Guilt and defiance

It will be news to nobody that England (or ‘the Crown’) and Ireland had been in a state of mutual incomprehension since the time of the first Elizabeth. There had been much cruelty. Sean O’Casey spoke for his countrymen: ‘The English government of Ireland had often been soft-headed but never soft-handed.’ So, when Ireland, a newly made Free State, declared its neutrality at the beginning of the second world war, the explosion of anger on the one hand, and the grim defiance on the other, were to be predicted.

What was not to be foreseen, however, were the tangled effects — political, cultural, moral, psychological — of this neutrality on Eire itself. This is the complex subject of this intensely researched and crisply written book: its subtitle is ‘A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War’ — a global conflict referred to in Ireland as ‘the Emergency’.

Its author puts herself forward only once, at the very beginning, to describe her own family story as a sort of paradigm of recent Irish history. In the 1930s her grandfather, an agricultural labourer, was left £300 by an elder brother who had made good in Chicago. He bought a 30-acre farm. On it her mother was brought up and lived precisely the life, ‘fair, if frugal’, which de Valera had hoped to build in the new, fairly free Eire. After the war her mother went to England to work as a nurse in the new NHS, ‘typical of the thousands who left Ireland immediately after the war’, married an Englishman and eventually gave birth — another hint of Ireland’s developing story — to Clair Wills, Professor of Irish Literature at Queen Mary, University of London.