Times
November 24, 2002

MI5 ‘guarded Irish war neutrality’
John Lee



DECLASSIFIED MI5 files show the British intelligence agency supported and protected Irish neutrality during the second world war despite Winston Churchill’s fears that Ireland’s stance was jeopardising plans for D-Day.
Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt vehemently opposed Irish neutrality because it allowed the German and Japanese legations to remain in Dublin gathering information about allied operations. But Britain’s intelligence agency took the opposite view.

In the run-up to D-Day, the British and American leaders put diplomatic pressure on Ireland to revise its neutrality and expel the axis legations. Churchill even considered invading the republic and had drawn up contingency plans for the attack.

Recently released MI5 files show that Britain’s intelligence agency differed with Churchill and actually helped engineer Ireland’s continued neutrality in the belief that it would help, and not hinder, the allies’ war efforts. It was MI5, also known then as the Security Service, that reined in an increasingly belligerent Churchill.

While political relations between Britain and Ireland were strained during the war, the respective security services enjoyed unprecedented co- operation, according to the documents.

The revelations are contained in a new book by Trinity College professor Eunan O’Halpin, MI5 and Ireland 1939-1945, which is based on the declassified British government files. It reveals the true extent of the British intelligence’s activities in the republic during the war, or the Emergency as it was known here.

O’Halpin discovered that, as well as MI5, MI6, the Radio Security Service, Special Operations Executive and GCHQ secretly operated extensive counter-intelligence and codebreaking activities here in an effort to track down axis espionage operations — and that the Irish intelligence agency G2 helped. At the same time, German spies were making serious attempts to forge links with the IRA.

O’Halpin says: “Churchill regarded Irish neutrality as an almost personal affront.”

In a bad-tempered speech in May 1945, the imposing British leader implied that, in the interests of national survival during the war with Nazi Germany, Britain would have been quite entitled to breach Irish neutrality.

He said in the Commons: “However, with a restraint and poise to which history will find few parallels, we never laid a violent hand upon them, which at times would have been quite easy and quite natural, and left the de Valera government to frolic with the German and later the Japanese representatives to their heart’s content.”

In January 1946, MI5 operative Cecil Liddell wrote a classifed history of wartime operations in Ireland. This document is pivotal to O’Halpin’s book.

It says that MI5 received extensive information on German activities in Ireland with the help of the Irish Department of Defence.

The Irish director of military intelligence, Colonel Dan Bryan, even helped the British to eavesdrop on the German legation’s radio transmissions.

The Liddell history, as it is called, says: “As things turned out, Eire neutral was of more value to the British war effort than Eire belligerent would have been. Had Eire come into the war on the side of Britain, her people would almost certainly have been conscripted and with almost equal certainty . . . would have been kept in Eire.”

It goes on to say that the British would have been deprived of huge Irish supplies of labour needed for its war economy.

O’Halpin says: “MI5 and, independently MI6, came to the conclusion that the only way you can deal with Britain’s huge security problem relating to Ireland was to co-operate with the Irish.”

The document notes that neutrality was believed to pose a serious threat to Operation Overlord, which became D-Day, and Churchill and the American government pressurised Ireland to expel the Germans and Japanese.

It says: “Not just Churchill, but the American military under Eisenhower, were very concerned that any invasion information, not just through espionage but by accident, might get out through Ireland.

“They knew that the enemy diplomats were picking up lots of gossip, quite apart from the fact that there was diplomatic spying that late in the war.

“Some Paddy coming home for the weekend might say there’s a fierce amount of people down in x or y or z and that might prove to be crucial.”

Initially D-Day was planned for March 1944 and the allies were becoming increasingly concerned about the Irish situation.

In February 1944, the American minister in Dublin demanded that the German legation be expelled — with D-Day imminent, the Americans were paranoid that it would be compromised in Dublin.

According to the declassified documents, Churchill, always anxious to please the Americans, told his joint chiefs of staff that “the German and enemy embassies should be sent away forthwith.

“We ought not to be behind when the United States themselves were pressing in a matter of this kind against the hostile gang in Dublin.”

MI5 submitted a report to Churchill “on the dangers of leakage through the axis legations in Eire and on the pros and cons for expulsion”.

According to the Liddell history, MI5 told Churchill: “There would be very little, if any, security advantage in the removal of the German legation, whose communications we then controlled, but which, if removed, might be replaced at the most critical period by enemy agents with means of communication which it would take time to discover.

“All the more so as our relations with Eire would be so strained that it was at least doubtful whether we should continue to receive the assistance we had hitherto received in matters of this kind.

“After consideration of these views, the cabinet decided that there would be no security advantage in the removal of the German legation.”

Not all historians believe neutrality benefited the allies.

Professor Henry Patterson, of the University of Ulster, says: “Because the allies didn’t have access to ports and airfields in the south, ships were sunk that wouldn’t have been sunk, lives were lost that shouldn’t have been.”

“There was a very strong feeling, not just in London, but in the United States that de Valera had behaved despicably during the war. The unionists in the north exploited that for all they could.”