Books: A strange and neutral Ireland.

The roguish, hirsute and gravelly voiced Ronnie Drew, formerly of the Irish folk band the Dubliners, always has been as much a storyteller in the oral tradition as a pure singer. Consequently, it is difficult to imagine a more expressive set of vocal chords for wrapping around the spoken introduction to “McAlpine's Fusiliers,” a song written by Dominic Behan, multi-talented brother of the more boisterous and notorious Brendan. This song, arguably Dominic Behan’s most famous, considers the experience of Irish laborers in Britain during the Second World War.

'Twas in the year of 'thirty-nine when the sky was full of lead
When Hitler was heading for Poland, and Paddy for Holyhead

The song refers to the curious fact that with nary an interruption, the Irish diaspora that first began during the 19th-centurey potato famine proceeded according to its traditional cadence throughout the horrendous international conflict, officially known within the fledgling Irish Republic not as the “war” but as the “emergency,” which itself points to the anomaly that Ireland, minus a still captive Ulster, maintained strict "principled" neutrality throughout the period of 20th-century European conflagration.

The resulting situation was nothing if not surreal, and for some, typically Irish. Representatives of all warring nations were posted in Dublin, Irish newspapers were censored to achieve fairness and balance for all belligerents, and the chief unintended consequence of neutrality’s isolation was the near complete collapse of an already weak economy, sending thousands to either work abroad or join Britain’s military forces.

Eire may have been neutral, but either by choice or circumstance, vast numbers of its citizens became workers and, in effect, combatants. Many joined the British armed forces. Did Ireland's leader, Eamon de Valera, preserve its independence by a fanatical adherence to neutrality, or did the decision retard his country's progress in the community of nations?

In “That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War,” author Clair Wills thoughtfully surveys the length and breadth of the Irish experience during World War II. It is a record with which few Americans today are familiar, although at the time the controversies engendered were extreme matters of life and death, especially for Britain during the blitz, because Irish independence was new, untested and in all respects a work in progress, and ties with the mother country still painfully palpable.


Were the Irish traitors, or were they taking the only sane position in an insane world?

Author Wills devotes considerable effort to answering what might seem to be the simplest of questions: What was everyday life actually like in Ireland during the “emergency?” However, to even begin answering the question requires probing the extent of the Irish collective psyche, a task toward which untold millions of pints of Guinness have been previously drained absent resolution. She does well, dispassionately considering the contradictions that have coexisted on the island before and since the period of focus.

Unexpected consequences were in abundance. During Europe's war, life became even tougher for Ireland's long suffering rural poor, with bizarre make-work schemes calling for the cutting ever higher quotas of peat (for fuel) eerily reminiscent of Fidel Castro’s sugar cane drives of the 1960s, but all the while Ireland’s hotels and resorts remained packed, often catering to a wealthy British clientele, which came to the otherwise impoverished country to eat and drink well (and avoid the inconvenience of dinnertime bombing) at a time when rationing was the norm at home.

Catholic priests railed against the depravity of Europe as a whole, holding out a mystical vision of corporatist Ireland as making good on the model of neutral Portugal’s Salazar, and fearing the deleterious influence of condom-carrying American GI’s billeted in Northern Ireland in preparation for the climactic Normandy invasion. Censorship was something to be reckoned with by Ireland's writers and artists, who were cut off from previously fecund streams of continental inspiration.

Bizarrely, Ireland even had its own hardscrabble fascists, although comparisons with a Marx Brothers movie like "Duck Soup" seem more appropriate than the actual dimensions of the threat that these confused and disorganized elements posed to civil order.

I’m unwilling to pass judgment and render a verdict as to the ultimate significance of Irish neutrality during the “emergency.” In the end, it took the Allied victory, membership in the European Union, a vast transfer of wealth under the auspices of the EU and another half-century of effort (and millions more pints of Guinness) for Ireland to even begin shaking the mixed legacies that can be traced back to the famine, a full century before the wartime period covered in Wills’ book. I can recommend her work wholeheartedly, but before you begin reading, listen to Ronnie Drew and the Dubliners perform “McAlpine's Fusiliers.”

I've worked till the sweat it has had me beat
With Russian, Czech, and Pole
On shuttering jams up in the hydro-dams
Or underneath the Thames in a hole
I've grafted hard and I've got my cards
And many a ganger's fist across my ears
If you pride your life don't join, by Christ!
With McAlpine's fusiliers

And don't forget a pint of stout while listening.