In the 1920s Germany and Ireland were new European democracies operating in adverse international, political and economic conditions. This book places the bilateral Irish-German relationship in the context of the professionalization of the Irish Foreign Service and the Irish Free State's progressive carving out of an independent foreign policy. It assesses the key Irish personalities involved in Irish-German relations. These include the successive Irish representatives in Berlin, the eminent scholar Dr Daniel A. Binchy, Leo T. McCauley, and the contentious Charles Bewley. Eamon de Valera and Joseph Walshe (Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs) also played a crucial role. Irish responses to the Wall Street Crash, the rise of the Nazis, and Hitler's policies (domestic and foreign) are all analysed. Did Irish officials foresee the fall of Weimar and the rise of Nazism? How did they view the unfolding nature of the Nazi regime? The clashes between Bewley's apologetic justifications of Nazism after 1935 and de Valera's critical attitudes towards domestic Nazi policies are examined. The ineffective efforts to expand Irish-German trade during the Anglo-Irish Economic War shed light on Irish attempts at export market diversification in the emerging protectionist world economic environment. The analysis places Irish-German relations within the maturation of events in Europe in the 1930s, taking account of the League of Nations' failure, the popularity of Fascism, the Blueshirts, the fraught international atmosphere, and Hitler's revisionist foreign policy. De Valera's support of Chamberlain's 'appeasement' of Hitler before March 1939 is located in the framework of de Valera's attitudes towards collective security, neutrality and Hibernia Irredenta.

This edited monograph sets out to track the course of change in both Ireland and Germany and in Irish-German relations over the last 20 years. 1989 marked the 40th year since the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany - the same year saw the toppling of the Berlin wall and with it the fall of the Iron Curtain. In Ireland, 1989 was a year nestled within a period of high unemployment and poor economic performance. Yet within a few years, a transformation occurred that brought unprecedented change, economically and socially. Therefore, symbolically speaking, a number of walls fell in Ireland that brought new spaces, if not freedoms - increased standards of living and better living conditions for many, new confidence in Self, and greater openness and tolerance for the Other within a society that had been predominantly monocultural for much of the twentieth century. The tenor of this book is one which charts, analyses, discusses and celebrates transition and change in Ireland, in Germany and in the relationship between Ireland and Germany in the hugely significant period of the last twenty years.

This monograph provides the first comprehensive detailed account of German-speaking refugees in Ireland 1933–1945 – where they came from, immigration policy towards them and how their lives turned out in Ireland and afterwards. Extensive archive research in Ireland, Germany, England, Austria as well as the US and numerous interviews make it possible to give an almost complete overview.

The monograph provides the first comprehensive, detailed account of German-speaking refugees in Ireland 1933-1945 - where they came from, immigration policy towards them and how their lives turned out in Ireland and afterwards. Thanks to unprecedented access to thousands of files of the Irish Department of Justice (all still officially closed) as well as extensive archive research in Ireland, Germany, England, Austria as well as the US and numerous interviews it is possible for the first time to give an almost complete overview of how many people came, how they contributed to Ireland, how this fits in with the history of migration to Ireland and what can be learned from it. While Exile studies are a well-developed research area and have benefited from the work of research centres and archives in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and the USA (Frankfurt/M, Leipzig, Hamburg, Berlin, Innsbruck, Graz, Vienna, London and SUNY Albany and the Leo Baeck Institutes), Ireland was long neglected in this regard. Instead of the usual narrative of "no one was let in" or "only a handful came to Ireland" the authors identified more than 300 refugees through interviews and intensive research in Irish, German and Austrian archives. German-speaking exiles were the first main group of immigrants that came to the young Irish Free State from 1933 onwards and they had a considerable impact on academic, industrial and religious developments in Ireland.

