This is an rare example of a surviving internal IRA memo from 1942. Sent from the department of the Chief of Staff, GHQ to the Director of Publicity, Northern Command on 13th June 1942.
At the time, the Chief of Staff of the IRA was Hugh McAteer, while the Director of Publicity in the Northern Command was John Graham. The memo covers the IRA’s attitude towards American troops in the north following the entry of the US into the world war in 1941. In the IRA’s view, the stationing of any troops on Irish soil (British, German or American) could only happen with the consent of what was seen as the legitimate government of Ireland. According to the IRA, this was the IRA. While this may seem laughable, de Valera had taken a somewhat similar view of the deployment of American troops in Ireland. His constitution, enacted in 1937, retained the claim to authority over the whole of the island of Ireland and, as such, de Valera believed that the deployment of US troops in the north should only have happened following consultation with his government.
As fanciful as this may all seem, there was a significant Irish-American lobby which could be mobilised. When the IRA Chief of Staff was detained in the United States at the behest of the British government in 1939, seventy-six members of Congress threatened to boycott an official event welcoming the British king on an official visit. After September 1939, there was pressure from Irish-America to make US aid for British war efforts conditional upon the British government addressing the issue of partition in Ireland.
Indeed, the IRA had continuously positioned it’s own strategy with an eye on, at the very least, avoiding damage to de Valera and Fianna Fáil’s ascent to power in the 1920s and 1930s in the expectation that, once in power, they would seek to end partition and create an Irish republic along the line of the republic declared in 1916. By the late 1930s it was apparent that this was not going to be the case and, in the short term, the possibility of leveraging Irish-America towards the same end replaced the IRA’s long term hopes for de Valera.
The IRA memo of 13th June 1942 was in the Director of Publicity’s Northern Command HQ when it was raided by the RUC on 10th September that year and, as it was used as a crown exhibit in the trial of Graham and David Fleming, it has survived in the Public Records Office.
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