Sparked by the Irish documentary about the weather conditions on D-Day, I learned about the working together of South-Ireland and Britain. 
I did some further research and learned a lot that I didn't know.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/features/in-service-to-their-country-moving-tales-of-irishmen-who-fought-in-wwii-350818.html
There seems to have been 5000 Irish volunteers who swept uniforms to fight for the UK from I thought the Irish Republic that was neutral and another 60,000 civilians. And I couldn't understand that, but now I see that Southern Ireland had the status of dominion as Canada and Australia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emergency_(Ireland)
"On 6 December 1922, following the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence, the island of Ireland became an autonomous dominion, known as the Irish Free State. On 7 December 1922^[6], the parliament of the six north-eastern counties, already known as Northern Ireland, voted to opt out of the Irish Free State and rejoin the United Kingdom. This Treaty settlement was immediately followed by the bitter Irish Civil War between the pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty factions of the Irish Republican Army."
And yes that treaty sparked the Irish Civil War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Civil_War
But now I see that there were more volunteers to fight for Britain, the 5000 I mentioned where those from the Irish army, who so called deserted to join a foreign army.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-16287211
But also the others?
https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/features/in-service-to-their-country-moving-tales-of-irishmen-who-fought-in-wwii-350818.html

The irish Republic started in 1948.

I have still some comments and also questions to the knowledgeables, but that will for tomorrow.
There are some parallels with the start of the movement for Flemish emancipation in Belgium during and after WWI, retarded by the collaboration with the Germans in WWI, but the Irish emancipation in the UK is much much more complicated and with that many more victims...

Kind regards from Paul.

In 1933 reference to the British monarch was removed from the old Free State constitution. In early 1937 all reference to membership of the commonwealth (the term was used first in British constitutional [sic] history as a compromise form of "empire" and "dominion" within the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty) was removed from the Irish constitution completely.

Then, in 1937 the entire Irish constitution was repealed by plebiscite and replaced by a new one anyway. This dropped the "Free State" term completely, instituted republican structure to government leaving the country an independent republic in all but name (de Valera reserved that final step until after what he hoped was imminent Irish reunification with the "six counties"), and effectively ended any pretence of "dominion status" completely. Northern Ireland however had its own constitution since 1922 and was quite happy to consider itself dominion if necessary but as a full member of the UK preferred to regard itself as "equal" in status to Scotland and Wales, or at least the unionist majority there felt that way. So while it is true that many thousands volunteered for military service in WWII within the British army from Ireland, those who did so from Southern Ireland were technically doing so as British domiciled citizens, not as residents or with state approval of their "Irish homeland" as citizens. Northern Irish regiments, which had always retained full integration with the "British homeland" armed forces structure, recruited many of these too, though again not as "dominion" citizens, but as fully fledged UK citizens, just like the volunteers from within their own state.

In anticipation of the oncoming war the illegal IRA also recruited higher numbers than hitherto, as did also the Civil Defence, the Fire Brigade, the Garda Siochána (police), the Irish Army, the clergy and convents, and even a rejuvenated "Cumann na mBan" (think "Women's Institute", but armed). If truth be told, the extraordinary economic hardship and poverty in Southern Ireland brought about by global depression in the 1930s that had been made even worse by a long-standing "economic war" with the UK since 1933 probably explained as much about people's motives as any fundamental ideological stance against fascism - Irish involvement as volunteers in the Spanish Civil War had fatally exposed the deeply divided views "fellow" Irish citizens held in that regard, and had gone a long way to dismantling any remnant of the previous veneer that all "Irish Republicans" shared common fundamental political principles which the Irish Civil War had not already disabused people of. By 1939 there was now a rather deep disillusionment with and distrust generally in Ireland of strident ideological expression of any hue (which has persisted in Ireland to this day), which means all the more that one should not ascribe too much ideological motive to voluntary military and civil service from the Irish south at that time. And neither should one presume that these volunteers were particularly well received into British Army ranks as "dominion comrades". Sectarian discrimination within Northern Irish regiments, and general distrust of "Free Staters" within rank and file of other regiments, had both to be overcome for many of these volunteers. As the war progressed this eased somewhat, but never disappeared, and probably accounted for the great drop in levels of volunteering from the south once the conflict passed its initial phase.

I would recommend acquiring a rather deeper understanding of Irish history from the period than can be gleaned from a few wikipedia pages, Paul. The popularly expressed summary by historians of the period that "Ireland was neutral largely in Britain's favour" is not without foundation, but if not understood in terms of the geopolitical realities of the day will tend therefore to ignore or diminish some very important factors that were of paramount importance at the time - such as "neutral" Ireland commandeering the British naval bases in southern Ireland (established by the 1922 Treaty) in the run-up to war, the Economic War referred to above in which Britain effectively imposed embargoes and punitive tariffs on Irish exports that would put Trump's Iranian sanctions to shame, the confiscation of British property and financial assets within the Irish state as "reparations" from that economic conflict (a conflict not generally known about in Britain though it had been instigated by Westminster and was designed to reduce the "Free State" to a level of perpetual poverty akin to what the same country was doing to India), and other openly aggressive stances and actions that typified relations between the two states at the time of the outbreak of WWII. Churchill, in fact, was probably the leading politician who historically had done more than most to initiate and sustain this aggression, even to the point during his so-called "wilderness years" of assuring unionist rallies in Northern Ireland that the south's obdurate insistence on political and economic independence would only ever result in it having to come meekly back into the British fold, and that he would do everything to ensure that this came about. He even predicted it would happen before the impending conflict in Europe that he foresaw coming.

So it is against this background also that one has to judge pragmatic assistance from a neutral country to its nearest neighbour during the war (Ireland also tacitly assisted German communications and diplomatic initiatives during the same period). This should never be interpreted as expression of political unity with the conduct and aspirations of that neighbour, or even as evidence of approval of that neighbour in any respect, but should instead be looked at purely from the point of view of a small disadvantaged (artificially disadvantaged by that neighbour at times) country attempting self-preservation in very uncertain times. Hence de Valera's infamous (in Britain) telegram of commiseration to the German ambassador at the time of Hitler's death at the point where everyone understood the war in Europe was very close to ending - a signal to others never to confuse wartime pragmatic conduct on the part of Ireland from which Britain may have benefited with any presumed post-war political agenda involving Ireland returning to that particular fold at all. And in that sense it certainly worked.

Could you recommend a sensible book (or some sensible books) or even sensible online articles which deal with this subject, nordmann?  Some time ago I listened to a radio series about the Irish split from the UK and its immediate aftermath but I don't remember it awfully well.

