Joe Carroll writes: In the early hours of May 5^th, 1940 a parachutist landed in a field in Co. Meath near the village of Ballivor. His name was Hermann Goertz and he was a German air force officer. Although he was on a spying mission, he was wearing his Luftwaffe uniform. The reason may have been that if he had landed by mistake in Northern Ireland he could deny being a spy and avoid execution. Goertz was also carrying about $26,000 in cash, a Browning pistol and a knife.

A second parachute followed him down with a radio set and a tool for burying his parachute but Goertz could not find it so he had to hide his own parachute in a hedge. Later in the morning he was discovered by two farm labourers. Goertz gave them some money and asked the way to Co Wicklow.

His contact there was Iseult Stuart, who lived at Laragh Castle, Glendalough. He had been given her name and address by her husband, the writer Francis Stuart, who had met Goertz in Berlin where the Irishman was teaching English. Francis was soon to begin broadcasts to Ireland from a German propaganda station. Iseult was the daughter of the famous Maud Gonne MacBride. She was also the half-sister of Seán MacBride, who was briefly chief of staff of the IRA in the 1930s but was then a practising barrister.

Goertz set off for Laragh after dumping his air force tunic, leaving him dressed in a white sweater, riding boots, riding breeches and a black beret, an unusual outfit in the Ireland of the 1940s. He swam the Boyne to avoid a guarded crossing but the water ruined the invisible ink he had hidden in shoulder pads. He walked through Newbridge and even called into the Garda station at Poulaphuca to ask directions. Arriving at Laragh  in a bedraggled state after four days walking about eighty miles, he had trouble convincing Iseult Stuart who he was. But she eventually admitted him and gave him a bed to rest. .

Goertz asked Iseult to get him some proper clothes, so she drove to Dublin, met her mother, Maud Gonne, and the two women went to Switzers to buy some men’s suits. Iseult also arranged for someone to take Goertz away from Laragh. That someone was Jim O’Donovan, whose activities in the IRA help explain why Goertz was in neutral Ireland as a Nazi agent.

We have to go back just over a year to January 13^th, 1939. On that day a letter to the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, announced that his government had four days to agree to withdraw all British armed forces stationed in Northern Ireland. If there were no such announcement then the IRA would take military action in Britain. The letter from the government and army council of the IRA had been largely written by O’Donovan, who by day was in a permanent job in the ESB but in his own time was drawing up the so-called S-Plan for a bombing campaign in England. Not surprisingly, there was no response from the British government and four days later IRA bombs designed by O’Donovan, who used teach chemistry in Clongowes College, began to go off all over England. Brendan Behan was among the IRA bombers who were rounded up, leading to his spell in Borstal.

Although Germany and England were not yet at war, German military intelligence, the Abwehr, sent an agent to Dublin to contact the IRA. The Germans asked the IRA to send someone to Germany. O’Donovan was the obvious choice, and during three visits to Hamburg and Berlin right up to the start of World War II he filled in the Abwehr about the strength and aims of the IRA and sought German arms and financial assistance for their campaign.

The arrival in Ireland of Hermann Goertz in May 1940 was evidence of the Abwehr’s positive response. Hence O’Donovan’s quick reaction when told Goertz had made his way to Laragh. But what exactly was Goertz’s mission to neutral Ireland while the German army was over-running Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and France and threatening to invade England? Goertz’s mission was principally to persuade the IRA to concentrate its activities on military targets in Northern Ireland. By then the bombing campaign in Britain had petered out. Another aim of his mission, which seems strange to us today, was to see if the IRA could be reconciled with the Irish government. The Germans thought that since Fianna Fáil, led by Éamon de Valera had the same aim as the IRA – the unification of Ireland – perhaps they could work together against Britain. At the same time Goertz was told not to get involved in Irish politics. It would not take long for him to discover that this was Mission Impossible, and now he had no radio to tell his masters how he was getting on.

There was of course an official German legation in Dublin under the minister, Edouard Hempel. His main task was to try and ensure Irish neutrality in the war and deter Ireland from throwing in its lot with Britain. Hempel was not told about the arrival of Goertz and the last thing he wanted was a German agent wandering around Ireland and trying to influence the IRA, which was then an illegal organisation: indeed some days the Special Branch and the IRA were having gun battles in the streets of Dublin and two IRA men had recently died on hunger strike.

