Irish Political Review.  August 2014: Frank Aiken by Philip O’Connor

MI5-TCD character assassination debunked

Trinity College Dublin is soon to be “re-branded” as “Trinity College, the University of Dublin”. While this might seem a little arrogant, apparently the name change is in part to facilitate “international students” seeking foreign study options on Google! Whatever its branding strategy, its Bank of Ireland Professor of Contemporary Irish History, member of its Board until 2012 and, among other things, joint editor—with Prof. Kennedy, Dr. Crowe (National Archive) et al—of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series, Eunan O’Halpin, is a man of prodigious output with everything going for him as a leading historian of modern Ireland. A meticulous Professor with unparalleled and often privileged access to State and private papers, he has published a range of extensively researched books, most notably, Spying on Ireland. British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality during the Second World War (Oxford, 2008).

Spying on Ireland contains some quite sensational revelations of more than purely passing historical interest. But these are often left hanging in the air without proper explanation or context in a manner that one must suspect is done with a purpose.

The Lenihan Yarn

One example is the story of Joseph Lenihan (Spying, pp. 179-83), an uncle of former Minister Mary O’Rourke and grand uncle of the late Minister of Finance Brian Lenihan. This story was widely used in the media at the time of publication of Spying on Ireland to boost sales. It appears that Lenihan was an IRA man who became involved with the German Abwehr in the late 1930s and was dropped as an agent into Ireland at the start of the Imperialist War of 1939-41. However, in 1941, after 18 months or so undertaking this mission, he abruptly “changed sides”, handing himself over, not to the authorities of the Free State but to British Military Intelligence in the North, and serving thereafter in the field of British counter-intelligence against Germany, a role he terminated abruptly on the conclusion of the War. We are given no explanation for this behaviour, and O’Halpin’s telling of it leaves the impression of a charlatan—erratic, unprincipled and unreliable (he titles this section of the book “Basket Case”).

A historian without agendas would of course try to make sense of such a story. But then this Professor seems to be rarely without some kind of agenda or other. Readers of the Irish Political Review will remember Niall Meehan’s account of O’Halpin’s State-funded foray a few years ago with a JCB (via the State organ RTE), in which he had himself filmed digging up a field in Co. Cork to find the corpses of “murdered victims” of the IRA in 1921-22. Although he found nothing, he didn’t allow this get in the way of his far-fetched yarn.

As regards the actions of Joe Lenihan, these would make perfect sense to anyone acquainted with the politics of the Communist movement of the time, with which Lenihan seems to have been connected, though, not having the extraordinary access of the Professor to British Intelligence sources, I can only conjecture that this was the case from the selected facts presented by him. If so, then Lenihan’s actions were entirely consistent with the Comintern view of the War, which saw it quite correctly in its early (1939-41) phase as a playing out of military Imperial rivalries. British war plans in 1939-41 had nothing to do with “anti-fascist” concerns. Indeed, in late 1939, after Britain and France had declared war on Germany ostensibly in defence of Polish independence and then undertaken no action to effect their “Guarantee” to Poland, they moved to northern Finland with the aim of expanding offensive operations to the USSR. Britain’s frantic efforts at the time to get fascist Italy and semi-fascist Romania on side as allies were in full swing, as were its efforts to implement a trade blockade of Germany, Russia and neutral Ireland, expand the War as far as possible, especially to Scandinavian and Balkan countries, sabre rattle and threaten the Irish Free State with invasion, and, after June 1940, attack the French Empire in the Middle East and Africa. In this context of ruthless Imperialist war Lenihan’s conduct makes absolute sense, as did his abandonment of this line of action after the German invasion of Russia in 1941, which transformed the nature of the War into an anti-fascist war against Germany, prosecuted for the most part by the Soviet Union. But none of this context appears in O’Halpin’s book, as presumably it would contradict the neat Churchillian yarn of the War as a conflict between the “democracies” and“totalitarianism”, between Good and Evil, a storyline which O’Halpin is meticulously careful not to stray from. In such a scenario, Lenihan is reduced in the Professor’s book to a “basket case”.