I remember asking my parents why the whole of the island of Ireland wasn't given its independence lock, stock and barrel.  My father who was very pro-the Irish was of the view it should have been granted independence thus but my mother believed that the density of Protestant population in the north of Ireland meant that if the entity of "Northern Ireland" had not been created the violence would have been worse than it actually was.

My parents were both half Irish by descent though born in the UK.  Then "Northern Ireland" is to some extent a misnomer as County Donegal is in the physical north of Ireland but belongs to Eire.

In the 1980s an Irish historian, Deirdre McMahon, published an excellent analysis of Anglo-Irish relations throughout the 1930s called "Republicans and Imperialists". It was published by Yale University Press in the USA after McMahon struggled to find a British or Irish publisher to take it on (her dispassionate neutrality seemed to offend both sides), and quickly became an academic standard text. Highly recommended, even today, though it concludes with rather pessimistic predictions regarding normalising diplomatic relations between the states. It was published just before the Fitzgerald/Thatcher re-establishment of full diplomatic protocols that would eventually lead to the Good Friday Agreement, so in recent decades her excellent analysis of the 1930s development of that relationship was increasingly seen as subject matter "consigned to history". However given recent events and Britain's official admission of ignorance and apathy towards its responsibilities with regard to the same agreement, even her final conclusions have suddenly re-acquired incredible prescience.

It's a good start, anyway. And I see that you can pay anything from 35 dollars to just three cents for it on the internet, if you wish to order a copy.

Thanks nordmann.  There's always library loan of course.  The library I attend will order a book (look round other libraries in the UK to see if they have a copy) for a borrower if they ask.

nordmann wrote:

a conflict not generally known about in Britain though it had been instigated by Westminster and was designed to reduce the "Free State" to a level of perpetual poverty

The attitude of the UK towards Irish independence has generally been one ranging from deep denial at best to bloody-mindedness at worst. The transition from Free State (within the British Commonwealth) to Republic (outside the Commonwealth of Nations) is a case in point. Like many people who went through the UK education system in England, I was taught that southern Ireland became independent as a dominion in 1922 later becoming a republic in 1948. In other words Ireland’s international status was something which was conferred upon it by the UK (of course). The fact that dominion status actually ended with the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 was totally unknown to me as was the subsequent interregnum between the resignation of the last governor-general on 11 December 1936 and the inauguration of the first president on 26 June 1938.

As for the economic war then it goes without saying that that too is generally unknown east of the Irish Sea. The peaceful transition (following the 1932 general election) from the government of William T Cosgrave to that of Eamon de Valera should have been something which Britain (however grudgingly) should have applauded at a time when much of Europe and much of the world was turning to authoritarian and even totalitarian regimes. Ten years earlier Cosgrave and de Valera had been opponents in Ireland’s bitter civil war and the state’s army, police and civil service etc (in 1932) were essentially those of the victorious pro-Treaty forces of Cosgrave. Their ability, therefore, to put aside factionalism and professionally accept the result of the poll was an indication that Ireland was genuinely a multi-party democracy in deed as well as in name.

The UK’s rather ham-fisted response to de Valera’s primitive attempt at autarky in 1932 and the subsequent trade war was indicative of the counter-productive bloody-mindedness which so often characterises the Irish-British dialogue. I’m not sure that the trade war was necessarily instigated by Britain but the effect was such that it could have been seen as a sort of delayed ‘punishment budget’ by the UK on southern Ireland for having first voted for independence in 1918 and then for having voted for republicanism in 1932.

Once the UK political establishment had opted to back partition in the 1910s (even before the First World War) then this meant that they denied themselves the opportunity of having a large pro-British bloc within a self-governing Irish state. The prospect of a genuine dominion within the empire was lost there and then. And once they had opted for a sectarian partition then this meant not only the partition of Ireland but also the partition of Ulster. Thus they denied themselves County Donegal and the hugely strategic Lough Swilly which they then had to except from independence as an insecure ‘treaty port’. It’s almost as though the UK’s rulers whether in the run-up to the First World War or in the run-up to the Second World War (i.e. when Ireland’s geographical location would count for so much) were determined to shoot themselves in the foot and do whatever they could to sour Irish-British relations at each and every opportunity.

Vizzer wrote:

I’m not sure that the trade war was necessarily instigated by Britain ...

Well, it depends on whether you judge the land annuity repayments as servicing a private or public liability. In the 1925 abolition of such repayments for government "loans" deemed private in Britain but yet linked to public policy and hitherto deemed to be servicing public debt (legislation enacted to end a huge establishment "scam" that made some individuals - the disaster capitalists of  their day - very rich indeed by basically reaping in revenue at huge interest into private accounts for "loans" that had initially come from the public purse but had been then managed privately), the repayments coming from Ireland on that basis for the tenant buy-out assistance loans from before independence had been specifically excluded as a special case, the British implying that these buy-outs were not public policy but a "private" arrangement and therefore within private, non-public, liability. I see the wikipedia page on this says that the idea to withhold these repayments rested with de Valera when he came to office in 1932. However Cosgrave had also threatened to stop them, and it was Cosgrave also who wished to refer this huge injustice to the League of Nations for arbitration (Britain offered to have the matter adjudicated by itself). It was de Valera who indeed passed the legislation, and it was telling that the 20% tariff imposed by Britain on all Irish agricultural exports (90% of all Irish exports at the time) was enacted on the very same day. This was a fight that certain people within the British establishment had been spoiling for (and obviously planning for).

The Economic War however, even though its conduct and especially that of the British side reveals much more regarding British attitudes to Ireland than vice versa, is still only one aspect to the background behind why both parties chose to engage with each other quite as they did during the course of WWII. I personally dislike the "neutral on the side of Britain" summary of the official Irish stance as it conveniently deflects attention away from a rather more sordid and even at times sinister undercurrent of often undisguised distrust and loathing that also afflicted both parties when real issues requiring diplomatic engagement were urgently required. And I have to say, having read much related to this topic , including by British participants in events of the time, that when civilised restraint and common sense occasionally did prevail, it had rarely been at the instigation of the Anglo- side in much Anglo-Irish negotiation.

Many are saying now, in light of more recent turns in events, that some things haven't in fact changed very much at all.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Thanks nordmann.  There's always library loan of course.  The library I attend will order a book (look round other libraries in the UK to see if they have a copy) for a borrower if they ask.

