Book Review

In the war but not at war

That Neutral Island: a cultural history of Ireland during the Second World War

On the morning of 15 January 1943, Micky Tannian, a farmer's teenaged son from County Galway, heard a military plane circling the sky around Athenry. Tannian believed that Ireland was being invaded - whether by the British or the Germans, he didn't know - and he was scared that the humdrum reality of Irish life during the Emergency was about to be punctured by the harsh reality of war. In fact, the aircraft was an American bomber - the "Stinky" - that crash-landed at Athenry later that day leaving its entire crew of 16 uninjured. The wreckage was subsequently dismantled, and both plane and crew were quietly transferred to Northern Ireland in the early hours of 16 January. This episode suggests some of the central themes of Clair Wills' masterly study of Irish politics, society and culture during the Second World War. Neutral Ireland was both in and out of the war: the country suffered from unemployment, food shortages, emigration, censorship, poverty and paranoia but it was not systematically bombed like the major British cities or indeed Belfast (where almost 900 people were killed by German bombs on the night of 15 April 1941). Furthermore, neutral Ireland was, in reality, a "friendly neutral", which informally assisted the Allies throughout the Emergency.

Broadly speaking, there are two views of the Irish state's decision to declare itself as neutral during the Second World War. From the Irish point of view, it was argued that the Irish Free State had little choice but to adopt the policy of neutrality. Ireland was insufficiently armed to be able to defend itself against invasion or aerial bombardment; the Irish Free State had the right to pursue its own foreign policy and to assert its independence from Britain; and involvement in the war might exacerbate internal tensions that could destabilise the fledgling state (the memory of the Irish Civil War (1922-23) continued to divide Irish society). From the British point of view, on the other hand, Irish neutrality was regarded as a political failure to join in the fight to defend democracy; and also as a moral failure to face up to and resist the evil of Nazism. Wills is sympathetic towards Ireland's position of neutrality and acknowledges that it was the natural policy for the Irish Free State to adopt, given its lack of military capacity and the recent history of conflict between Britain and Ireland during the War of Independence (1919-21) and the economic war of the 1930s (as well as widespread ignorance of the realities of Nazism). However, she also demonstrates that neutrality cut Ireland off from wider intellectual influences, and that this had both positive and negative implications for the development of cultural life. Furthermore, she suggests that cultural detachment may have been accompanied by a kind of moral detachment, perhaps most evident in the reluctance of Irish commentators to accept the truth of the Holocaust in the weeks after the end of the war (and in the reluctance of the Irish Free State to allow persecuted Jewish refugees to come to Ireland).

This is historical writing at its very best. Wills, professor of Irish literature at Queen Mary, University of London, interweaves cultural, social and political history in a beautifully written and subtly argued account of life during wartime in Ireland. There are superb analyses of the work of the major Irish writers working in both English and Irish at this time - Brendan Behan, Elizabeth Bowen, Dennis Johnston, Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Kate O'Brien, Máirtín O'Cadhain, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain and Brian O'Nolan - as well as interesting analyses of less well-known writers. Creative writing is used to illuminate the nature of Irish life at the time, and the discussion of Kavanagh's long poem The Great Hunger and O'Cadhain's novel Cré na Cille are brilliant analyses of the fate and failure of rural Ireland in the decades after independence.

Wills has also read widely in provincial newspapers, parliamentary reports and statistics, and the extensive secondary literature to provide a valuable social history of Ireland during this period. Her discussion of subjects as varied as joyriding, prostitution, bicycle theft and tea shortages are a welcome departure from the obsession with "high politics" in the work of many historians of Ireland.

Wills' judgements are mostly fair-minded and astute, but I would disagree with her characterisation of Frank Ryan (a Left-leaning Irish republican) as an "unlikely fascist collaborator". He may have opportunistically cooperated with the Germans in order to return to Ireland from Berlin in 1940 but his history of fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War surely sets him apart from genuine Nazi collaborators like the writer Francis Stuart.

Wills is perhaps also incorrect to assume that the work of creative writers gives voice to the thoughts and feelings of the "silent majority". While her discussion of literary sources does illuminate a great deal about Irish society, by and large, historians have not listened to the real voices of the ordinary people of Ireland.

Wills has made an excellent and pioneering start in the excavation of Irish social history during this period, but the social history of twentieth-century Ireland still, largely, remains to be written, and further studies may suggest a broader range of perspectives on the Second World War. The stories of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Irish men and women who lived through the Emergency await their chronicler.

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