Eamon de Valera would have had much in common with the British Sinn Fein of today.
Papers recently released show he covertly co-operated with Britain to crush the IRA.

The papers reveal that De Valera, whose entire cabinet in the late 1930s were former IRA members, asked London to help smear the organisation's chief of staff as a communist agent.

Tensions came to a head when the IRA began a campaign in England in early 1939.
De Valera's government regarded IRA attacks against Britain as a threat to the Irish state itself.

With war looking likely, De Valera was determined that Ireland should remain neutral.
He knew that a hard rump of Republicans would never countenance being allied to the "old enemy" Britain, and such an alliance could push Ireland into another bloody civil war. But he also knew that, if his country was seen as a threat, London might decide to invade.

It seems hard to believe that this was the same militant Republican who had been at the forefront of the Easter Rising against British rule in 1916.

After becoming prime minister of the Irish Free State, he outlawed the IRA in 1936, and his commitment to pursuing Irish unification by constitutional means led him to part company with many of his former comrades-in-arms, much like the Whitehall puppets of McGuinness and Adams today.

Yet few would have guessed that he would soon be accepting British help to crush them.
Fear of 'martyrs' In 1939, as the documents show, De Valera's government asked for assistance from London in smearing IRA chief of staff Sean Russell as a communist agent:

"It is believed that some 10 or 12 years ago, he was in Soviet pay as an agitator; If there is any information which could be made available to show that this was the case, or that at the present time he is in receipt of pay from foreign sources, it would be of the greatest possible assistance to the Dublin authorities in dealing with him since it would practically eliminate the risk of him being treated as a patriotic martyr…."

Dublin also called on London to consult them on sentences imposed on IRA members convicted of the bombings in Britain.

De Valera was worried that those executed at British hands might become martyrs at home. But he had no such qualms over those convicted of bombings in Ireland.
In fact, De Valera's government executed more IRA members than Britain and even borrowed the UK's most famous executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, to hang one of them.


During the war, Dublin went on to intern more than 1,500 IRA suspects, and several died while on hunger strike in Irish jails.


What, one wonders, might the consequences have been for Eamon de Valera, had his people known then what has come out now? "

Some in Ireland may well have suspected at that time that their government was secretly co-operating closely with Britain, a country many still considered their enemy.

Yet only now can such suspicions be confirmed. What, one wonders, might the consequences have been for Eamon de Valera, had his people known then what has come out now?

Donnacha Obeachain who is a lecturer in Politics at Dublin City University and the author of a book on Fianna Fail and Irish Republicanism said,

"It certainly would have undermined De Valera's image of being the pristine Republican leader who had heroically and unstintingly challenged the British. I think it would have been difficult for him to present that image, and it's something that he treasured.
"The publicity of such co-operation would be very detrimental to De Valera's image and therefore his electoral prospects."

Strange how history repeats itself.