 
LiR and nordmann,

LiR it is the same overhere, the library can ask a book from another library and they send it on their costs to your library. But from my experience before, you have to have patience before it arrive. I will try to buy it as nordmann said for some three cent via the "interference" of the granddaughter.

nordmann, I did only some quick research on the internet of an hour to select the most valuable ones on the first sight...and as I asked for the "knowledgeable" ones I have them now in "your person"
I have to comment more but too late to start.
I thank Vizzer and you for the interesting exchange of thoughts.

Kind regards from Paul.

nordmann and Vizzer,

thanks to you both, as I read it now all in depth, I start to see where it all was about. I see now from the book of Deirdre Mc Mahon
https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/90/1/143/116025?redirectedFrom=fulltext
or was it from this article from Jstor that I will read tomorrow fully as I have access via a university
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4049380?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
that de Valera was on  the anti treaty side during the Civil War. And I learn about many items that I start to understand from your comments and the context of the book that nordmann provided.
https://www.amazon.com/Republicans-imperialists-Anglo-Irish-relations-1930s/dp/0300030711

Kind regards to both from Paul.

de Valera's stance on the Treaty in 1921 was relevant to how he was subsequently regarded by the British establishment. However it is also worth noting that by 1932 he and his party had adopted totally constitutional methods, even if their primary ambition was to urgently dismantle that very constitution and replace it with one more in accordance with what they regarded as the revolutionaries' original republican principles. It is also worth noting that he didn't even have to cite the constitution at all when he prioritised ceasing the repayment of land annuities to Britain - he could cite Britain's own laws as amended in 1925 which effectively outlawed this spurious activity (it had applied to almost the same extent in Scotland with small/croft farmers, in much of Yorkshire, and across the whole of Britain with regard to house purchase). However it was also understood by everyone at the time of the Treaty signing that this was one of the "five pillars" upon which Lloyd George's "offer" of independence stood, and that it was one of several methods whereby the retreating power politically could look after the welfare of those within the British establishment who had always seen Ireland as a very lucrative cash-cow. When these annuities in particular were excluded from the 1925 reform Act this was a very blatant political ultimatum/guarantee - to the Irish it meant that its neighbour was intent on impoverishing the fledgling state (siphoning off expendable income within the agricultural sector through continuation of this practise effectively cut off the bulk of potential investment in the new state's frail economy) and that it was basically throwing down a gauntlet if the Irish wished to "take on" the British Empire in an economic showdown (or even a more military engagement if it was foolish enough to go down that route again). Knowing that this was not very likely given the internal divisions within the state and its extreme dependence on Britain as an economic trading partner, it was also a guarantee to those establishment cronies who received these revenues, ostensibly repayment of public debts but which ended up in private bank accounts of these individuals, that they could continue to collect. It is not difficult to work out therefore just how politically aggressive this was on the part of Britain, and also how the motive behind this aggression was two-fold - it served to accelerate the non-viability of the Free State, making it amenable to reincorporation on even more stringent terms than it had "enjoyed" previously within the UK, and it also preserved a bank-rolling system for establishment members and cronies that had been identified as unlawful elsewhere within their own jurisdiction. This is why Britain flatly refused both Cosgrave's and de Valera's reasonable insistence that the case should be adjudicated in an international court of arbitration. Nowadays several bodies exist that could automatically and forcibly have been enrolled in that process through international law and treaties. However in the late 1920s the League of Nations seemed the logical choice, and McDonald knew full well that any body of nations not made up exclusively of those within British control would find in Ireland's favour. He suggested a House of Lords Committee instead, adding insult to injury since many of the beneficiaries of these repayments sat in that very institution.

It is largely forgotten now that land annuities were only one aspect of this problem - another of Lloyd George's original "pillars" (his term) was that the new state would honour its ground rent liabilities. Ground rent - literally rent paid for the ground on which your house stands, completely separate from whoever legally owns the space above and below this "ground", was an ancient European convention dating back to the early Middle Ages which guaranteed legal title to land for the monarch and his mates, even as that land was bought and sold among his subjects. It had been abolished throughout most of Europe by the 1700s but persisted in Britain, and in fact persists to this day. What's more, part of the "resolution" of the Economic War in 1938 was that Britain abandon its claim on land annuities but the principle of Ground Rent would continue. These rents transfer with deed to individual property owners via purchase or lease, so on that basis are often nominal amounts for the individuals affected. de Valera, pragmatically though not very popularly at the time, allowed the continuation of this practise (it had not been abolished in Britain either so was harder to argue as a "special case"), and so even today the Irish are rather bemused to find on occasion that certain iconic republican landmarks - such as the GPO in Dublin or, for that matter, each individual grave in Glasnevin Cemetery in which many prominent republicans and politicians of note are interred - have always yielded a handsome little sum on the side for such as the Queen of England, various Dukes, and of course those aristocrats who retained their title to revenue after independence. The inhabitants of Lucan, a sizeable suburb of Dublin, were therefore a little miffed in 2016 when their "Lord's" son finally got his father to be officially declared dead. The outstanding ground rent due since pater's disappearance in 1974 amount now to a not so modest sum at all for each of the many thousands of semi-detached house owners occupying the original Lucan estate.

nordmann and Vizzer,

thank you for your interesting summarry nordmann. I learned a lot from it.
But as a continental from Belgium and I think it is the same in the Netherlands, France and Germany?, I have some questions for you both...as for instance about the term "ground rent". As I understand it, it is not the same as our "grondlasten" (ground taxation) they call it also "kadastraal inkomen" earnings from having a piece of ground, which is evaluated by the "kadaster". Normaly that is minimal, but nevertheless if I understand it well it can be altered by the "kadaster" with a new evaluation of the price for instance because of the place in the city, becoming more worth. But that is nothing in comparison with the system applicating on what is build on this ground.
I have the impression that in Britain in this case the term means something as the rent of a farmer hiring ground from a tenant to produce crops on it. The owner of the house was never owner of the ground? That starts here too for new owners, who can't buy the ground from the government, they can only hire it for "one hundred years". The grandson is complaining living in Sweden for the moment about the hiring system, and you seems to be not able to buy a house, while once bought you have to let it obliged in the family and only when the whole family is died out...????

Also I have to ask to Vizzer and you, what are "land annuities"? 

Kind regards to both from Paul.

"Grondlasten" only sounds the same as "ground rent". The crucial difference is that one is a form of taxation and the revenue goes into public exchequer funds, whereas ground rent is paid to private individuals.