Goertz himself had an interesting background. He was born in Lübeck in northern Germany in November 1890 into a middle class family. His father was what we would call a solicitor. Goertz fought in World War I, first on the Russian front, where he was wounded and decorated. Then he transferred to the air force as an observer and later served as an interrogator of captured English and American airmen. He got married in 1916 to Ellen, the daughter of an admiral, and they had three children.

After the war. Goertz worked in his father’s firm as a lawyer and spent some time in the United States specialising in international law. He was also an all-round sportsman who could ride, sail, swim and box, And he was artistic: he could sketch, paint, play music, write stories and poetry. He was almost six feet tall, had brown hair going grey and grey eyes. He also had some scars. (He and his wife spent a holiday in Ireland in 1927 and were there for the funeral of Kevin O’Higgins, the minister for justice, who was murdered on Booterstown Avenue by maverick IRA members. Goertz noted how strongly political passions were running in Ireland at that time, just a few years after the Civil War.)

He joined the Nazi party in 1929 but his legal career was going downhill and in 1935 offered his services to the Abwehr to spy in England on RAF installations while pretending to research a book. He brought along an attractive nineteen-year-old secretary from his office, Marianne Emig, whom he referred to as his niece but who was also his mistress. After a few months travelling around southern England, the couple went back to Germany but Goertz, who planned to return later, made the mistake of leaving a suitcase behind with a landlady to whom he owed rent. When he delayed his return she opened the case and found notes and sketches of airfields and RAF installations. She called in the police and soon MI5 had a watch out for Goertz, who was duly picked up when he arrived in Harwich. His trial for peacetime espionage caused a sensation in England and was widely reported as the “Flying spy” case. He was sentenced to four years in prison and was released in 1939. In view of how he had bungled this first spy mission, it is perhaps strange that the Abwehr was ready to entrust him with a new one, this time to Ireland.

So here was Goertz at age fifty on his second spying mission, again facing failure. He had lots of cash but no radio, no secret ink and no contact with the IRA and was stuck in remote Glendalough. With the arrival of Jim O’Donovan and his car, this was about to change. O’Donovan drove Goertz to his home in Shankhill, an elegant period house called Florenceville. A day later, four IRA men called demanding money from Goertz. He gave them $16,500 but kept $10,000 for his own use. They brought him to another safe house in Winton Avenue, Rathgar and he had his first of several meetings with the chief of staff of the IRA, Stephen Hayes. At first he admired Hayes, although finding it hard to understand his Wexford accent, but he later came to despise him. IRA members retrieved Goertz’s parachute from Ballivor where he landed but could not find the radio set. Goertz was later moved to the home of Stephen Held, a dealer in sheet metal who had a large house in Templeogue called Konstanz. Held was half-German. The IRA had sent him on a recent mission to Germany to renew contact with the Abwehr. Held brought with him a plan for German landings in Ireland by parachute and by sea preparatory to invading Northern Ireland. It was called Plan Kathleen and was to haunt Goertz in the years ahead. Goertz was lucky to escape over a back wall when the Garda Special Branch raided Held’s house on May 22st, but Held himself was arrested. The search of the house revealed a room in which there were new suits from Switzers, a parachute, some German military medals, coded messages, $20,000 in a safe and Plan Kathleen.

Held spun a yarn that the incriminating material belonged to a German called Heinrich Brandy who had been a lodger. He said the money was part of a collection to build a retirement home for elderly IRA members. But the Irish authorities now knew that there was a German spy on the loose and that there was what looked like a German plan to invade Ireland. There was panic in the Government as rumours flew about an imminent German parachute landing – this was at a time when Germany seemed invincible and the defeat of Britain almost inevitable. Several hundred IRA suspects were quickly rounded up and interned in the Curragh.

Goertz was on the run again. He headed once more for Iseult Stuart and Laragh but it took him several days and he almost starved on the way. When he got to the Stuart home, there was no Iseult. The Switzer suits had been her undoing. The police had found out from the shop that she was the purchaser and she was arrested. But luckily for Goertz, the house and children, Ian and Katherine, were being minded by Helena Moloney. She was a well-known 1916 veteran under Countess Markievicz and later an Abbey actress who had become a trade union activist. She sheltered Goertz in an outhouse. Ian, then about ten, later recalled that he used to bring Goertz food. (Ian after the war married the German sculptress Imogen Werner, now known as Imogen Stuart.)