Britain’s Imperialist sabotage forces in wartime Ireland

Another interesting revelation in Spying on Ireland, whose full importance is left hanging and unclarified, is the story of the networks of spies and saboteurs “revived” by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) in the Free State in late 1939. These networks involved several hundred mostly Irish citizens of mainly, though not exclusively, Protestant and/or Anglo-Irish background, and mostly also former British military personnel, who regarded their oaths of loyalty to that organisation as superseding any ‘loyalty’ they might owe to the obviously despised State of their citizenship. O’Halpin asserts—without providing any sources for the assertion—that no such network had been maintained between 1922 and 1939. He does however concede escalated British Intelligence/subversion activity in Ireland in 1932-33 at a time when, in O’Halpin’s silken words, Britain “was influenced by a longing to see the back of {de Valera} and to facilitate the return to power of the supposedly more malleable Cosgrave” (Spying, p. 119).

“Supposedly”!!  Indeed, when, a few years ago, Manus O’Riordan, in this journal, revealed convincing evidence of comprehensive plans for an Italian-fascist-style coup to oust the de Valera Government involving British Government agencies, Cumann na nGaedhal circles, the Army Comrades and even the Irish “High Commissioner” in London, Sir John Dulanty, this writer has it on good authority that this revelation was pooh-poohed by the Professor.

He nevertheless relates (Spying, p. 74) how SIS’s main man recruited to oversee operations in Ireland in 1940, Sir Charles Tegart, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, had worked with British Intelligence against India in World War One “probing links between Indian separatists and Germany”, had then undertaken a “review” of RIC/Black-and-Tan Intelligence efforts in Ireland in 1920 on behalf of MI5, thereafter returning to “Indian Political Intelligence” and running its London office until being posted to “advise” British counter-insurgency forces suppressing the Arabs of Palestine in 1938. And throughout all those years, O’Halpin tells us, there were no MI5 operations in Ireland, though Tegart “maintained contact with Ireland, returning on holidays whenever he could”! How naive and/or blind is our Bank of Ireland Professor!?

The “revived” (or yet another?) SIS network was headed from June 1940 by Captain C.S. Collinson, “a career SIS officer” who operated under the cover of head of the “newly established British Travel Permit Office” (Spying, p. 113). His major collaborator was Albert Podesta, manager of the Dublin Stubbs office and “a Cork Protestant and first world war veteran … passionately loyal to Britain”. The Stubbs operation provided Collinson with a vast amount of information on sometimes compromised individuals through its army of credit “enquiry agents” and  Collinson’s web rapidly expanded to a mass of“networks of informants in Dublin and other major towns and along the southern and western coastlines”, including diverse individuals with old military connections, typically Captain W.M. Reidy, an ex-British officer who was a “well known Mason” and secretary of a Golf Club in Cork as well as “former members of the defunct Dublin Metropolitan Police and of the Garda”, with“pro-British sentiment … reinforced in some cases with modest regular payments” (Spying, p. 114). One Stubbs employee in the network, however, was a certain Moore, an anti-Treaty Republican, who, having “no intention of spying for Britain”, immediately alerted Dan Bryan, head of Irish Military Intelligence (G2) to Collinson’s networks and communications systems. Instead of rolling up the British spy/sabotage network, and without MI5 or SIS ever discovering its penetration by the Irish, G2 simply kept tabs on it for the remainder of the War, making use of the copious information that came through it intended for British eyes only.

O’Halpin provides some detail on this network, and also on radio communications officers located around Ireland by SIS and MI5 to operate allegedly in the event of a German invasion, at a time when Britain continued to refuse such equipment or arms to the Irish Government, despite repeated requests. In his eagerness to emphasise and absurdly exaggerate the extent of Irish-British “security cooperation” in World War Two, it is only in a throw-away remark that O’Halpin mentions that, throughout the War and at Churchill’s explicit command, Britain implemented a ruthless economic blockade of Eire aimed at “starving Ireland into the war” (Spying, p. 213).  It also maintained a strict ban on the sale of military equipment of any kind, thus limiting the country’s ability to defend itself and, in the event of actual military action against Ireland by the other side, maximising potential Irish dependence on the British Army:

“The prime minister believed that to give the Irish arms would only encourage them in their intransigence, and thought it more likely that that such weapons would be used against Britain than against a German invader” (Spying, p. 135-6).

