Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

collective endeavors: as a member of the Mods Group at Penn and as a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. My year at Cornell was restorative and inspiring, due in large measure to the graciousness of the staff of the Society, its director Tim Murray, and the other fellows. I am especially indebted to Duane Corpis, Sarah Ensor, Tom McEnaney, and Jennifer Stoever.

      I owe special and heartfelt thanks to Jeremy Braddock and Jon Eburne: their humor and dedication, their alacrity and hard work, have been sustaining me for years. This book owes a great deal to their intellectual fellowship, but I owe much more to their friendship.

      An only child, I am very grateful to be a part of a large extended family, for whom I have the deepest respect and greatest love. I admire Tim Bowles for his humane perspective and profound belief in fairness. For their unstinting hospitality, sense of the world, and caustic humor, Rosemary Keane and Lisa Hogarty are wonderful, the sisters I never had. I simply marvel at my grandparents, Rose and Robert Keane and Frank Falcone, and their sense of history lies close to the heart of this book.

      It makes me sad that my father, Michael, did not live to see this book. While we did not always see eye to eye, I hear echoes of his voice in its pages, just as I have heard his voice at some point during every day since his passing. Even so, I miss him terribly.

      This book is dedicated to my mother, Donna, because of what she has taught me about dignity. As a single mother, she had to go through changes of which I was only dimly aware, but my strongest impression of growing up is of how much fun we had together. All my life she has made me know and feel that her love for me, her belief in me, are constant because of who I am. An honest Calabrese proverb (cui cerca trova e cui dorma si sonni) reminds me of her, among other reasons because it was she who provided that I sleep and thereby enabled me to dream. My respect for her is unbounded, and I love her because of who she is.

      And, finally, to Gabriela Zoller, the loveliest person I know, for her very goodness in the world.

Introduction

       The Problem of Information

      Just after the end of the Second World War, a small, plain booklet titled Ireland’s Stand was published in Dublin collecting a selection of speeches delivered by Eamon de Valera, the Irish Taoiseach, during the six years of conflict. Drawn from press interviews, statements made in Dáil sessions, and radio broadcasts, the speeches outline the evolving rationale for the state’s wartime policy of neutrality. As its title suggests, the booklet as a whole was also meant to defend the policy in the postwar world, in which the niceties of national self-preservation, practiced and articulated seemingly without regard for larger ideological or geopolitical alignments, were receiving an even less welcome hearing than they had in the decade before the war. Indeed, for many officials and opinion makers in the victorious Allied nations, Irish neutrality remained all but synonymous with collaboration. While not an official government publication, Ireland’s Stand was nevertheless produced within the ambit of the Government Publications Office and distributed—especially to interested foreign readers—through the Government Information Bureau.¹ With its cream-colored cover, the booklet can thus be rightly viewed as a form of off-white propaganda, poised between openly announcing and quietly dampening its source. The opening paragraph of its anonymous introduction manifests this affiliation: “The years 1939 to 1945 were years of national tension in Ireland. They brought forward in their most acute form questions of international relationship, defense, supplies and food production. Happily, the Irish people and the Irish Government were at one in these grave matters, and by that unity and the discipline and self-sacrifice of the community as a whole the many perils in the situation were avoided and Irish neutrality was maintained.”² Balancing the peril, gravity, and tension of the war years against the communal self-determination both secured and represented by neutrality, the rhetoric of the passage underscores what had already become the familiar official image of “Ireland’s stand”: that of singular perseverance amid exceptionally dangerous impositions on the state’s independence. As propaganda, the passage provides an effective set of strong terms and associations with which to inform the meaning of neutrality.

      Because of the familiarity of this image, it is fundamental to note the peculiar idiom of the passage, which on its own seems to clash with the conventional harmonics of Irish neutrality. Between grim poles of global devastation and national preservation, the passage turns on the word “happily,” a mediating term meant to convey grateful and fortunate relief, but also carrying the sense of secure and appropriate contentment. Given that the war years in Ireland have since become characterized by their unremitting claustrophobia and horizonless isolation, this turn is at best odd. Yet it chimes with what is perhaps the most famous Irish statement of the war years, a speech made by de Valera that is not, however, collected in Ireland’s Stand: his St. Patrick’s Day broadcast of 1943. Delivered on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Gaelic League, the speech has come to exemplify the insular vision of Irish life, its second paragraph alone standing as the regressive essence of what passes for “de Valera’s Ireland”:

      Acutely conscious though we all are of the misery and desolation in which the greater part of the world is plunged, let us turn aside for a moment to that ideal Ireland that we would have. That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be the forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that man should live.³

      The devotion paid by later critics to this single paragraph of a single broadcast, as though de Valera never uttered another word into a microphone, is almost touching. With some justification, de Valera has been taken to task for flattening the diversity of Irish experience in articulating a traditionally sanctioned, rurally based conception of society, one apparently unable to comprehend happiness outside the confines of field, family, church, and language. But this reading comes at the cost of ignoring the broadcast’s attention to the risks of increasing stratification amid scarcity, to the possibility of concentrating privilege with those already possessing it. Its vision of self-sufficient contentment based on shared commitments to health, welfare, and respect is indeed all the more plangent for its conditionality.⁴ Hardly the outline of a program of national redistribution, the speech nonetheless understands the “ideal Ireland that we would have” by recognizing the very real constraints on its achievement.

      These constraints are spelled out in the other fourteen paragraphs of the broadcast, in which the ongoing pursuit of an ideal self-determination is rhetorically couched among the all-too-real challenges to Irish independence. The speech explicitly identifies the latter as the material conditions of the war, what the second paragraph names as the “misery and desolation in which the greater part of the world is plunged.” Closing the speech in Irish, de Valera again sounds this note in its final paragraph, contrasting the “calamity” (anachain) and “misfortune” (mí-ádh) brought by the war with the “protection” (scáth) and “shelter” (dídean) afforded by non-belligerence.⁵ Within this frame, the “Ireland which we dreamed of” represents not the idealist renunciation of the realities of the world, but a momentary inward “turn” toward alternative possibilities that is itself necessitated by those realities. Taken in its entirety, the speech insists on this relationship, and the point becomes even sharper when the speech is read in the context of the policy statements collected in Ireland’s Stand. Nowhere in the text of the St. Patrick’s Day broadcast does the word “neutrality” appear, and this fact might account for why it was not included in a booklet partly aimed at foreign readers; yet in the speech, neutrality everywhere serves as the term mediating between “misery and desolation” close at hand and the possibility of future contentment. In response to the German invasion