Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Spying on Ireland

Too close for comfort

Eunan O’Halpin
OUP, 335pp, £30,

Mary Kenny

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

Mary Kenny on the new book from Eunan O'Halpin

Yet O’Halpin seems to know every inch of the wood without quite seeing the whole forest. He chronicles in great detail the spy networks — British and German — which criss-crossed Eire, particularly in the early phases of the war. Some of these characters were hilarious, such as Roddy Keith, an advertising man sent as SOE’s ‘whisperer’ in Dublin, spreading rumours about Mussolini’s insatiable sexual appetite for nurses; or Joseph Lenihan, the black sheep of a renowned Irish political family, a cheerfully anti-British British spy. Particularly entertaining were Wilhelm Preetz and Joseph Donohue, despatched by the Reich to Ireland, spending ‘two dissolute weeks in Dublin blowing the Abwehr’s money on women and drink’: surely the best use of Nazi gold yet known.

There is a huge amount of incidental, and often fascinating, information: James Larkin, the idolised Irish Labour leader whose statue adorns O’Connell Street, was a Communist Party member, though Moscow found him somewhat ‘unmanageable’: as was the esteemed writer Peader O’Donnell. The Vatican did try to help individual Jews and there is some good Irish archival material on this. And Ireland’s home intelligence network was often pretty effective.

But some of O’Halpin’s own judgments are just personal opinions, unsupported by evidence. He dismisses Jimmy Thomas, the 1930s Dominions Secretary, as an ‘erratic buffoon’: I recently did some research on Thomas, and it is my opinion that he was an honourable and decent politician. O’Halpin describes the Marquis of Tavistock (of 1939) as a ‘do-gooder’: maybe so, but he was also a busy appeaser with some Fascist associates. He describes Guy Burgess as ‘erratic but stimulating’: yes, but a traitor just the same.