That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War

by Clair Wills

352pp, Faber, £25

Like Auden and Isherwood's departure for America in 1939, Ireland's wartime neutrality was once a source of bitter controversy. Winston Churchill was the fiercest critic, denouncing the Irish premier Eamon de Valera as unprincipled and cowardly, and leaning on him (without success) to lease back the Treaty ports that Britain had finally given up in 1938. The Americans were no less vituperative, once they belatedly joined the Allies, accusing the Irish of acting as "a ready-made Trojan horse" for Hitler. And there were also criticisms from Irish writers based abroad, including Louis MacNeice, who wrote of the "neutral island in the heart of man", and Samuel Beckett, whose efforts in the French resistance made him scornful of those back home ("My friends eat sawdust and turnips while all of Ireland safely gorges"). A recurrent image, ironic given that wartime Britain was enduring blackouts while Dublin blazed with light, was of a people living in darkness, their faces turned away from Europe's suffering as they skulked in the peasant mindset of Ballygobackwards. Whether through passive indifference or active collaboration, either way they were "shaking hands with murder".

The view in Dublin was very different, of course. For a new nation, too small and ill-equipped to defend itself, neutrality was simple prudence. To offer help when a neighbour's house was on fire was fair enough, but, as De Valera saw it, entering the war was like being asked to "throw ourselves into the flames". The vast majority of people in Ireland supported him. The guiding principle was Ourselves Alone, an affirmation of sturdy independence rather than a cop-out. It wasn't as if the war had no impact. But the nation's sovereignty was precarious, and staying out of the conflict was the only way to preserve it.

The arguments raged back and forth long after the war was over. But Clair Wills's history of wartime Ireland brings a sane, subtle, reconciling spirit where once there was only intransigence. This isn't to say she writes with permissive, wrong-on-both-sides equanimity - whenever hypocrisy, disingenuousness or self-delusion raise their heads, she's suitably tough on them. But her task is to explain rather than to pontificate, and it's hard to imagine a fairer-minded guide.

The war began with a mass exodus of Irish workers from England ("The year was 1939/ The sky was full of lead/ Hitler was headed for Poland/ And Paddy for Holyhead"). But soon many were taking the boat back, not just to pick up labouring or nursing jobs but to serve in the British armed forces. De Valera had mixed feelings about this: for Ireland to be the vibrant, self-sufficient rural republic he dreamt of, Catholic in religion and Irish-speaking, it needed to keep its young; exposing them not just to battle but to Anglo-Saxon mammonism might mean they never returned. But for all his mistrust of Britain and "the dope of foreignism", his sympathies were with the Allies rather than the Axis powers, and what neutrality came to mean to most of his people (all the more so once the balance tipped against Hitler) was "friendly neutrality" towards England or, as some preferred to put it, "being neutral against Germany".

For leftwing republicans, the position was different. Until the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet pact, they saw Britain as a colonial aggressor engaged in another of its imperialist wars and they felt honour-bound to offer resistance. In Britain the great fear was that Hitler would invade via the back door of Ireland's south-west coast, and rumours abounded of German spies and parachutists being made welcome in Kerry and Cork. But despite one would-be joint German-IRA plot, codenamed Plan Kathleen, there was little substance to the portrayal of Ireland as a fickle coquette flirting with the Nazis. Most active members of the IRA were interned for the duration of the war. And the wise or apathetic who thought that war could never come to Ireland - who said that (as a character in a Brian Moore novel puts it) "It'll be years before Hitler gets around to this benighted outpost" - were proved to be right.

Ireland's Catholicism was potentially a bigger problem, promising a link with the fascist countries of southern Europe - Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Salazar's Portugal - which shared the same religion. The prospect of an alliance of Catholic nations, spiritually armed against paganism, certainly appealed to some priestly hierarchs; others merely assumed a pose of saintly superiority in being above the fray, as if the bombs falling on England were a punishment for her materialism. But De Valera wasn't swayed by this kind of clerical pressure any more than he was by Churchill. And the books and broadcasts of fascists such as Francis Stuart ("Democracy is the ideal of those whose lives as individuals are failures") had little effect on Irish public opinion.

The idea that Ireland intentionally cocooned itself between 1939 and 1945, or (Hubert Butler's image) curled up like a hedgehog, isn't borne out by the evidence that Wills presents. Many people would have liked to know more about the war in Europe, but were hampered by censorship of newspapers and a lack of batteries for wirelesses. Moreover, the country didn't emerge unscathed: there were fuel shortages, transport chaos, a dramatic rise in cases of TB and, most devastating of all, the break-up of the rural economy. In time, food became scarce, too, and even in the early days of plenty, Cyril Connolly noted on a trip to Dublin in 1941, "the shops are full of good things to eat, the streets of people who cannot afford to buy them". There were also air raids. In 1941, 34 people died during a German bomb attack on Dublin; north of the border, 900 died in Belfast in a single night.

Still, by May 1945, with the first images of Belsen, came a feeling, among many, that neutrality had been collaboration by omission - that it had severed the Irish people from a common tide of suffering humanity in Europe. That feeling grew when De Valera visited the home of the German envoy in Ireland to offer his condolences on Hitler's death - and, a year later, protested that the death sentences imposed on Nazi leaders at Nuremberg were contrary to international law. The Allied destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an "abombic tomb" (Flann O'Brien's macabre pun) may have complicated this reaction, but the Irish Times's damning verdict in 1945 was that De Valera's policy had been one of "national emasculation" - neuterality. Two years later, the Irish people delivered their own verdict and voted in a different party. As the economy slowly picked up, so isolationism declined. These days Ireland's ties to mainland Europe are stronger than Britain's.

As the daughter of an Irish mother and English father, Clair Wills grew up with two different versions of the second world war, and is perfectly placed to tell the story as seen by each side. Her book not only fills a gap, the only previous full-length study of Irish neutrality being Robert Fisk's In Time of War (1983), it is a model of exhaustive research and illuminating example, taking in a wide range of topics - dancing, films, smuggling, farming, informing, amateur theatre and Step Together fairs - without losing direction or focus. A particular bonus is the attention to Irish writers (Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O'Faolain, Brendan Behan and many more), whose ideas and experiences from 1939-45 make a fascinating study in themselves.

· Blake Morrison's novel South of the River is published next month by Chatto