Land annuities in the Irish context arose from the economic crisis of the late 19th century in post-famine Ireland. Centuries of penal legislation forbidding Catholics from owning property, even though Catholics represented 98% of labour within the agricultural sector, had led to an extremely fragile system whereby 98% of people within that sector were therefore paying for the dubious privilege of raising wealth for the remaining 2%, the amount each paid in the form of rent decided largely by whatever the 2% considered necessary for the upkeep of the large estates they administered (the Act of Union in 1801 had, amongst other things, ended a legislative move within the scrapped Irish Parliament to set legal limits on all agricultural rents). The disaster of the national famine in the late 1840s knocked this system out of action suddenly and permanently, the 2% responding by raising rents to offset the losses they experienced, but in doing so setting the whole agricultural economy into a rapid spiral of disintegration. Much like the UK at the moment with its self-inflicted Brexit "disaster", this situation led to a feeding frenzy of what we now call "disaster capitalists" who moved in and gobbled up all available assets at knock-down prices, accelerating the crisis in the process through mass evictions of tenant farmers who were now no longer considered an asset and had become an expensive liability.

In Ireland this led to a concerted campaign for agrarian reform in the last few decades of the 19th century, the fore-runner to what would later evolve into a full blown campaign for political independence. Under pressure from Irish MPs, various governments attempted to control the situation without ceding independence, and one "solution" was to assist tenant farmers in buying out their property from the landlords. However this being a "British solution" to what it regarded as an "Irish problem" it came with a catch - those landlords who had survived the economic depression with their estates intact, as well as all the new landlords (think Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ilk and you have an idea of how these shysters operated), had to also "benefit" from the "solution". The scheme devised in Westminster therefore was that parliament enacted enabling laws to allow Catholic tenants initiate purchases of their small holdings, but the capital used in advancing loans to these people was privately raised and managed through merchant banks and other London based financial houses, some set up solely to take part in this asset stripping bonanza, as it turned out to be. A typical tenant farmer purchase of land took the form of a "loan" from one of these institutions with the land itself as collateral. The farmer technically owned his plot, but often found that his loan repayments exceeded the amount he had previously paid in rent, and evictions across the country in fact accelerated instead of diminished. Worse, they suddenly began to include even moderate sized and large farm-holdings whose owners had previously been productive enough to not only hold their own financially but had even managed to survive through the worst ravages that the famine had inflicted on their sector. But in a system where land no longer needed to be worked to retain profitability for the disaster capitalist owners, it actually paid dividends for these vultures to evict people whose presence on the land posed an unnecessary expense should the normal standards of reimbursement, reinvestment and costly development apply to keep them solvent. In a culture of massive short term gains to be accrued from doing nothing, then "mouths to feed" on one's land represented a threat to this gain.

Under Gladstone this appallingly cynical exercise was curtailed when the government stepped in and "bought out" some of these loans, especially the close to default loans which were normally the trigger for eviction, and the value of these was then used to underwrite further loans at cheaper rates to other tenant farmers, particularly others close to financial peril. However this only led to something of a mess financially - about 20% of land purchases ended up being government-assisted in this manner, but the remaining 80% were still carried out as private transactions, especially those involving the larger and more economically viable farm units. Repayment of subsidised loans was classified as "annuity" (fixed amount), whereas the rest were subject to normal loan repayment method. This bad compromise was tolerated in Ireland (as well as in Scotland where it had been used for much the same political reasons) as long as the repayments were manageable and the economy visibly improved, which it slowly did once the eviction rates began to subside. Gladstone's annuity scheme acted as a form of insurance (what they would call a "back stop" today, I suppose) in that it could step in and rescue individuals who fell foul of the private capitalists' occasional avarice, but in the main this avarice was kept in some check by basic economic forces and the system settled into a pattern whereby the agricultural sector slowly recovered some profitability while enough of a share of these profits went straight into private funds and accounts to keep the vultures happy.

When Ireland became independent these capitalists however suddenly faced an expensive dilemma - potentially the new independent state could step in and compulsorily "purchase" these debts at minimal rates of its own choosing. Lloyd George's solution to keeping his mates in the money was to insist as a clause of the Treaty that all such repayments would be termed "annuity" which, under the legislative structure as originally defined by Gladstone, could be technically treated therefore as subject to intergovernmental agreement under prevailing common definition as set out in international law. This is what happened, though in reality 80% of these repayments were still going direct from farmers' pockets into private bank vaults in London, with no government involvement at all excepting the small taxes on these transactions.

de Valera's complaint in 1932 - one echoed by just about everyone in Ireland - was that these "annuities" were nothing of the sort, and in fact the British government itself had admitted as much when it abolished the practice within the UK in the 1920s (though specifically excluded revenues from Ireland within that definition). Furthermore the repayment of loans by recipients, originally obliged to become loanees through legislation enacted by what was now a "foreign" government that continued to legislate how these loans were being administered even though the revenue was not even going into their public exchequer, represented in many people's eyes a politically motivated hostile and cynical attempt to undermine the Irish state's sovereignty and economy, as the relatively few private institutions that were benefiting from the practice precluded any British claim that its continuation was in any way "for the British public good". A similar matter related to defaulted Russian loans following the Bolshevik revolution had been adjudicated by a legal committee appointed by the League of Nations, which effectively ruled that any sovereign state could legally acquire or underwrite such debts accrued under the authority of another state but unprotectable by any legislation within the power of that state to enact. In other words, if a government does not protect, own or underwrite a loan amount through fixed subsidy determined under law (annuities, for example), then it cannot later insist that this ventured capital should be treated as annuity when circumstances change, such as when a newly sovereign state takes control of all assets and liabilities within its economy, including the loanees in such a venture.  However this was precisely the scam that Britain had set up and had in fact made a condition of Irish independence. Arthur Griffith, the chief negotiator on the Irish side, had checked with the Bank of Ireland (acting as a de facto Central Bank at the time), and had been told that there was already a plan afoot in the US to bring about an international agreement outlawing such activity (the US saw itself losing out in the feeding frenzy descending on ex-German colonial assets after WWI) so the Irish decided that they could live with what was going to be a very temporary injustice. However when the US pulled out of the League of Nations this initiative died, and it was left to individual states to seek adjudication on a per case basis. This was what de Valera tried to initiate, and Britain's response was to immediately "close the Irish economy down" in retaliation.

Hence the "Economic War" ....

nordmann,

thank you very much for your in depth explanation. I think I understand it all now what I asked to you. The repression of the Catholics starts already with William III as I read on wiki about the "penal laws"? And the "Popery Act" seems not to be a nice trick to reduce the Catholic ownership of ground?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popery_Act
I have the impression that the repression against the Catholics has never been that severe in the Dutch Republic as it was in Ireland. At least from all what I read
and that is more then about Ireland, as it is part of the history of the Low Countries, where nowadays Belgium is also a part of (as of the nowadays Benelux)
I wonder what Dirk thinks about it? There was also something as the "Generaliteitslanden".