Yet hand in hand with this approach, Churchill’s force for creating “stay behind groups” as a terrorist/sabotage force behind German lines—the Special Operations Executive (SOE)—created yet a further network of agents and saboteurs in the Free State from late 1940:

“Plans were made for the destruction of Irish fuel stocks to prevent them falling into German hands. Fuel imports and storage were largely in the hands of British firms, and in December {1940} the JIC {Joint Intelligence Committee—PO’C} were reassured to learn that ‘an arrangement had been made … with the three principal companies … that the stocks there … should be kept down’. Plan ‘Vista’, for the destruction of the fuel stocks of BOAC at Foynes by an employee named Monroe, who might ‘even consent to stay behind after the Germans overrun the area’, was agreed in June 1941 … As was disclosed to the Admiralty in December 1942, the Irish themselves made extensive plans for the destruction of key port facilities and airfields, although shortages of explosives and other materials {due to the British blockade and armament sales ban to Ireland—PO’C} made the likely effectiveness of these dispositions problematic, and from a British point of view there was always the consideration that the Irish might just as likely put them into effect to hamper a British invasion as a German one” (Spying, pp. 131-2).

These plans were to be implemented without any connection with Irish forces:

“The SOE plan did not envisage preparatory measures such as suborning of local officials or covert subsidy of Irish opposition groups, methods which were features of British schemes in other parts of the world at the time” (Spying, pp. 132).

A special relationship indeed! On 31st March 1941 the British Chiefs of Staff ordered SOE, in collaboration with the British Army in Northern Ireland, to activate an “organisation to undertake subversive warfare … in the event of Germany occupying part of Ireland”. Major Colin Gubbins, one of the chiefs of SOE who—although O’Halpin doesn’t tell us this—had been involved in “anti-guerrilla” operations in Ireland during the War of Independence (see my article, ‘British war strategy, the SOE and the IRA’, in Irish Foreign Affairs No. 6, April 2010), was insistent that any stay-behind sabotage force be firmly controlled by SOE. Irish involvement should be limited to Irish military circles who were willing to collaborate, to the exclusion of the “Eire Government” of whose Ministers only “one or two, but no more, may be trustworthy” (p. 134).

These 1941 SIS-SOE plots for military action in the Free State, first in support of a British invasion and then against a German invasion, were thus to be effected to the exclusion of other than collaborationist Irish military circles left over from the “Civil War”. From Autumn 1940 such plans focused mostly on the eventuality of a German invasion only, though nothing of substance changed in the British action to be taken. This shift of emphasis occurred when planning a direct British invasion were dropped, thanks in large parts to Churchill’s accepting the analyses of his chief spy in Ireland, Elizabeth Bowen, operating under the cover of a “novelist” and “travel writer” (as first exposed by Aubane Historical Society in this journal, and now grudgingly and here finally admitted by O’Halpin, Spying, pp. 119, 139).

With Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941 these plans too appear to have been put on the back-burner. O’Halpin does not give us details (yet alone many names) of this British terror/insurgency force in Ireland, though it is difficult to imagine it did not overlap with the several hundred strong loyalist SIS force, whose identities the Professor knows but chooses not to divulge. That there was no shortage of such loyal circles had been made clear in the thousands of applications made to the London-based “Irish Grants Committee” in the 1920s by people resident in southern Ireland who claimed to have “suffered” at the hands of the Irish as a result of their “active loyalty” to Crown Forces during the War of Independence (the vast majority of the claims were rejected as bogus, but what a database!).

The War of Independence Truce, negotiated by de Valera to enable negotiations on a final settlement to take place, began in July 1921, and in the Autumn the British Army implemented very visible and provocative preparations for the “immediate and terrible war” on the Boer War model with which Britain had begun to threaten the Republic’s negotiators. These preparations included the registration of “active loyalists” and their concentration and arming at centres where troop concentrations were being assembled. Plans were drafted for troops to bring in these civilians and their families to clear the way for the “energetic action” planned against the “rebel population”. (see my article, “‘Immediate and Terrible War’—Some British Army plans, Irish Political Review, July 2012).