Iseult was held in custody for six weeks. Her trial for harbouring a person unknown who was threatening the security of the state was held in camera, but she was acquitted for lack of evidence. She apparently began a romantic relationship with Goertz after her release according to her husband, Francis, in an interview with his biographer, Kevin Kiely. Held was not so lucky and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Goertz, with the help of Helena Moloney, was brought back to Jim O’Donovan’s house in Shankhill. Now began a period during which the spy decided to cut his links with the IRA, which he now distrusted. He moved from house to house, usually helped by admiring women with strong Republican backgrounds. Among the places he stayed was 1 Charlemont Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, on the sea-front, near the station, owned by a retired nurse, Mary Coffey. Goertz was called Mr Robinson and to explain his comings and goings he was said to be a commercial traveller.

Helena Moloney and a woman named Maura O’Brien then rented a house for Goertz called St Alban’s, on Nerano Road, Dalkey, from where he may have sent wireless messages to Germany with the help of an ex-post office technician called Anthony Deery. Goertz also received visits at St Alban’s from political figures with pro-German sympathies, such as Dan Breen. He also stayed with two sisters, Marie and Bridie Farrell, who lived at 7 Spencer Villas, Glenageary. They were devoted to him and he returned there to live for a while after the war. Another branch of the extended Farrell family lived at 43 Cross Avenue, Dun Laoghaire and ran the Ideal Creamery at 88 Lr George’s Street.

Another devoted woman was Maisie O’Mahoney whose mother ran a bed and breakfast in Gardiner Place where Goertz sometime stayed. Maisie acted as a chauffeur for Goertz and there was also a romantic interest. He referred to her as “Golden Queen” because of her blonde hair. She worked for Dr Andrew Cooney, a former IRA chief of ctaff – yet another one ‑ who was then running the Hospitals Commission linked to the Irish Sweepstakes.

A much more significant contact of Goertz, and one which could have had disastrous consequences was Major-General Hugo MacNeill, then the second most senior officer in the Irish Defence Forces. Like many others in the Army and politics as the Germans were over-running Europe in 1940, MacNeill worried about what would happen if the British forces in Northern Ireland felt obliged to come across the Border to try and seize the Treaty ports at Cobh and Berehaven and forestall a possible German invasion.

After the war, the plans for a German invasion of England in September 1940, called Operation Sea Lion, were discovered, but also plans for a supporting invasion in Ireland called Operation Green. This would have involved German landings in the Waterford-Wexford area, seizure of bridgeheads, advancing towards the line Dublin-Kildare etc. There has since been speculation that this was never meant to happen but was a diversionary tactic to confuse the British. General MacNeill was worried by the unpreparedness of the Army to oppose a British invasion from the North. He first sounded out the number two in the German legation, Henning Thomsen, about getting German arms and equipment in such a scenario. When he got no response, MacNeill decided to approach, Goertz whom he knew was the contact between the German military and the IRA. MacNeill’s unofficial contacts with Goertz only emerged after the war when the telegrams between the legation and Berlin were captured and published.

MacNeill was probably unaware that the German foreign minister, Von Ribbentrop, had actually offered British equipment captured at Dunkirk to the Irish Army. The offer was made through ambassador Hempel, who passed it on to de Valera. The latter feared this offer was a poisoned chalice which the British would almost certainly hear about and then use as a pretext to accuse Ireland of having only a pseudo-neutrality and to invade themselves. The German offer was ignored by de Valera, to the annoyance of Ribbentrop.To complicate matters further, plans were drawn up in the summer of 1940, with de Valera’s approval, between the Irish Army and the commanding officer in Northern Ireland for British forces to help the Irish repel any German invasion in the South. The fact remains that MacNeill’s action in discussing German help with the embassy and then with a Nazi agent was extremely reckless and could have compromised Ireland’s attempts to remain neutral.

Goertz put the German ambassador into a very difficult situation with the Irish government. Hempel was not told in advance that Goertz was coming on a secret mission to the IRA to get them to carry out sabotage in Northern Ireland. But he was belatedly filled in by Berlin after the spy was nearly captured in the raid on the Held house. Hempel was horrified at the idea of Goertz at large making contacts with the IRA, politicians and even senior Army officers while he was trying to convince de Valera that Germany would respect Irish neutrality. Hempel reluctantly arranged to meet Goertz. This would happen under cover of a cocktail party at the ambassador’s residence in De Vesci Square/Terrace, Monkstown, a large Victorian house since pulled down and replaced by an apartment block. When Goertz arrived he gave the pre-arranged signal that he wanted to go to the toilet. He was brought to the ambassador’s study where Hempel joined him but had to keep interrupting the meeting to return to his guests. Hempel was impressed by Goertz’s bravado but was relieved to hear that he planned to leave Ireland and return to Germany as he believed he was wasting his time with the IRA.