This groundbreaking book is an indispensable contribution to appreciating the dilemmas facing Ireland in the ‘age of Brexit’. Encompassing an exhaustive account, it traces the relationship between Ireland and FRG by drawing on original material from both. It critiques depictions of Irish-German relations as peculiarly affable and explores the problems presented by trade, Britain, neutrality, NATO, Northern Ireland and the Cold War. The work contends the German ‘economic miracle’ was a vital stimulus for Ireland’s tardy retreat from protectionism. It maintains that Ireland’s reorientation was informed by lessons gleaned from Irish-German trade relations as well as a budding recognition of the potential offered by German industrial investment. This granted Germany weighty influence over the shape and direction of Ireland.

German���±Irish relations have been characterised by a wide variety of contacts throughout the centuries. These included age-old religious and scholastic and, since the beginning of this century, military and economic links. This book sets out to explore a decade of these relations as yet undocumented. The time from 1945 to 1949 was a period of difficult decisions and complicated diplomatic activity following the end of the Second World War, with Ireland having to decide on the fate of over 300 German citizens in the country ���± soldiers, spies and diplomats ���± who were wanted by the Allies. The period after 1949 is characterised by the normalisation of relations with Germany on a political, diplomatic and economic level. These many moves towards stronger personal, economic and cultural links with Germany were among the first tentative steps taken in the primarily isolationist Ireland of the 1950s towards Europe.

This book uniquely focuses on Dr Edward Hempel, German Minister in Dublin from 1937 to 1945, covering the period of the Second World War known in Ireland as 'the Emergency'. It reveals the difficulties experienced by a career diplomat like Hempel of the so-called 'old school' in implementing Nazi foreign policy as enunciated by Ribbentrop, the erratic German Foreign Minister. It throws new light on Third Reich diplomacy which lacked unity and was subject to inputs from a proliferation of competing maverick agencies. Thus, after the fall of France, de Valera found that even the usual staid Hempel was 'unbearable'. De Valera, the then Taoiseach, however, not only outmaneuvered Hempel but he also outboxed the 'Paddy-factored' British. He realized, however, that words alone would not deter Hitler. His anti-partition rhetoric therefore remained anti-British but his actions continued to show 'a certain consideration for Britain'. He did not accept that absolute neutrality was a practical proposition, and he interpreted 'our traditional neutrality' pragmatically. He made no bones about calling it 'ad hoc' and in asserting that in a future war, neutrality for a small strategically located island like Ireland could not work. The author, having accessed Hempel's own words in German telegrams from the time, in entirely original research in the British Foreign Office, throws valuable new light on the subject of Ireland's neutrality. He also exposes de Valera's theatrical condolences on the death of Hitler, probably intended more as a retaliatory gesture to the ineffable American Minister, David Gray, than an expression of genuine sorrow, and how it went badly wrong and turned into a complete fiasco. This book completes the picture of the relationship between the Dublin Legation and Berlin and its effects on diplomatic intercourse between Germany and Ireland and consequently between Ireland and Britain.

Irish Secrets graphically tells the little-known history of German military espionage activity in Ireland - despite Ireland's neutral stance - before and during the Second World War. It details illicit contacts between officers of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) and leaders of the Irish Republican Army with the intent of co-ordinating actions against British targets and the Irish state. Irish Secrets also examines the extent of pro-German support in Ireland, the fledgling Nazi party in Ireland, and the activities of Irish civilians and diplomats abroad who offered to serve Hitler's Germany. It scrutinises the personalities and mission profiles of the eleven German agents (from both the Abwehr and the SD (the SS intelligence service), who operated with widely varying degrees of success on Irish soil, and unearths the stories of previously unknown German operatives and Irish supporters. Many of the most compelling scenarios revolve around the use of recruited Irish nationals for espionage work, some details of which are still classified by the British and Irish governments. This book explores why German intelligence ultimately failed, and proposes that the German effort represented a genuine threat to the Irish state and the Allies alike, which seriously threatened the official position of Irish neutrality. It makes for a gripping account of the intelligence war and highlights the brilliant, creative success of Irish military intelligence in waging a counter-espionage campaign that effectively neutralized the German threat. Drawing from newly released intelligence files in several countries, in-depth interviews conducted with the participants, and on other previously unpublished primary sources, Mark Hull conclusively rewrites what is presently known about a fascinating aspect of the Second World War.