Had intended to highlight this extract from The Journal before now. A reader emailed it a week or two ago, but between one thing and another, I'm only getting to it now.
It's the memoir of a US ambassador, David Gray, who had a stint in de Valera's Ireland during The Emergency. Or the Second World War as the world outside Ireland knew it.
Well worth a read, if the extract below is any guide.
‘Mr de Valera’s conviction that Hitler would win the war was stupid’
David Gray, the US Amabassador to Ireland in 1940, reveals just what he thought of Dev, the 1916 leaders and why he thought Ireland was in collusion with the Nazis.
Eamon De Valera on the steps of No. 10 Downing Street, London.
Image: (PA Archive/Press Association Images)
David Gray became US Minister (Ambassador) to Ireland
in 1940. His memoir, written at the age of 89, is published for the
first time by the Royal Irish Academy and is a patchwork of top-secret documents, letters to Roosevelt and extracts from his diary.
Gray was born in New York in 1870 and was a journalist and
playwright before joining the military and entering politics. He was not
well disposed to Irish republicanism. He came to hold Irish society in
contempt and despised de Valera, believing that certain Irish officials
were collaborating with the Nazis to achieve a British defeat and a
32-county republic. This extract is from 1940. He writes:
The Taoiseach’s office (pronounced popularly ‘tee shack’) and
surroundings were all as they had been so often described by
interviewers. He himself was the tall, gaunt figure with the suggestion
of Lincoln, and ironically in the corner stood the O’Connor bronze
statue of Lincoln which John McCormack, the singer, had given to the
Irish government. The office was bare, the flat-topped desk was bare and
Mr de Valera was dressed in his invariable black clerical-looking suit
with black string tie.
He was always neat and his linen was always fresh. His grave eye
trouble excited sympathy. It was said that he suffered from glaucoma.
From time to time he removed his spectacles and put his hands over his
eyes, and from time to time he showed the appealing smile that I had
heard about and the suggestion of his peculiar charm.
Why Mr de Valera replied to my English speech in Irish was a question not difficult to answer. Both languages are sanctioned by the new Constitution, but Mr de Valera and his Separatist group were anxious to impress on the outside world that English is only an unfortunate and temporary makeshift and that Irish is the true and natural tongue of the nation, though today only one person in six speaks it. Very few Irish politicians speak Irish except as American High School students learn to ‘speak’ French, but they usually begin their speeches with a paragraph in Irish, which they have memorised, and then continue in English. It is the badge of being ‘Irish’ Irish, like the Gaelicisation of proper names.
Why Mr de Valera replied to my English speech in Irish was a question not difficult to answer. Both languages are sanctioned by the new Constitution, but Mr de Valera and his Separatist group were anxious to impress on the outside world that English is only an unfortunate and temporary makeshift and that Irish is the true and natural tongue of the nation, though today only one person in six speaks it. Very few Irish politicians speak Irish except as American High School students learn to ‘speak’ French, but they usually begin their speeches with a paragraph in Irish, which they have memorised, and then continue in English. It is the badge of being ‘Irish’ Irish, like the Gaelicisation of proper names.
1916 leaders turned out in tails and white ties
The official dinner in the state apartments of the Castle that
evening was as elaborate and well done as the ceremony in the morning.
Food, wines, service, cigars, all were unexceptionable. The de Valera
revolution had been to a large extent a ‘social movement’. It appealed
to the ‘common man’ and repudiated the symbols of privilege. Mr de
Valera banned the ‘topper’ and wore the black ‘cowboy’ hat. He and his
Cabinet constituted the surviving nucleus of ‘The Sixteen’ and the
left-wing IRA faction that had staged the Civil War. Almost every man
present had been condemned to death or jail either by the British
government or by the Free State government, yet only eight years after
coming to power this new aristocracy had all turned out in tails and
white ties in the best London tradition, I had never sat down to dine
with so many people who had been ‘martyred’ and thrown into prison, nor
with so many politicians, who after having been down and out had ‘come
back in’ and stayed ‘in’. It had its embarrassing side. It was like
dining in a house in which there has been a highly publicised domestic
difficulty.