But I see now that the Irish emancipation has nearly no comparison with the Flemish emancipation in Belgium, as it only started at the end of the 19th century and only came in the large public during and after WWI. And it was not that harsh, when I read it all about the Irish in comparison with the Flemish one.
And of another kind as I see it. Here in the beginning mostly language related and opposed to the own French speaking elite and as such rapidly becoming also a social struggle, while and the lower Catholic clergy and the Socialists, both at their own side supported the Dutch dialects spoken in the North of Belgium against the Belgian French speaking bourgeoisie and upper-class. It was a pitty that some Flemish cultural protagonists turned to the Germans during WWI to impose their rights as the "vernederlandsing" (Dutchification?) of the university of Ghent.
But again, as I see it, even at the heights of the "Flemish Question" it was always otherwise than the Irish one.

Kind regards from Paul.

Technically speaking it had become legal for Catholics to own property on the same terms as their Protestant neighbours as far back as 1829, when the rather inappropriately titled "Roman Catholic Relief Act" was passed - ironically under the prime ministership of the Duke of Wellington who, though Irish by birth, was a staunch opponent personally of any relaxation of anti-Catholic legislation. The "relief" in the title was rather misleading (as one prominent O'Connellite remarked at the time it was akin to someone sheathing a dagger after having repeatedly stabbed you and then asking you if you now felt "relieved").

However having a right to buy and being in a position to do so were two very different things. While the legislation allowed an immediate, if gradual, entry of Catholics into the mercantile middle classes in towns and cities, those operating within the agrarian economy - and this included Presbyterian small-holders in Ulster as well - found they had nothing to purchase and nothing to purchase anything with either. Without some incentive for the landlord class to break up their vast estates and some way to extend credit to people without collateral then no amount of perceived emancipation could transport tenant farmers from their traditional and artificially manufactured position of absolute servitude and legal indenture to something approaching what we would now call stakeholders in the national economy. And of course lack of property ownership, by the law of the land, still effectively disenfranchised them from even the most basic political processes such as voting in elections and standing for public office. Without political voice it was easy to ignore them, and in pre-famine Ireland such was indeed what happened. This disenfranchisement was a problem throughout the UK at the time - but in Ireland , because the agrarian sector accounted for around nine tenths of both the GNP and the population, it was of huge concern. This was the legal and economic morass, exacerbated hugely by the famine, into which Britain had inserted its "Land Annuity Solution" to an "Irish Question" that no one in Ireland had ever asked (the real questions related to social justice and these would never receive a hearing, let alone a straight answer, from the UK establishment).

The argument in 1932, and the main plank on which de Valera hoped the case would rest when presented to the League of Nations for adjudication, was that what Britain called "land annuities" was in practice a ham-fisted and innately corrupt money-lending scheme that had only been necessary anyway due to Britain's own gross mismanagement of the Irish economy. As a system it had failed in its original objective having actually drained the economy it was meant to be supporting of vital investment potential. Worse, the vast majority of the funds it generated never even made it to the public exchequer in any case and had actually only enriched a handful of private individuals at the expense of the public in both Ireland and indeed the rest of the UK, and after Irish independence was now almost indistinguishable from punitive reparations such as had been inflicted on Germany after WWI, though at least these reparation funds were technically transparent and re-invested in the allied victors' own economies. The Irish view was that this lack of public accountability meant absence of public liability - in stark legal terms it was therefore simply theft, obtaining money under false pretense, and even if Britain defended its continuation on the basis that the debts had been legally incurred still therefore had to explain to its own people how come the money accrued had effectively been embezzled from the public purse.

There was a perception promoted by the establishment in Britain that de Valera was simply a "rabble-rouser" who wasted no chance to opportunistically antagonise "the old enemy", and there is no doubt that he didn't harbour very warm intentions towards the UK. He also had many failings even in the eyes of fellow nationalists which, in hindsight, can be easily demonstrated to have interfered negatively with the potential for economic growth in the Irish state just as severely as the annuities issue, such as with his insistence that Ireland remain a pastoral culture at heart with minimum focus on industrialisation (which in Ireland placed him politically and ideologically ever closer to the principles of the Roman Catholic Church, and led to that body's inappropriately high position of authority within what should have been secular arms of government). However in some matters he showed incredibly principled restraint and genuine statesmanship, especially when it came to constitutional law. An option open to him in 1932, and one which many in the country would in fact have supported, even many of his political opponents, might have been to "nationalise" the land annuities debt and then unilaterally reduce the repayments, or even default completely. After all, Britain would engage in an "economic war" even if the terms were simply questioned by this up-start ex-colony, let alone tampered with (and it did). But de Valera was obsessed with Ireland's image as a rightful addition to the world of free nations and was determined to do this by the book, allowing Britain no opportunity to pretend it was the wronged party when the matter eventually received international adjudication. His legal preparations for this case (that was never brought in the end) were thorough, to put it mildly, and included testimonial evidence from other British colonies in which similar scams had been inflicted on the locals. He even started a lively and detailed correspondence with a certain Indian lawyer - Mahatma Gandhi - who was engaged in an almost identical exercise, negotiating a treaty with Lord Irwin in which the "salt tax" was one of the primary points of contention (another measure sanctioned by British Act of Parliament which was draining the Indian economy of funds that were largely ending up in private hands - often indeed the same hands into which Irish Land Annuity money ended up). It should be pointed out that Churchill also had a particularly virulent strain of bile that he reserved for use in his comments about that gentleman too.

However it is fair to say that both Ireland and the UK knew full well the outcome should the issue ever be referred to international arbitration, and in that light one can understand de Valera's diligence in preparing his case, as well as Westminster's outright refusal to go down that route and its immediate retaliation that bordered on extreme spite, to the extent that it provoked public censure from Roosevelt's US government and seriously risked the UK's reputation abroad as an arrogant bully in diplomatic terms - a view that was being increasingly expressed by others around the world as the decade progressed, including some "allies" whose good books Britain could ill afford to fall out of. This placed de Valera on the moral high ground but without the bargaining power one would have thought this should bring with it - and one could criticise his determination to retain that ground even if the country went down the toilet as a result just as one could equally criticise Britain's obdurate refusal to acknowledge an injustice even if the country's international reputation went down a similar toilet. The "not an inch" mentality was a fault shared by both sides.

