The Rhetoric of Irish Neutrality

Eamon de Valera began setting up the basis of Irish military neutrality in 1936 as a campaign of conspicuous nonalignment in the Spanish Civil War. In a speech to the League of Nations on July 2, 1936, de Valera exhorted small nations "to determine that they will not become the tools of any great power and that they will resist with whatever strength they may possess every attempt to force them into a war against their will." Over time, this argument, based on the embattled sovereignty of small nations, would become the moral doctrine on which Irish neutrality is seen to rest. Neutrality, de Valera encouraged his countrymen to believe, was an ethical stance against the making of war, particularly war with imperial ambitions. In a 1937 article in Ireland Today, Michael Tierney summarized what would become the prominent rationale for the policy: "We must be implicated, as far as in us lies, in no more wars to end wars or wars for democracy or for any of the other high-sounding ideals in which war-propaganda is so fruitful. Our course, above all in war-time, must be one of 'sacred egoism.'" The phrase "sacred egoism" had, since 1918, been associated with the republican concept of sinn féin, or "ourselves alone." Written pseudonymously by Ernest Boyd, a pioneering critic of the Irish literary renaissance, the 1918 pamphlet The Sacred Egoism of Sinn Féin shows the concept of "sacred egoism" to be rooted in the Great War's Irish anticonscription movement. Boyd argues that if the war was an "Allied crusade for the liberation of small nationalities ... one had been forgotten," and that by asserting their unwillingness to participate for Britain in this gallant act of hypocrisy, Irishmen could assert their independent nationality. Sacred egoism and sinn féin come to define, for Boyd, the "tenacious selfishness, without which [small nationalities] must abandon the struggle for life." The echoes of the doctrine of sacred egoism in de Valera's approach to the Second World War are clear: Ireland's unwillingness to participate should be read not as a sign of isolationism but as self-assertion on an international scale. For de Valera's Fianna Fáil government, sinn féin made an organic transition from republican motto to rallying cry for self-sufficient neutrality.

After V-E Day, de Valera felt justified enough to defy Churchill's claim that Britain "stood alone" against tyranny, in a radio address that proclaimed Ireland as "a small nation that stood alone, not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression ... a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul." The sacred egoism of neutrality, then, also implied sustained purity of soul — or at least of de Valera's fondly imagined Irish, Catholic soul. Not everyone was swayed by the taoiseach's argument. In 1943, Sean O'Faolain noted in The Bell that the meaning of sinn féin seemed to have undergone a different sort of change: "Self-reliance has taken on the astonishing implication of estrangement from the world." The morality of Ireland's sacred egoism was compromised by the uniquely ethical grounds in which the Allied fight against fascism was couched. Like O'Faolain, many Irish writers and intellectuals worried that the lofty self-sufficiency of neutrality might not be enough to insulate the country from an indictment of moral negligence.

Behind his rhetoric of idealism, de Valera had shrewdly realistic reasons for charting a course of neutrality. For economic and defense purposes, and for the purpose of galvanizing a young country only just healing from the civil war of 1922–23, neutrality was the most practicable option. But its great success as a policy, its continued valuation as a marker of Irish difference, and de Valera's reputation as a statesman rest on the way in which Irish neutrality was couched as a moral choice. Throughout the Emergency, de Valera's public pronouncements relied on diction of morality and justice and a rhetoric that couched neutrality only in positive terms. That Irish neutrality is still generally perceived as an ethical obligation rather than a self-serving policy attests to the power of de Valera's rhetoric. Neutrality was enforced by a deliberate manipulation of language and guarded by a state censorship that shielded the government from any scrutiny that might have revealed just how unneutrally it behaved.

As Ireland's vulnerability in the war decreased, Emergency censorship increased. In a sense, there was less to be frightened of, but more to cover up. De Valera's government was anything but neutral when it came to promoting its image of what Ireland ought to be, and censorship became a primary weapon in making the "morality" of neutrality an essential part of a conservative, Catholic, and insular Ireland. De Valera's famous 1943 "dream" of an Ireland of "happy maidens" and "athletic youths," of "frugal comforts" in "cozy homesteads," "serene" wisdom and "right living" owes something of its imagery to popular interpretations of Gaelic revival ideology. If the literature of the revival aimed to disrupt the aesthetic autonomy of the tired, English, Arnoldian notion of the Celt, de Valera's camp revivalism created a similarly autonomous vision of a conservative Gaeilgeoir's Catholic Ireland. Much of the literature of the Emergency is a response to the government's attempt to legislate aesthetic autonomy, as well as an acknowledgment that if modernist forms are no longer capable of making things new, they are still capable of disrupting dominant cultural narratives.

This chapter examines the political rhetoric of Ireland's wartime neutrality in order to reveal the ways in which Irish late modernism emerged to disrupt it. First, I explore the manipulation of legal language that allowed the Irish government to create a state of emergency in Ireland that it could propagandize as both nationally empowering and morally upright. Next, I show how de Valera's conservative government adapted — or one might say perverted — the nationalism of the Gaelic revival into a rhetoric that could conflate sovereignty with sanctity, and then used the political power of wartime censorship to censor materials for the public's moral "safety" as well as the safety of the body politic in wartime. But as the Fianna Fáil government misread and ossified the revival, Irish late modernists returned in spirit to the revival's disruptive aesthetics while simultaneously eschewing them as the bourgeois clothing of official republicanism. In the final section of the chapter, I read material and manifestos from two dissident periodicals, the Irish Times and The Bell, in order to show how print culture responded to the cultural, financial, and even verbal constrictions of...