Just as I would have wanted to ask my host whether he really beat his
wife as alleged, I wanted to ask the questions to which every historian
of the period was trying to find the answers. I wanted to ask why Mr de
Valera had not abided by the majority action of his own parliament; why
he appealed to the gun and started a Civil War. How he escaped being
shot for rebellion, first by the British and then by the first Irish
government ever to be recognised by the comity of nations. I wanted to
ask him whether Michael Collins had been the chance victim of an ambush
or the designed victim of an assassination; and if he knew who murdered
Kevin O’Higgins. Of course I asked none of these questions.
The German Ambassador
Herr Hempel – the German minister to Ireland – had a charming house
and garden at Blackrock, a suburb on Dublin harbour. His chancery was an
ugly, modern red brick house in Northumberland Road. It was here that I
called upon him. Herr Dr Hempel received us with great courtesy. He was
somewhat over-civil and did not ring true. He spoke fluent English with
little accent. I was conscious of being ill at ease. Hempel might be
doing his duty as he saw it but he was serving a Führer whose hands were
red with the blood of Jews, Poles and Norwegians, on whose conscience
was the annihilation of Austria and Czechoslovakia. I was naive enough
at seventy to be shocked by these things.
We exchanged pleasant commonplaces. I was not to re-enter the German
legation at 58 Northumberland Road till I took possession of it in the
name of the United Nations at the end of the war and found the wires of
a radio sending set and other interesting items. The Irish government
had seen to it that we did not gain admittance until the files had
been destroyed.
Collaboration with the Germans
Mr de Valera’s conviction that Hitler would win the war was stupid in
view of the opportunities he enjoyed for obtaining
authoritative information as to what was going on in the United States.
It was doubtless due to the fact that he knew few if any Americans, only
‘Irish in America’. As a matter of fact he himself never told me that
Hitler would win, though he scoffed at the suggestion that the United
States would become involved. But his deputy Joe Walshe told me.
Further, Mr Walshe was confident that at the worst, Hitler would not
lose. Cardinal MacRory told me that Hitler would win. Count Plunkett,
the patriarch of the IRA, expressed the same opinion. We know from
the German papers that one of Mr de Valera’s generals was
collaborating with Hempel. Belief in German victory was in the Dublin
air. At the end of the war a former Lord Mayor of Dublin, ‘Paddy’ Doyle,
a very ‘decent’ man, said to me ‘You know, at the beginning we were all
sure Germany was going to win’.
A Yankee in De Valera’s Ireland: The Memoir of David Gray is
edited by Paul Bew. Paul Bew is a member of the RIA and Professor of
Irish Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. A historical advisor to
the Bloody Sunday inquiry, he was appointed an independent cross-bench
peer in 2007 and is a member of the British–Irish Parliamentary
Assembly.
6 comments:
David Gray sounds like an interesting chap. He was Eleanor Roosevelt's uncle and freely admitted he got the job for that reason. His favourite method of 'intelligence' gathering was to hold seances.
It that's the case; between Mr Gray consulting the spirit world via seances, and Dev consulting the lord Almighty himself via Archbishop John Charles McQuaid before enacting the laws of the "republic", it seems like an interesting combination.
"The Irish government had seen to it that we did not gain admittance until the files had been destroyed." How dense can a group of people be, after all Hitler did? Invasion after invasion, and this lot still had sympathies for them.
Oh yes Dev was the lad for the job, no doubt about that. There is really no wisdom whatsoever among the Irish in groups. All the indicators are there (LOL)...
They'll claim they never heard of the Nuremberg Laws, DC3.
Yes GM, if todays cultural ilk is anything to go by, they would surely have had such cheek. Tricky, Creepy Isle.
De Valera.....a great old Irish name....when he sent his condolences to the German Ambassador on the death of Hitler as the 'Leader' of the Irish Nation was in fact only the ambassador of the dirty little Vatican which had occupied Ireland far more thoroughly than Hitler could ever have hoped to.
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