Letter from Joseph P. Walshe to Seán Nunan (Dublin)
(Personal and Secret) (Copy)

Some weeks ago, namely on Friday, April 17th, I had a visit from Desmond Williams of University College, Dublin. I hadn’t met him since he was a small boy, some twenty years ago, when he was seriously ill in Vincent’s Hospital. I had known his mother and his uncles (James and George Murnaghan) very well since I was a relatively young man.

Now, I was particularly anxious to meet Desmond Williams because I had read his articles in the ‘Leader’ on our neutrality during the war.¹ I saw that he knew a great deal more, especially from British and German documents, than he felt free to write. I had, of course, suspected the activities of the individual whose name alone is concealed in the articles, but I found it very hard to believe that he would have gone so far. Fr. Martin, OSA,² who is doing a post-graduate course in history, was with Williams, and it was difficult for him to make any particular reference, but he said enough to show that our Departmental conclusions were extremely near the mark.

You will have noticed that, although Williams is a close friend of Jack Costello’s son-in-law, Alexis Fitzgerald,³ his articles, on the whole, are unbiased and his probable party prejudices do not prevent him from paying tribute to the Taoiseach for having kept us neutral during the war.

Did you notice that the ‘Leader’ article on the Bishops’ recent intervention almost certainly comes from the same pen. Williams’ serious defects of style, his long parentheses and excessive allusiveness are all there. And, also, and this is the important point, his ultimately right judgment on the main point at issue which here, of course, is no longer that of the rights and wrongs of particular suggestions for amending a particular Bill, but the wholly extra-constitutional character of the Bishops’ intervention, the grave danger of laying the foundations of a new tyranny with the entry of the Bishops, as a block, into party politics.

A very wise Monsignore here said to me, á propos of certain aspects of the fight against Communism, that, in some respects, a clerical tyranny would be worse than a Communist tyranny, and all my reading of Church history, and the hundreds of conferences by excellent historians I have listened to in Rome, simply confirm that view.

To return to the matter of Williams’ articles, he told me that MacWhite senior⁴ is repeating, in Dublin, a favourite prejudice of his, namely, that nobody in the Department, from top to bottom, at home or abroad, either during the war or after, knew or knows anything about foreign affairs, and that he, Desmond Williams, does not know what he is talking about when he writes and preaches that the Taoiseach and his civil servants did a good job in maintaining our neutrality.

It is useless raking up ugly things out of the past, but, in view of the grave international position, you won’t mind if I suggest, though it be bringing turf to Clonsast,⁵ a general conclusion. The men who failed us in the crisis had either been too long out of Ireland, in their first thirty years, and begun to think themselves superior to us ordinary Irish, or had already shown a tendency to excessive broadmindedness, of the S. Ó Faoláin⁶ type.

The coming war is going to be decidedly more serious in relation to our representatives abroad, and it is a good thing that, so far as one can judge, the outlook of the entire personnel is solidly national.

Williams is coming back to study here in July and I hope, then, to hear some of the background of his German and British research.