Goertz made several attempts to escape from Ireland by using small boats. The first was in February 1941 from Fenit, Co Kerry, but the IRA men scouting the area for a suitable craft were spotted and arrested. One of them, called Crofton, was actually a member of the Garda Special Branch, which he had infiltrated. Goertz escaped yet again back to Dublin. Another escape bid by boat from Inishduff in Co Donegal also failed. Goertz was getting to see quite a lot of Ireland; he also stayed in Co. Cavan for a week near Belturbet. In August 1941, he lived in a holiday chalet in Brittas Bay, Co Wicklow, while he prepared to sail in a collapsible boat with outboard engine to France. For cover there were also some of the Farrell women and a young girl who would sometimes sail with Goertz as he practised his getaway. Sean McEntee, then a cabinet minister , also had a holiday home nearby so there would have been police around. Goertz’s two efforts to sail down the Irish Sea to France were thwarted by bad weather, so it was back to Dublin again.

He was eventually arrested on November 27^th, 1941, nineteen months after he landed in Co Meath. He was hoping that his Army contacts would supply him with a plane to fly to France and he was staying in an IRA “safe house” in Blackheath Park, Clontarf belonging to a Patrick Claffey. His move to the Northside was not a good idea. The Special Branch, which had been arresting and questioning the Farrells and Jim O’Donovan, were closing in on him. Following a tip-off, Superintendent Gantly and his men raided the house in Clontarf. Goertz was found in a passageway between the house and a garage. As he was being led to the police car Goertz shouted: “You are arresting the best friend Ireland has …your government know why I am here, there is no room for a military attaché – that’s why I am here.” In the car bringing him to the Bridewell, he told the police that the IRA had let him down but that he had meant no harm to southern Ireland.

Goertz’s nineteen-month spell of freedom raises the question of how or why he was at large for so long. The other German spies, about a dozen, who had landed in Ireland had been picked up, in some cases within hours and usually within weeks. Goertz met so many people, five hundred according to himself, that it is hard to believe that he was not being left free by the authorities so that they could observe whom he was contacting. Col. Dan Bryan, the head of military intelligence, called G2, later denied this and blamed Garda incompetence for failure to arrest Goertz sooner ‑ but one has to wonder. It is interesting that the authorities only discovered Goertz’s real name shortly before his arrest. Until then neither they nor Britain’s MI5 knew that the German spy at large in Ireland was the same man who had been convicted of spying in England back in 1935.

Goertz was held for a year and a half in Arbour Hill military prison and was frequently interrogated by military intelligence. One officer was Commandant Éamon de Buitléar, who spoke fluent German (he was the father of the well-known director of nature programmes Éamon de Buitléar). Another interrogator was Dr Richard Hayes, director of the National Library, who was on part-time secondment to G2 as a code-breaker, a task for which he had excellent skills. He was anxious to break the code messages discovered with Goertz’s belongings when the Held house was raided. Dr Hayes succeeded in this, much to the admiration of the British MI5 to whom the information was passed on as part of the close wartime cooperation between the two intelligence services.

The news of Goertz’s arrest was reported in the Irish and British press and caused headaches for Hempel. Goertz wrote to him from jail: “I ask you urgently to get in contact with me as I feel the honour of the German Wehrmacht is involved. Heil Hitler.” Hempel was trying to work out with Berlin a statement which would appease Irish suspicions about what exactly Goertz had been up to. Goertz was sticking to his story that his mission was to persuade the IRA to stop causing trouble in the South and concentrate on sabotage actions in Northern Ireland. He denied that he had anything to do with Plan Kathleen’s German invasion scheme although the minister for justice, Gerry Boland, several times spoke in the Dáil to the effect that Goertz was behind a German plot to invade the country.