My final point about the Economic War (as it was meant only to illustrate some background behind where both countries stood at the outset of WWII) is that no one ever claimed to have "won" it. By 1938 the beneficiaries of the scam within the UK, being the good "disaster capitalists" that they were, suddenly found themselves on the threshold of vast profits as the country began to go over to a "war economy". It was quickly apparent that the Irish revenues were mere pocket money compared to what was around the corner, and it was important that they start playing ball with their fellow ex-Etonians and the like in Westminster and Whitehall so that they were first at the trough when the big pay-outs started rolling in and the re-armament and factory re-purposing contracts were dished out under government authority and license. As war approached there was a new political need to "sweeten" a neighbour with an as yet unquantified potential German sympathy, and waging an "economic war" with that neighbour suddenly became a luxury the UK could ill afford. It was this, more than any argument for justice or international standing, that finally motivated the UK to unilaterally suspend and then quietly abandon the scam (the debt was technically "written off" during a budget speech, almost unnoticed by the Chancellor's audience in the House), by which time Ireland's agricultural exports to the UK had more or less been restored to low tariff or even total tariff exemption in some cases. However the "war" had cemented in Irish minds a profound distrust of the UK, not so much in its political ambitions or policies (arrogant and aggressive certainly, but all the more predictable for that and therefore containable), but in where actual power resided within its establishment, how this was exercised, by whom, and why. This distrust has persisted to this day - and it must be said that recent events have seen open expression of this distrust come to the fore again in Irish public discourse. So maybe, if you really want to understand the nature of the political relationship between Ireland and the UK during WWII, you might only have to keep a close eye on how the present relationship is presented and conducted by both sides right now, and especially over the next few years as Britain commits economic suicide and is prepared (and even determined in some quarters) to bring its neighbour down with it.

nordmann,

thank you very much again for this elaborated enlightenment. I even now understand it all better. adn I read it all from A till Z, as the other ones before.

Kind regards from Paul.

Just to add to the very pertinent points you make nordmann, it’s been popular among some historians not favourable to de Valera to cry hypocrite with regard to the annuities issue. They point out that de Valera, although decrying the payments, nevertheless, still expected them to be collected. In other words it wasn’t the annuities as such which were a problem for him – it was just the fact that the bulk of the revenue was going to the UK. It’s a slightly unfair accusation, however, because (long before the Wall Street Crash in 1929) de Valera had been complaining that it was the ‘annual exportation of income and revenue’ in the form of the annuities which was negative drag on the country’s prosperity. In fact he estimated the total as being ‘over £5,000,000 a year’ which (in a parallel universe) one might imagine being splashed across the side of the Fianna Fail campaign bus during the 1932 general election.

The importance of the fledgling state not to be seen as one likely to default on its international obligations (however seemingly unjust) was drilled into de Valera from among his funders in the US. It must be remembered that some continental countries saw the Great Depression as an opportunity to default on their First World War debts to America. Britain, however, promised not to. This earned London considerable praise across the Atlantic. Any suggestion, therefore, that the Irish Free State might not meet its own obligation towards Britain consequently drew negative headlines in New York.   

The ‘Economic War’ of the 1930s was thankfully short-lived as both sides soon realised what a lose/lose cul-de-sac it really was. The interdependence of the Irish and British economies was too obvious and ancient for any attempts as autarky (on either side) to have any real prospect of achieving anything worthwhile. Normal trade and commerce resumed. That said - when the Second World War broke out, the exigencies of it meant that Ireland’s neutrality (which under other circumstances could have prompted an economic boom) again proved economically costly.

I would agree with the above, except perhaps for giving credit to the US for "keeping Ireland honest" in the sense that de Valera was influenced by those contributing funds to his party from there. For one thing, the extent of such funding from private political donations among the American Irish has been greatly exaggerated in the past (admittedly by British historians, and now not so much even by them either), and the source of such funds has also been badly interpreted. At one point as a Sinn Féin politician de Valera had indeed successfully raised considerable funds in a well publicised American campaign (as a half-American he had been a natural choice to head up the campaign), but by 1932 this wasn't the case at all. In fact it hadn't lasted long anyway as a lucrative source - tapping the diaspora for money to fund a campaign of independence and to help get the country up and running was one thing, getting the same people to enthusiastically contribute to "one side" of an acrimoniously fractured independence movement after independence had been achieved, and with that side in self-imposed political exile, was quite another. By 1932, and this is something that was actively suppressed within the UK at the time, by far the greater portion of voluntary funding from outside the state (for all parties) came in fact from within the UK itself. Tim Pat Coogan wrote an interesting article in the Irish Times once that detailed the extraordinary lengths to which the British authorities went in order to disrupt such money transfers for years after independence - everything from mysterious "failures" in the banking system to steaming open letters in post office back rooms, and even substituting counterfeit currency in some over enthusiastic cases! It was so farcical as to be comical, and couldn't have worked as economic sabotage, but it certainly had an annoyance factor that seemed to gratify some elements within the UK establishment and infuriatingly tied up resources within the Fraud Squad in Dublin Castle for many years before de Valera finally threatened to have the matter raised at international level when it was his turn to chair the League of Nations Assembly.

However it is certainly true that the fledgling state took its image abroad extremely seriously, and this didn't originate with de Valera's Fianna Fáil government. As far back as 1921 Michael Collins, acting as a Minister for Foreign Affairs-in-waiting and having presented himself as the "new boss" to civil service heads (Ireland managed to preserve almost 100% intact not only the service's bureaucratic structure but a huge amount of its personnel as well upon the transfer of power), had advised all those whose work entailed foreign travel and appointments, or who in fact contributed in any way to Ireland's image abroad, that they must comport themselves impeccably, any lapse not only potentially portraying the country in a bad light but also potentially being used as a weapon against the state to seriously undermine its survival chances. The story went that, at the meeting, he told the assembled Principal Officers, Secretaries, and other service top people, that they must now reckon on their previous employer actively attempting to undermine their activities at every turn and to expect nothing but hostile interventions from Britain in every sphere of diplomacy and finance from now on. To which the Finance Secretary William O'Brien replied "so what's new then?".

We haven't got as far as WWII yet, I notice (my fault, I know). I should recount a little parable from my father's childhood - during the "phoney war" period he and his classmates at school were taught a version of "The Protecting Corselet of Mary" hymn (believe it or not that's a thing) by his teacher, in which the BVM was replaced by the Führer. The teacher was the widow of a rather well known (late) IRA hit-man who had taken out a few British agents, and then with even more gusto and dedication taken out quite a few of his ex-colleagues during the civil war, before he himself had found himself at the receiving end of that which he had so often distributed. Because he was on the "wrong side" his wife had been refused receipt of an IRA widow's pension and had to go back to work, hence her position as a rather bitter but quite assiduous moulder of young minds in the state national school system almost two decades later.

