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  • Ireland and Irish Americans 1932–1945: The Search for Identity
  • Matthew J. O’Brien
Ireland and Irish Americans 1932–1945: The Search for Identity, by John Day Tully, pp. 192. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Portland, OR. $69.95.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 proved a pivotal juncture in modern Irish history, posing an existential threat to the diplomatic autonomy of the new country. Caught between Nazi aggression and British desperation, Taoiseach Eamon de Valéra nevertheless refused to abandon his prewar commitment to neutrality for the next six years. Although this stance enjoyed almost unanimous support within Irish borders, foreign observers were much less sympathetic, maintaining a bitter sense of recrimination that would persist long after the defeat of the Axis powers.

John Day Tully’s Ireland and Irish Americans 1932–1945 offers welcome insight into the role played by transatlantic relations during this dramatic test of Irish will. Drawing largely upon recently released state records, Tully identifies the wartime experience as the crucial moment of disengagement between Ireland and Irish America, following a period of shifting identities on each side of the Atlantic. The author’s discussion of Irish developments revisits a thirty-year-old debate on the origins and motivations behind that country’s lasting commitment to neutrality, as Tully attributes this definitive stance to de Valéra’s interwar attempt to create an independent role for Ireland on the world stage. At the same time, the author challenges the conventional notion that Irish-American identity lost its salience during the ethnic watershed of the 1920s, asserting instead that Irish Americans remained marginalized in the United States until World War II. In Tully’s eyes, then, the wartime experience was truly a double-edged sword, cutting a new course for Irish diplomacy while [End Page 149] severing transatlantic ties with Irish America, wielded by the occasionally clumsy hands of Irish, American, and British statesmen.

Tully’s most notable scholarly contribution comes in his assertion that the transatlantic relationship between Ireland and Irish America played a central role in Allied diplomacy during World War II. In the last twenty years, a new generation of historians—for instance, Eunan O’Halpin, Clair Wills, and Robert Coles—have followed up on the groundbreaking work of iconoclasts like T. Ryle Dwyer and Robert Fisk, looking past de Valéra’s public pronouncements of neutrality to uncover numerous cases of Anglo-Irish wartime collaboration. Moving beyond Churchill’s polemics and the postwar recriminations of writers like Nicholas Monserrat, such works have shifted the role of chief anti-Irish antagonist from Britain to the United States.

How, then, to explain this American transition from a role model for Ireland to its most ardent critic? The answer, first propounded by T. Ryle Dwyer, came in the person of David Gray, a remarkably undiplomatic American minister to Ireland from 1940 to 1947. Owing his position to nepotism(he was Eleanor Roosevelt’s uncle by marriage) rather than to any experience in foreign policy, Gray soon displayed an openly contemptuous approach to de Valéra. In time, Gray undertook an unrelenting public relations offensive against the Irish government long after Irish neutrality had lost any strategic military importance.

With his thorough examination of recently released documents, Tully offers a wider appreciation of American diplomacy during this period that elaborates on Gray’s campaign without diminishing his culpability. Among the Irish records that Tully utilizes, the most evocative are probably the collection of Robert Brennan, the Irish minister to the United States during the war, who emerges as one of the book’s most sympathetic figures. The deft service of this former journalist makes him the perfect foil for Gray, as Brennan scrambled to contain the damage deliberately wrought by the American minister’s disinformation campaign. In this, Tully is helped by a recent release of Irish diplomatic documents as part of the Royal Irish Academy’s archival series, Documents on Irish Foreign Policy.

Tully’s most profound revelations, however, come from recently released American diplomatic records. The author’s thorough examination of American State Department documents (including the voluminous Foreign Relations papers of the United...

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