The Irish authorities were naturally intrigued at what Goertz had been up to during his nineteen months at liberty. The rumour mill had it that he was meeting dozens of influential people. Some of these were alleged to have been government ministers, such as Frank Aiken, Dr Jim Ryan and PJ Little. He was also believed to be arranging a meeting with Cardinal McRory as part of his futile idea of incorporating the IRA into the Irish Army.

Berlin told Hempel about Goertz’s last radio contact, in which he suggested a German proclamation for “Irish freedom and reunification of the occupied North with the South on the principle of Irish neutrality”. But Berlin added that this was “a complete misunderstanding of his mission” by Goertz and said it could only be explained by the fact that “he had lost his nerve and perspective in the previous 18 months and that he had been attempting all possible means of returning to Germany”. When Hempel met the secretary of the Department of External Relations, Joe Walshe, he stuck to this line and insisted that “if Goertz was active in a political way it could only be because he had acted on his own responsibility or through personal anxiety and a disturbed state of mind”. There was probably some truth in this suggestion concerning Goertz’s mental state.

While in Arbour Hill and later, when transferred with the other captured German spies to Custume Barracks in Athlone, Goertz kept up contact with his network of friends outside. For this he bribed a Corporal Lynch, who would smuggle letters to people like Mrs Austin Stack, widow of the Kerry IRA man; a Mrs Maeve Kavanagh McDowell who worked in Lees drapery shop in Rathmines, and the Farrell sisters. He asked them to supply a hacksaw blade, a glass cutter, a wire cutter and £3 to be left in Del Rio’s café, South William Street, owned by a sympathetic Italian fascist. By this time the authorities had discovered what was going on and were intercepting these clandestine letters so it was an Army sergeant in civvies who turned up at Del Rio’s to collect the escape material.

Another Goertz contact was Dr PJ Brennan, the Dublin County coroner who lived in Mellifont Avenue, Dun Laoghaire and may have treated Goertz medically while he was at large. Goertz also sent messages to Dr Kathleen Lynn, well-known as the medical officer to the College of Surgeons garrison in 1916 under Countess Markievicz. Another well-known Republican family which got involved in German espionage was the widow of Cathal Brugha, Kathleen and her daughters. Mrs Brugha, who owned the Kingston’s shirts business with its shop in O’Connell Street, is believed to have helped Goertz when he ran short of cash.

The biggest coup for the Irish intelligence service was to break Goertz’s code and to then send him replies, supposedly from Germany, to messages which he continued to smuggle out from prison. In this way they fooled him into giving a lengthy account of his movements from the time he arrived in Ireland. As a consolation for his efforts, the Irish spycatchers pretended to Goertz that he had been promoted from captain to major as a reward for his bravery on the Irish mission. A fellow-internee, Van Loon, recalled that when he got this news, Goertz “looked at me, then began to cry and sank onto his bed”.

Goertz found his imprisonment very hard and he went on several hunger strikes. He did not get on well with all his fellow spies, some of whom he did not trust. He kept devising escape plans, which with time became more outlandish. He once appealed to outside helpers to get him a bicycle and a few trusted men who “must darken their faces and have gloves on”.

He made pathetic appeals to the Irish character of his contacts: “I would not dare ask you if it were only for me. I am convinced it is for Ireland and for the friendship and the unbelievable kindness of hearts I have found here. It has become for me a kind of a second home … nobody expects that you slip out of neutrality but you must show that there is an Irish spirit, not only by Irish dancing. I know it is there.”

When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, the German sailors and airmen who were interned at the Curragh camp were sent back to Germany. As regards the spies held in Athlone things were more complicated. The British representative told the Irish government that it would be “most undesirable that these agents should be released and allowed to be at large in Eire after the war”. The Irish government at first took up a strong position and refused to deport the spies back to the Allied-controlled areas of occupied Germany. Goertz and the others were allowed to walk around Athlone and meet locals but had to report back to their prison quarters each evening. Goertz applied for political asylum but this was blocked by G2, which still saw him as a “dangerous person”. Col Bryan of G2 said he believed that Goertz would resume his contacts who would “lead straight to certain groups in this country who were pro-German in the war years and are interested in the project to bring German children here … a certain clique in the group seeks to give it an anti-British and almost pro-Nazi basis”. This is a reference to the Save the German Children Fund, called Operation Shamrock, which aimed to bring four hundred German Catholic children to Ireland for foster placement. Goertz was eventually employed as secretary to this scheme at £2 a month. A friend of mine, Fergal Mulloy, who lived in Idrone Terrace, recalls Goertz visiting their house to report on the German child staying there.