Collinson’s networks, according to O’Halpin, were “in the main … not directed against Irish interests”(!) (Spying, p. ix) and were“wound up” in 1945 shortly before the end of the War. However, though not mentioned in Spying, this was not the end of the matter, as an earlier book by O’Halpin himself relates:

“SIS’s Irish networks were formally wound up on 31 March 1945, but orders were given in November 1945 to re-instate a skeletal organisation in case relations between Ireland and Britain soured. (It is said that the British, unaware that SIS’s wartime networks had been compromised, then made the basic error of going back to some of their former Irish operatives).” (MI5 and Ireland 1939-1945. The Official History. Edited and introduced by Eunan O’Halpin, 2003, p. 5.)

The History Departments of Irish Universities have never produced a credible account of organised British subversion, counter-insurgency, terror and propaganda activities during the Irish War of Independence or the succeeding decades of the Irish Free State and Republic. The nearest we get to an account of it in the War of Independence from University circles is a reproduction of British Intelligence’s own velvet ‘history’ of itself, lovingly “edited” and introduced by two of O’Halpin’s then fellow TCD operatives—British Intelligence in Ireland, 1920-21. The Final Report, edited by Peter Hart, Series Editor: David Fitzpatrick. On some of the unsavoury editing undertaken, see Brian P. Murphy and Niall Meehan, Troubled History—A 10th anniversary critique of Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies (Aubane Historical Society, 2008). To this day, the only comprehensive account of the actual axis of propaganda, terror, counter-insurgency and spin operated from Dublin Castle during those years is that by Dr Brian P. Murphy, again published outside a university, by the despised Athol Books (The Origins & Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland 1920, Aubane-Spinwatch, 2006 ). Perhaps TCD could free up one member of the battalions of Ph.D. students of the Bank of Ireland History Department producing theses tilting at Catholic and nationalist windmills, writing up the minutiae of the case for Britain’s ‘just’ Great War or inventing new theatres of operation for TCD’s “School of War Studies”, to compare the lists from the Irish Grants Committee with O’Halpin’s secretive lists of Collinson’s SIS operatives and the SOE’s putative “stay behind” teams to produce some interesting research results. Though on second thoughts .  .  .

The Aiken slur

O’Halpin, for all his fastidious research, cannot restrain the deep anti-Republican reflex required of a TCD Professor of History, even if a Bank of Ireland one. Whether or not he is a believer in biological racism we cannot say, but he has a disturbing habit of constantly reminding his readers or listeners of his distant relationship (grand nephew, and hence, in racist terminology, sharing about 1/16 of his blood) to Kevin Barry, the IRA volunteer hanged by the British in 1920.  It is as if he is trying to say that many Volunteers of that period were not really Republicans at all—look at me after all!

One of the unedifying aspects of Spying on Ireland is the sprinkling throughout it of sometimes open and sometimes more veiled tarring of various Republicans or Fianna Fáil Ministers as “pro-Nazi”. A good academic Editor might have pulled him up on this and asked him to produce something more than opinions inherited from MI5 reports. But then the book, after all, is produced by Oxford University Press, which has a long track record in these matters. Indeed his cosiness throughout with MI5 is merely a mirror image of his slurs on the historical reputations of many Republicans. A previous book of his, MI5 and Ireland 1939-1945. The Official History, was graced with an effusive forward by Christopher Andrew, the “official” historian of MI6, for which O’Halpin expresses his gratitude. Andrew lavishes praise on the Irish-British Intelligence “collaboration” in World War Two, a pudding which O’Halpin considerably over-ices. But also, for good measure, and possibly to reassert just who, in that particular relationship, is on top at the end of the day, Andrew closes his Preface with a veiled threat:

“Just as the demand for intelligence during the Second World War produced an unprecedented amount of intelligence collaboration, so 11 September 2001 has made necessary an even wider collaboration in order to identify and monitor the activities of al-Qaeda cells in over fifty countries. That collaboration will sometimes necessarily involve intelligence exchange with states such as Sudan and Libya with which Washington and London have in the past maintained less than cordial relations. And, as in the case of Ireland during the Second World War, intelligence exchange will not preclude the continuance of covert operations on the territory of those countries with which the exchange takes place.”

