise to retire now’ because he was incapable of doing ‘more than an hour’s constructive work in a day’. Lady Londonderry simply observed that the Prime Minister was ‘ga-ga’. The only new recruit to the cabinet was John MacDermott, appointed as Minister of Public Security. Sir Richard Dawson Bates, Minister of Home Affairs, was frequently drunk and simply refused to reply to army correspondence. Edmond Warnock resigned as his parliamentary secretary because the government ‘has been slack, dilatory and apathetic’.

  When Craigavon died on 24 November 1940, his replacement, John Miller Andrews, kept the old guard in office, and under his direction the government was no more capable than before of coping with the exigencies of war. On 30 November a single unobserved German plane flew high over Belfast; the crew brought back high-definition photographs of suitable targets, demonstrating that the entire city was defended by only seven anti-aircraft batteries. France had fallen, and British cities endured relentless German attack from the air. Yet the government still did little to protect citizens in Northern Ireland: people in Belfast were told that they could use the underground toilets in Shaftesbury Square and Donegall Square North in the event of an air-raid; and the plan to evacuate 70,000 children from the city was activated only in July 1940, and of the 8,800 who turned up, more than half had returned by the spring of 1941.

  On the night of 7–8 April a small squadron of German bombers inflicted damaging blows to Harland & Wolff and Belfast’s docks. Later a Luftwaffe pilot gave this description on German radio:

  We were in exceptional good humour knowing that we were going for a new target, one of England’s last hiding places. Wherever Churchill is hiding his war material will go…. Belfast is as worthy a target as Coventry, Birmingham, Bristol or Glasgow.

  Air crews reported that the city’s defences were ‘inferior in quality, scanty and insufficient’.

  On Easter Tuesday 15 April 1941 180 German bombers, predominantly Junkers 88s and Heinkel 111s, flew from northern France, over the Irish Sea and towards Belfast. At 10.40 p.m. the sirens wailed, and over the next five hours the bombers dropped 203 metric tons of bombs and 800 firebomb canisters on the city. At 1.45 a.m. a bomb wrecked the city’s telephone exchange, cutting off all contact with Britain and the anti-aircraft operations room. It was not the industrial heartland but the congested housing north of the city centre that received the full force of the attack.

  In response to a desperate appeal made by railway telegraph at 4.35 a.m., Eamon de Valera authorised fire-engines from Dublin, Dún Laoghaire, Drogheda and Dundalk to speed northwards. Since the water mains had been cracked in so many places, little could be done. At least 900 citizens died: no other city in the UK, except London, had lost so many lives in one air-raid. Spender felt that Belfast’s fire brigade made a poor showing, and John Smith, the city’s chief fire officer, was found beneath a table in his office, weeping and refusing to come out. An American, seconded by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to Shorts, was not impressed by his fellow-workers; in a letter to his parents in California he wrote:

  All I can say is that the tough Irish must come from S. Ireland because the boys up in N. Ireland are a bunch of chicken shit yellow bastards—90% of them left everything and ran like hell. Short and Harlands, the aircraft factory that builds Stirlings here, had 300 Volunteer fire fighters in the plant, after the raid they were lucky to get 90 of them.

  The German bombers returned in even greater force to Belfast on the evening of Sunday 4 May. In the words of one pilot, ‘Visibility was wonderful. I could make out my targets perfectly.’ The Luftwaffe concentrated attack on the harbour, the shipyards, the aircraft factory, the docks and the city centre. Ernst von Kuhren, a war correspondent, broadcast his impressions afterwards:

  When we approached the target at half-past two we stared silently into a sea of flames such as none of us had seen before…. In Belfast there was not a large number of conflagrations, but just one enormous conflagration which spread over the entire harbour and industrial area…. Here the English had concentrated an important part of their war industries because they felt themselves safe, far up in the North, safe from the blows of the German airforce. This has come to an end.

  The death toll for t
his May raid was 191, a low figure explained by two facts: firstly, in this Sabbatarian city the centre was largely deserted when the attack began; secondly, a very large number of people had already fled to the countryside. By the end of the month 220,000 had left the city, and every evening tens of thousands left Belfast to sleep in the open in the safety of the countryside.

  In January 1941, almost a year before the USA entered the war, American ‘civilian technicians’ had been coming to Northern Ireland. They began to develop Derry as the most important anti-submarine base in the North Western Approaches, and Lower Lough Erne as a key flying-boat base. On 26 January 1942, shortly after Hitler had casually declared war on the richest nation on earth, the first American troops stepped ashore at Belfast’s Dufferin Quay. The USA took over the defence of Northern Ireland, and, now that the Wehrmacht was largely engaged against the Soviet Union, American troops prepared in comparative safety for Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, and then for the D-Day landings in Normandy. Altogether some 300,000 Americans were stationed at one time or another in Northern Ireland.

  In April 1943 Unionist backbenchers ousted Andrews, and Sir Basil Brooke became Prime Minister. Brooke came to power as Northern Ireland belatedly strove to feed the insatiable Allied war machine. Altogether Harland & Wolff launched almost 170 Admiralty and merchant ships and repaired or converted about 30,000 vessels, in addition to manufacturing over 13 million aircraft parts, over 500 tanks and thousands of guns. Short & Harland by the end of the war had completed almost 1,200 Stirling bombers and 125 Sunderland flying-boats. By VE-Day, 8 May 1945, the mass unemployment of the inter-war years was but a memory.