Not only did they have to learn this revised "hymn", intended to be sung by the children at the roadside as the Waffen-SS marched triumphantly along O'Connell Street in her fantasised version of the near future, but she even decided a "dry run" in procession around the streets of their town was in order. They had actually managed more than a mile (people assumed it was a religious procession and didn't listen too closely to the words) before they came a cropper outside the local garda station, where the "blue-shirts" inside had got wind of their advance and set up a road block to halt their progress. Not only that but they had swiftly engineered the words to "Jerusalem" (Ireland being a more logical candidate anyway to be called a "green and pleasant" land - well, "green" anyway) which had already attracted a few extra choir members from the Sweet Afton Pub next door. There then ensued a "sing off" which saw several children defect - the opposition choir contained many of their fathers after all, and they had a better tune anyway - and the attrition of single verse hymn renditions in an endless loop began to take its toll. By the end, my father (who's orphan status meant that he had no logical reason to defect that he could think of) and the local simpleton were all that remained of the once glorious welcoming party for the leader of the Third Reich, and when they noticed their teacher slink off in defeat they simply rounded off the latest verse and went off to engage in something more interesting (catapulting hedgehogs or some other innocent pursuit of the age).

He taught me the words of the hymn as a small child - which meant that I too could join in when, as a teenage lounge-boy working in the local pub later, spontaneous renditions of the ditty often broke out among the inebriated customers who also had survived the encounter as children. Needless to say the teacher herself was soon "retired" after the great sing-off (nerve issues, they said), and though the war progressed for another five years or so, no Waffen-SS blue-eyed blonde-haired specimens of the master race were ever fortunate enough to be regaled with "O thou of the angelic countenance, without fault, Thou hast given the milk of thy breast to save me ..." etc as they goose-stepped past the GPO.

I believe the Germans actually countenanced an invasion of Ireland - Operations Whale and Osprey were both drawn up by them to execute the takeover at different times - though I also believe that it took only a little research "on the ground" to hastily dissuade them from proceeding. Their collective mental health was already in enough trouble, I suppose. Taking on the role of metaphorical breast-feeders of Ireland's pre-pubescents was probably deemed one goose-step too far ....

nordmann,

yes it exists:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/celt-archive/conversations/topics/2502?guccounter=1
But what is the "BVM"?
And the "Jerusalem" does that contain the "green and pleasant land"? And was that Jerusalem the one of the "night of the proms"? Or is it the one from Vera Lynn? Or are they both the same?

Kind regards from Paul, always reading your utterings very attentively.

The "BVM" is how Stella Maris is sometimes referred to by modern trendies (by leaving out the Lessed Irgin Ary bit). Mind you, the girl isn't lacking in epithets either, my favourite being what is regarded as the earliest ever - "Nuova Eva" - which I remember from the very first school I attended as an infant and which had been painted by the nuns who ran the establishment in ornate red letters on the wall above the door to the girls' toilet. Over the boys' toilet they had painted "Daoine Eile" ("other people" in Irish).

"Jerusalem", the song composed by Hubert Parry based on Blake's original poem (and the one regularly butchered at the Proms), was a little like "Lily Marlene" in that its popularity quickly extended beyond those for whom it had been designed to boost morale (British soldiers in WWI) and became as big a hit even with some of their declared or self-declared enemies, including amongst the latter the Irish women's branch of the independence movement (who were also very much part of the Suffragette Movement too so had probably absorbed it from that UK source). Their version, in Gaelic, became a big hit in Ireland and in America amongst the ex-pats where it was a regular part of Count John McCormack's concerts. At the inauguration of Ireland's first president, Douglas Hyde, in 1938 it had featured in its Gaelic version in the ceremony at his own request, so was probably enjoying a renewed burst of popularity when the assembled choirs of the local police force, and other sundry locals, did their spontaneous acapella rendition outside the Sweet Afton Bar & Lounge in suburban Dublin (by 1939 the tune had long been denounced by more rabid republican types as being "too English", even in its Gaelic form, so was a guaranteed way of immediately winding up such specimens at a pinch, especially if sung in the vernacular).

It's a powerful tune, and the words - though replete with forceful and beautifully phrased imagery - are sufficiently vague to allow easy translation and adaptation for other causes. Just by replacing "England" with "Ireland" it suddenly became a patriotic hymn for the Auld Sod (or Deutschland indeed, where for a while it was sung at the closing ceremony of the annual Wagner concert festival in Bayreuth, the English born Winifred Wagner being a huge fan of the piece). One of the weirdest, and nicest, renditions I've ever heard was in Crete, where a school orchestra and choir sang it in their local dialect at an Easter festival I attended one time in a small mountain village. Jerusalem with bouzoukis as a hymn to the "moon country" is a thing to behold!

nordmann,

thank you so much for your explanations. You can say in one sentence what I have to say in a whole paragraph. And yes I found the BVM in an entry together with Stella Maris (star of the sea) as "blessed virgin mary"
We hadn't toilets with "Nueva Eva". Up to six I was with my sister at the nunschool, but I am not sure if they weren't mixed. From seven on it was boys only school and the further nunschool for my sister.
But we came again with the BMV in contact, 15 years old, when we before each Latin lesson had to say the Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum benidicta tu in mulieribus...have to seek for the rest on Google:
https://www.liveabout.com/ave-maria-text-and-english-translation-724041
and as I see it "blessed" but no reference to "virgin"...

And you are right about Jerusalem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C79L3vjKAWQ

And now I see what you meant about the words: "green and pleasant"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKRHWT6xdEU

And yes no Vera Lynn version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_oxdM1rCig
 Did a lot of search for the "jerusalem" in Gaelic, but as I don't know Gaelic... and their seems to exist also an Irish Gaelic "Jerusalem"...

"One of the weirdest, and nicest, renditions I've ever heard was in Crete, where a school orchestra and choir sang it in their local dialect at an Easter festival I attended one time in a small mountain village. Jerusalem with bouzoukis as a hymn to the "moon country" is a thing to behold!"


nordmann, you mentioned it one time that you have been in Greece too during a time. What a life you have had and yes many things "to behold". I am a little bit jealous.