In his unsurpassed analysis of the actual workings of the system of propaganda, terror, counter-insurgency and spin operated by British Intelligence from Dublin Castle during the War of Independence, The Origins and Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland 1920 (Aubane-Spinwatch, 2006), Dr Brian P. Murphy showed that doctoring and distorting the historical record (“poisoning the well”) through an astute management of its own files is one of the high arts employed by this most ingenious of intelligence services. Part of this was the doctrine of “verisimilitude” which, as enunciated by the chief propagandist at the Castle, and one of the masters of early 20th century British intelligence propaganda, Basil Clarke, meant “having the air of truth”, an assembly of apparently plausible facts which give the air of truth to an essential lie. O’Halpin’s Foreword writer, Andrew, in his own MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, relates two things of importance. The first is to tell the reader that, to be entrusted with the files of that organisation and write an acceptable history of it, he had had to take the oath which all members of MI6 take. The second important matter he relates is a regurgitation of the MI6 character assassination of the late Jack Jones, TGWU and TUC leader and Spanish Civil War volunteer, as a “Soviet agent” when he was close to British Government affairs. While the former demonstrates that Christopher Andrew became a member of MI6 to be allowed write an acceptable history of it, the latter illustrates his loyalty to that oath in regurgitating the lies of its “poisoned well”, lies which have since been comprehensively demolished by Manus O’Riordan (The Vindication Of Jack Jones, Athol Books, 2012).

Whatever Professor O’Halpin’s relationship with MI5, he is certainly not in his MI6 Foreword writer’s shadow when it comes to regurgitating useful lies from the “poisoned well”. He reprints without comment or correction the outrageous view of the terrorist spook, Major Gubbins of SOE, that “some of the Eireann Ministers are almost self-confessedly pro-German, others are indiscreet, and one or two, but no more, may be trustworthy” (from an MI5 point of view) (Spying, p. 134). O’Halpin also relates that the SIS traitors’ network in Ireland filed reports on various people, including “pro-Nazi Irishmen such as the one-time IRA man and solicitor, Con Lehane, and Seán McBride” (p. 119—note the ingenious comma) and elsewhere boldly states that “McBride and {Francis} Stuart were strong admirers of Nazi Germany” (p. 42). While this is true of Stuart, it is demonstrably untrue of McBride, a fact of which O’Halpin should be well aware since the appearance of the excellent biography by Elizabeth Keane (Seán MacBride. A Life) published three years before O’Halpin’s Spying. Many other similar instances could be mentioned, leading to the unavoidable conclusion that the Professor is engaging in his own little campaign of well-poisoning.

But it is in the case of Frank Aiken, a senior figure in the Treaty War IRA, De Valera’s wartime Minister for Coordination of Defensive Measures and probably Ireland’s outstanding post-WW2 Minister for Foreign Affairs, that O’Halpin’s exercise in verisimilitude goes a file too far. He regurgitates MI5 reports to the British Cabinet which classified Aiken as “an extremist (left)”, and portrayed him as “virulently pro-German” (p. 37). O’Halpin does not tell the reader what to think of these charges. The Professor mentions once, in passing, buried deep in dense type, that Aiken was “determinedly pro-neutrality, not pro-German”, but quickly adds a doubt with the comment that he was nevertheless “always suspect in British eyes” (p. 47). These reports were spread in US circles to discredit Aiken when he went on a mission there in 1941 to try to secure US support to arm Irish neutrality:

“The imperturbable and taciturn Aiken, described by Bill Donovan {head of the OSS, precursor of the CIA—PO’C} as ‘of the extreme Left Wing’ but nevertheless a man whom the President should see, was believed, correctly or not, to be among the most pro-German of Irish politicians” (Spying, p. 144, emphasis added).

