Ireland's Revolutionary Diplomat: A Biography of Leopold Kerney by Barry Whelan

Author:Barry Whelan [Whelan, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Political
ISBN: 9780268105051
Google: HarauwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 41879594
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2019-01-15T10:21:13+00:00

The bonds that bind our souls together

In love of Ireland and each other.5

KERNEY PREPARES THE GROUNDWORK

It is clear from Kerney’s diary records of this time and from family photographs taken of Micheline’s wedding that within Fianna Fáil and moderate republican circles the diplomat was a close and trusted friend of everyone from government ministers down to root-and-branch associates. As far as de Valera was concerned, Kerney was clearly a loyal and trusted colleague, as these rare social events illustrated during the war years. Both he and Kerney had been through tumultuous events since the treaty split, and their association had endured many ups and downs to this point. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, knew of Kerney’s close ties to de Valera both politically and as godfather to the diplomat’s youngest son, yet they somehow came to the view that Kerney was a possible route of access to the Taoiseach to open negotiations to alter Ireland’s neutral policy and reach an accommodation with the IRA.

Hitler’s spymasters and henchmen, most prominent of all, the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, supported an initiative of this kind, yet from the beginning they completely failed to see that such a plan was deeply flawed and was predicated on false assumptions. De Valera had marginalized, distanced himself from, and then clamped down on the IRA since coming to power in 1932, as one biographer, Diarmaid Ferriter, has shown: “Six IRA men were executed by army firing squad during the war; Charlie Kerins was hanged in December 1944, three others were allowed to die on hunger-strike, while more than 500 were interned without trial and another 600 were committed under the Offences Against the State Act.”6 He was no longer supportive of that organization. He had successfully used legislative and constitutional means to attain greater freedoms for Ireland and had negotiated the return of the treaty ports from Britain in 1938. This strategy had worked, and moderate republicans like Kerney, as well as the majority of the electorate, supported de Valera because his approach worked. Neutrality was a further expression of that independence. Any witness to Micheline’s wedding that day would have seen that Kerney, like all his colleagues, was prepared to sacrifice anything for de Valera. It is quite astonishing how the Nazis got it so wrong right from the start.

It appears from the Germans’ intelligence files that their reading of Irish republicans and republicanism in general was framed in a purely militant context and perspective. They believed that its adherents would be willing and ready to fight with Germany at the right moment against Britain to realize the dream of a united island, no matter what past actions demonstrated to the contrary. The different strands of Irish republicanism seem to have escaped or, rather, been overlooked by them. Their estimations of both de Valera and Kerney were profoundly incorrect. A natural assumption and overestimation was reached after meetings with Kerney, for example, that led them to think he was a militant republican who knew

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