Kind regards from Paul.

nordmann,

I know it is perhaps against the rules you mentioned in the tip thread and as I am known already since years to "wander off" on this board...
And it has all to do with your explanation of BVM, which I found out as being "blessed virgin mary" and I wanted to explain that we learned again with the nuns, we nearly 6 years old, that Mary had an "onbevlekte ontvangenis". Seeking for English I found the term "immaculate conception" and I wanted as I learned on the BBC forum (or was it another American one?) what immaculate conception was, and say that the some Protestants didn't believe in the "virginity" of Mary, but I now see: it is the "perpetual virginity"

Poor me...already three quarters of an hour busy with seeking...as all things relying to religion it is a complex matter...and certainly not to condense in an aside overhere...I will start with it at the "Religions"

Kind regards from Paul.

nordmann wrote:

The story went that, at the meeting, he told the assembled Principal Officers, Secretaries, and other service top people, that they must now reckon on their previous employer actively attempting to undermine their activities at every turn and to expect nothing but hostile interventions from Britain in every sphere of diplomacy and finance from now on. To which the Finance Secretary William O'Brien replied "so what's new then?".

I like that story. I don’t know if that O’Brien is any relation to his namesake of Land War fame but I suppose William O’Brien is a fairly commonplace name in Ireland. By coincidence I was reading quite a bit recently about that other O’Brien. There's Sally Warwick-Haller’s 1990 book on his role in the Land War and also some of his own writings such as The Irish Revolution And How It Came About written in 1923. He was a fascinating character who, as an Irish nationalist, nevertheless bent over backwards to try to accommodate the Ulster Protestants. He didn’t seem to realise that with some people the more one bends backwards the more they are just likely to push you over.

In Irish Revolution he points out how in 1913 and even 1914 Ulster Unionists such as Thomas Andrews and James Craig were saying that they would rather be ruled by the German Kaiser than by John Redmond and the Irish nationalist party. This they said while German arms were being illegally run to the Ulster Volunteers.

And yet popular history tends to cast the nationalists in Ireland as being Germany’s stooges both in the First World War and in the Second. This wasn’t helped, of course, in the latter case by such things as when the IRA chose to bomb Coventry in August 1939 only a few days before the outbreak of war, managing to kill civilians in that city even before the Luftwaffe did. That said - when war did break out, Ireland’s neutrality was indeed basically pro-Allied. The most obvious example being the 'Donegal Corridor' agreement whereby British aircraft based at RAF Castle Archdale on Lough Erne in County Fermanagh were permitted to overfly neutral Irish airspace and straight out into the Atlantic.

I'm not sure how it could have been otherwise, Vizzer - the geopolitical reality as understood by everyone, including almost all senior Irish politicians, far outweighed whatever rhetoric, ideological wishful thinking, and (in some cases) sheer fantasies that any anti-British elements might have engaged in at the time. Extreme republican publications from the period - mostly outlawed and underground - were where such fantasy and rhetoric got full reign, and you can see from its tendency to lapse into declaration of intent and discussion of how things would be "after victory", rather than any hint of how such intent could ever be achieved in the circumstances that now prevailed, just how removed from geopolitical reality this element had managed to become.

The German spy, Hermann Görtz, who had liaised very closely with IRA members for almost two years between 1940 and late 1941, upon his eventual arrest, was almost relieved during his debriefing by the authorities to be able to tell the Irish authorities about his frustrations. These included vain attempts to dissuade the IRA (then estimated to be less than a hundred "active members") to follow through on "Plan Kathleen" - a proposed armed "invasion" of Northern Ireland from the South, "led" by them and with "help" from Germany. Görtz of course knew - but didn't reveal either to the IRA or indeed to his Irish Army debriefers after arrest - that the Germans had rather more sensible plans of invasion in which taking ethnic, sectarian or political sides in any internal Irish nationalist-versus-unionist power play played practically no role whatsoever, and which in no way depended on participation or cooperation from extreme republicans at all. They were to be used purely for intelligence gathering beforehand, and Görtz and other German spies quickly deduced such a lack of this commodity amongst these extremists that they refused even to avail of IRA "safe houses" during their operations. In Görtz's case this proved to have been sensible - the first time he reluctantly agreed to meet an IRA contact in such a location he was arrested.

(I am reminded of a conversation I had with an elderly ex-SS officer in Austria many years ago who - perhaps mischievously but I was never quite sure - told me on hearing that I was from Ireland how the wartime invasion plan for my country would have included solving the sectarian issue in Northern Ireland for once and for all, namely by exterminating half the population. When I asked "which half?" his candid reply had been "what does it matter?")

However the "popular" historical summary of Ireland's "stooge" status - which of course was only bolstered when stories such as Görtz's emerged after the war - was mainly one of British composition (Churchill, as he promised in his famous quote about writing history, being no small contributor to that process). But in fact the "stooge" accusation had actually originated very early in events, based as it was on an already existing suspicion that had long preceded the war in public opinion stoked by remarks oft repeated by certain elements within the press and British politics. It could be argued in hindsight that de Valera and others within his party in fact played on this suspicion, thereby even voluntarily encouraging such later historical assessment, and I believe there is some truth in that at a very superficial level of public diplomatic exchange, though this assessment is sometimes complicated by other such exchanges in the public sphere which flatly contradicted such sentiment, even ones in which Churchill figured. But I'm content to believe from my own reading and talking to those who were interested parties at the time that the "stooge of Germany" theme was simply a natural brush with which to paint the official Irish position, as long as that position fundamentally set out to advertise that the Free State was not to be regarded internationally as a "stooge of Britain".

At this stage however I reckon there is more than enough detail revealed and now in the historical record to discount this version, however "popular" it may have later become, for its superficiality when compared against what was actually transpiring "on the ground" and "behind the scenes" in both countries.

PS: I tried to check out William O'Brien as far as I could but found no obvious family link between the two lads sharing this name. The Finance guy seems to have come originally from London and followed a standard banking career there before applying for civil service appointment, his first being in the Chancellery there, though his biographical details are sketchy enough that one can't say for certain. I imagine that being related to the older man might have helped get him appointed later to Dublin if that's what happened, but I seriously doubt it would have helped his original application for civil service employment. But then, given that Michael Collins had himself been recruited at a tender age into the same organisation (albeit as a messenger boy), it is dangerous to ascribe too much intelligence to the interview procedures and what we would now call vetting criteria that the service may have adopted at the time.

Vizzer and nordmann, thank you very much for this conversation. I learned a lot from it and some items that I never understood about this complex matter are more clear to me now.

Kind regards to both from Paul.