Why does O’Halpin throw in “correctly or not”? Does this Professor of Irish History, with unparalleled access to papers private, public and secret, and co-Editor of the RIA’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy 1941-1945, really not know the answer? Not to mention that Aiken’s extensive private papers have long been easily accessible in UCD Archive. As if to compound his insinuations, the Professor gratuitously adds that Sir John Dulanty’s portrayal of Aiken as “an anti-British bogeyman” on orders from Dublin during the Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1938 “may go some way to explain why the {pro-German} label stuck throughout the war (during which Aiken was elevated to the high-sounding role of minister for the coordination of defensive measures, a job which placed him at a remove from direct control over military matters and contact with G2)” (Spying, p. 38).

O’Halpin’s verisimilitude and sly, uncommented and dishonest use of quotations from MI5 sources, with his own ugly hints that the Irish Government shared MI5’s assessment added in for good measure, can leave the reader in little doubt as to what s/he should think of Aiken—a Nazi.

The slur rebutted

Bryce Evans—a lecturer at Liverpool University and a provocative historian who has been a thorn in the side of the Irish revisionist Establishment since the appearance in 2011 of his iconoclastic biography of Lemass (Seán Lemass. Democratic Dictator)—has recently co-edited with Stephen Kelly a biography of Aiken, Frank Aiken: Nationalist and Internationalist (2014). In the section on Aiken and the Second World War (pp. 133-157), Evans seeks to establish whether there is any basis for the MI5/O’Halpin character assassination and is left bewildered that it should even be a matter of debate.

But first back to the TCD Professor. Although allegedly a book on both “British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality during the Second World War”, O’Halpin’s Spying reduces to a single paragraph (in a book of 335 pages) one of the great stories of Irish neutrality—the key ancillary role in De Valera’s army of resistance played by the IRA. O’Halpin relates:

“{SIS/MI5} activities certainly contributed to a partial rapprochement between republicans and the state in the Munster area. The Irish army southern command intelligence officer, Florence O’Donoghue had, like Bryan and Archer, specialized in intelligence during the War of Independence … The fact of British clandestine activity along the southern coastline … and the possibility of a British attack to seize the southern ports …, enabled him in 1940 to persuade republicans to form the ‘Supplementary Intelligence Service’ … organized on the old war of independence IRA battalion areas. {I}SIS was designed as a surveillance organisation, channelling information from localities to O’Donoghue, and carrying out local investigations on request. It was also to have a ‘stay behind’ intelligence role in the event of areas coming under foreign military occupation. At the time of its creation the obvious problem for investigation was clandestine British activity;  over time, however, the organization was to prove useful in respect both of American and, most crucially, of German-related intrigue. It gave G2 the capability to collect good local intelligence independently of the Garda, and it also provided O’Donoghue with a good line into the Munster IRA. So secret was {I}SIS, and so delicate was the fact that committed republicans cooperated with the army which had defeated them in the civil war, that its existence was never publicly acknowledged. Five years after the end of the second world war, however, the government approved the secret distribution to {I}SIS members of the ‘Emergency Medal’ awarded to those who had served in the defence forces between 1939 and 1945” (Spying, pp. 73-4.  The ‘I’ before ‘SIS’ which, although not in the original, was inserted by O’Halpin for ‘Irish’, to distinguish this force from the “real”, British, SIS, has been placed by the present writer in curly brackets).

The Professor, of course, does not mention whether Aiken had any connection with these events. But it is not credible that he was not involved. He had retained close links with the IRA while, as Evans quotes him, believing firmly that the 1937 Constitution had restored the anti-Treaty position, making the southern IRA irrelevant. Nevertheless, he met with hunger-striking IRA prisoners in Arbour Hill Prison in early 1940 and “offered the IRA an amnesty and incorporation into the Army. The deal however was refused” (Evans, p. 135). Despite this rejection of a formal arrangement, the cooperation of the IRA in its Munster base, and in other activities brought to light by Manus O’Riordan in recent articles in the Irish Political Review, was no doubt facilitated by Aiken’s role. As minister for coordination of defence, Aiken had also led the creation of the Local Defence Force which, Evans reports, numbered over 180,000 by late 1941. Many local republicans joined this force which, in the event of an invasion by either side, was intended to form the mass base of a guerrilla resistance movement officered by the full time soldiers of the Army (of 41,000 men). But of course there is no mention of any of this in O’Halpin’s dense book.

