British Spies and Irish Rebels
British Intelligence and Ireland, 1916-1945
Paul McMahon
Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2008, h/b, £30
First up, I have no specialist knowledge of this area, so if there any howlers in here, I’m unlikely to spot them. However, I know a good book when I see one. This has been produced to a high standard as befits a book that intends becoming the definitive account of the relationship between the British intelligence and security services, and what finally became, after a bitter and highly divisive struggle, both north and south of the border, the 26 county Republic of Ireland (Eire). The author has made extensive use of both published sources and official papers (as far as permitted) on both sides of the Irish Sea, and this is shown in the wealth of footnotes that document his research.
Equally I couldn’t detect much in the way of bias (that is upfront partisanship, although such reliance and focus on governments and their actions produces its own bias, but that’s a different argument). McMahon is as scathing about the pointless IRA actions in the 1930s and 1940s as he is about the British government’s (and many of its intelligence operatives’) apparent inability to work outside a very racist and colonialist mindset when dealing with the ‘Irish’ problem. He also gets inside de Valera’s almost cynical use of the republican threat which enabled him to wring concessions out of the British government, which (while I have no criticism of them) were often carried out because of the lack of proper British intelligence on the ground in the 26 counties.
Moreover the Protestant landowners and others who were prounion who stayed (or survived the attempted expulsion of them) in the 26 counties are shown to be culpable of providing the intelligence services with exaggerated reports, and the Unionists in the North also supplied self-serving information. In short we have an excellent example of politics as usual, where everybody supplies inaccurate information to others to further their own interests. And if they weren’t trying to fool others, they were deluding themselves as the various physical force elements in the IRA continued with bombing and other campaigns against an ‘enemy’ who was merely stiffened in its resolve to resist because of them.
After the partition and the Civil War, the position of the 26 county government was in diplomatic terms an anomaly; and this was a major cause of British inability to frame an efficient and workable way of getting reliable information on the south, in particular on elements which might pose some form of risk. Until it became a fully-fledged independent republic in 1949 there was uncertainty as to what form diplomatic relations should take. There was no longer any possibility of treating the south as part of the United Kingdom, so internal security forces could not be deployed there (there would have been massive opposition if it had been found out), but equally it was not a totally sovereign ‘foreign’ state with which formal diplomatic relations could be established which would allow the operation of the Secret Intelligence Service on a formal basis.
Co-operation, at least in the formative years of the southern state, was always problematic, not least because many senior British politicians and intelligence chiefs were either smarting at the loss of the territory and totally lacked trust in the bona fides of their southern Irish counterparts, considering many to be still IRA men at heart, waiting for the opportunity to restart the war; or there was a liberal hope that limited self-government was a step towards some form of political rapprochement and reunion, albeit on different terms than before. Few were willing to accept that Ireland really was a foreign country.
On the other hand there were situations in which some form of co-operation was advisable, and with war looming this became the most important issue. However, this took time to achieve and even during the war there were breakdowns over a few issues, not least the operation of the German legation in Dublin during the Second World War. However, much as the British resented the Irish sticking to their position of strict neutrality, they equally did not want to drive the Irish into the enemy camp. (The Irish government’s position can be simplified to: whoever invades us first we will ally with the other side.)
The war saw increasing technical co-operation and the Irish turned a blind eye towards covert British operations inside the 26 counties, provided it did not conflict with their interests; but refused to have formal recognition of them (as that would have been politically unacceptable south of the border.) The British turned over much of their intelligence work to a private detective agency, which, of course, kept the Irish intelligence people fully informed of what they were up to.
For the first couple of years of the war, there was a near consensus in Whitehall that the British Isles was teeming with Fifth Columnists and the security services were berated for not finding many enemy agents. Eventually they realised the reason for the lack of such agents (very few had landed!), and such agents as did manage to land were quickly dealt with and in some cases turned. There remained the problem of Britain’s ‘back door’ – Ireland, and the leakage of useful information. Fortunately, a combination of stringent British censorship, controls on shipping and intelligence co-operation saw the few German agents that landed there eventually rounded up; and it was established that the German legation was more keen to keep itself operational in a neutral country than undertake much espionage and intelligence gathering.
Two agents who failed to make it to Ireland were Sean Russell and Frank Ryan, senior IRA men who sailed from Germany on a mission; but that was aborted when Russell died on board the U-boat, and it had to turn back because Ryan hadn’t been given the details of the mission! To say the IRA was divided during this period is an understatement. There were clear anti-fascist, opportunist and pro-fascist camps (almost literally in the case of those who were interned during the war.) Quite what the IRA thought it would gain by instituting a bombing campaign in England in 1939 is unknown; and continuing it into 1940 destroyed any sympathy anyone on the mainland might have felt for their cause, and to a great extent the organisation as well. More cynical was the Belfast IRA actually sending the German legation in Dublin a map of Belfast, with areas with a mainly Catholic population clearly marked in the hope that German bombers would avoid them and concentrate on the Protestant areas. (The map was intercepted en route.)
As the war went on, the Irish remained strictly neutral, but with the probability of an Allied victory increasing they became more friendly towards the eventual winners. (Indeed many thousands of people from the south volunteered to join the British armed forces, while others took the opportunity to earn good money working in essential industries and on the land.) The working co-operation between the British and Irish security and intelligence services proved extremely valuable to both parties and set the tone for post-war relations, which culminated with the declaration of a fully independent state in 1949.
In a review this length it’s impossible to fully convey the scope and depth of this book. There is much more, including the work of British propaganda both here and the United States. (There is, for example, some information about John Betjeman, who served as British Press Attaché in Dublin during the war.) This sets a high standard for the rest of the volumes in the series and I can thoroughly recommend it, not just for the light it shines on the work of British intelligence services but the wider political and diplomatic world of the period.