What basis is there for the MI5 slurs of Aiken as “pro-German”, or even “pro-Nazi”, so slyly repeated for modern consumption by Bank of Ireland Professor O’Halpin? Having sifted through all the available evidence, Evans can find none. Indeed the militantly anti-de Valera US envoy, David Gray, stated bluntly in a memo to Roosevelt on 28th June 1940: “Aiken, as I wrote to you, has been a suspect as a fifth columnist {the charge widely circulated in US circles by MI5—PO’C}, but on the best authority I can get, this is untrue” (Evans, p. 135). Aiken also abhorred the Nazi treatment of the Jews and the censorship system which he supervised ruthlessly excluded anti-Semitic content of any kind from wartime newspapers (Evans, p. 149). Aiken never expressed any admiration of any kind for Nazi Germany and his liberal treatment of infringements of the censorship regulations and benign toleration of the antics of the pro-British editor of The Irish Times, R.M. Smyllie, is well documented by Evans.

That Aiken retained a strong hostility to Britain is beyond dispute, telling the head of the US State Department in 1941 that“there was no point talking to the Irish people about a potential aggressor when they were facing an active aggressor”. But, despite his role in Collins’ devious and disastrous “invasion” of ‘Northern Ireland’ in 1922 (see Pat Walsh, Catastrophe and Resurgence: The Catholic Predicament in ‘Northern Ireland’, Athol, 2014), he was no die-hard anti-partitionist. Evans shows how in 1940 he rejected notions of using the War to carry out incursions into the North, and that “rumours” (by guess who) that he favoured cooperation with a German invasion so as to “re-take” the North had no substance whatsoever. In his meeting with Roosevelt himself, Aiken categorically rejected the British claims that he had said that Ireland had nothing to fear from a German invasion. When asked in a hostile US press interview by Denis Johnston about Churchill’s “offer” of unity in return for Ireland joining their war, he replied: “Most certainly not. We want union and sovereignty, not union and slavery”. Evans also shows that his famous meeting with the fanatically pro-British Roosevelt in early 1941 and tour of the US were far from a failure or a “disaster” as O’Halpin termed it. He firmly stood his ground with Roosevelt, insisting—to the outrage of the Anglophile President—on US support for Ireland to resist aggression from either Britain or Germany, but nevertheless succeeded in securing large quantities of fuel and coal, and two merchant ships, which contributed considerably to blunting the impact of Britain’s brutal economic blockade of Ireland.

Why does he do it?

Bryce Evans, to paraphrase the awful Eamon Dunphy, is a good historian, not a great historian. All the sources he uses to establish the real record of Frank Aiken in WW2 were readily available to the TCD Professor, O’Halpin, and some of them are even in the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy 1941-1945, co-edited by the Professor himself. Evans brings some new evidence to bear in relation to Aiken’s visit to the US and his meeting with Roosevelt in 1941, but otherwise what he writes was readily available to the Professor. But O’Halpin prefers instead to cast slurs and employ innuendo and MI5-style verisimilitude to spread a Nazi cloud over Aiken’s historical reputation. Why does he do it? While the Professor’s visceral hostility to Republicans generally—something of a requirement for a TCD Professor, let alone a privileged MI5 historian—can be taken as given, his particular animus for Aiken is something less immediately explicable. One factor might well be the extraordinary affinity that has developed between Irish revisionists and the cause of Zionism, first championed by Conor Cruise O’Brien. For Aiken was to emerge in the post-War world as a substantial politician on the world stage, and nowhere more so than in his championing of the victims of the Zionist state building/expansion project in the 1960s and 1970s. That issue will be returned to in a future article.

The Origins and the Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland 1920 by Brian P. Murphy osb.  Foreword:  Prof. David Miller.  ISBN 1 903497 24 8.  100pp, Illus. Bibliog. Index.  AHS + Spinwatch., Feb. 2006.  €10, £8

Troubled History:  A 10th Anniversary Critique Of The IRA & Its Enemies by Brian Murphy osb and Niall Meehan.  Introduction Ruan O’Donnell.  48pp.  ISBN  978-1-903497–46-3. AHS.  May 2008.  €10,  £8