Then in April 1947, the Irish government yielded to the demands of the Allies and ordered the deportation to Germany of Goertz and the other spies. Goertz appealed against this decision to the courts but lost. He now became deeply depressed and told fellow spy Gunther Schutz: “Whatever happens they will never get me. My phial of cyanide will be my last resort”. Goertz feared that he would be handed over to the Russians, who might be aware of his anti-communist activities after World War One. He was assured by the Irish government and Hempel that he would be released after interrogation by the British authorities in Germany but he remained distrustful. When he went to the Aliens Office in Dublin Castle on May 23^rd, 1947, to renew his parole, he was told that a plane was waiting to fly him back to Germany.

Goertz sat in the waiting room smoking his pipe but then slipped a cyanide phial into his mouth and bit down on it. The Garda in the room shouted “That man is taking something” and tried to get it out of his mouth. Goertz said “That is none of your business” and collapsed. He was taken to Mercer’s Hospital where he died soon afterwards.

Goertz’s funeral on May 26^th attracted a lot of attention. A military funeral was refused. Crowds gathered along some of the route to Dean’s Grange cemetery where an estimated six to eight hundred people were gathered. There was a swastika around the coffin and a number of people gave the Nazi salute. The faithful Farrell sisters, who used to call him “the Doc” wore Goertz’s military medals in his honour. Hempel asked to attend the funeral but was advised by officials not to. It was probably the last time the swastika was displayed in public in Ireland.

Pictures of the funeral went around the world and the Irish ambassador in Rome said that “they gave the impression that Dublin is a Nazi stronghold and the only country outside perhaps of Spain where the Nazi emblem is publicly displayed and honoured. People who had persistently refused to believe Anglo-American propaganda about Ireland’s pro-German sentiments are somewhat perplexed by incidents such as this.” An official in Dublin replied to the ambassador that the press had exaggerated the numbers at the funeral, which “consisted of IRA sympathisers whom Goertz had met during his period of liberty rather than Goertz’s own compatriots in this country. In fact the whole German colony – including the former German minister (Hempel) were conspicuous by their absence.”

In 1974, the body of Hermann Goertz was exhumed and reburied in the German war cemetery in Glencree. On the simple grave stone his rank is given as “Major”, the promotion he had been accorded by the Irish intelligence service as part of their efforts to deceive him while in prison in Athlone.

Note on sources
Following my book Ireland in the War Years 1939-1945, I collected material on the activities of German spies which I did not deal with in the book. Enno Stephan’s Spies in Ireland is valuable because he interviewed many of the live actors when he was doing his research in the 1950s and used German military archives. Carolle J Carter, in The Shamrock and the Swastika, made extensive use of German archives on microfilm then only available in the United States. Eunan O’Halpin’s Spying on Ireland and Mark M Hull’s Irish Secrets made extensive use of the more recently available Irish Military Archives and the Irish National Archives and MI5 files on Ireland. I also researched the full Goertz files in the Irish Military Archives.

31/8/2018

A chara,
We the undersigned writers and artists appeal to the government to use the full force of its purse and power to undertake a complete excavation, identification where possible, and dignified reburial of the victims of Tuam. We further appeal for the government to undertake an active and authentic attempt to identify the many missing individuals who will have been illegally adopted at home and abroad.

In light of significant, possibly criminal, failings at Tuam – of which the lack of burial records for 796 infants and children, the missing bodies of women, the verified existence of ‘significant quantities’ of human remains, and the ongoing testimony of survivors are ample evidence – mere memorialisation is inadequate. Systematic exhumation is necessary to uncover the truth. The government must use any and all resources (including, as necessary, resources of the Bon Secours Order) to complete a full excavation and identification of all remains on the site as has been consistently requested by Catherine Corless, survivors, and family members of those who lived in the Home.

Sincerely,
Aideen Barry
Carmel Benson
Melony Bethala
Dr Dylan Brennan
Mairéad Byrne
Fióna Bolger
June Caldwell
Mary Rose Callaghan
Kimberly Campanello
Anna Carey
Eileen Casey
Paul Casey
Sarah Clancy
Jane Clarke
Patrick Chapman
Bríd Connolly
Susan Connolly
June Considine
Brigid Corcoran
Marion Cox
Enda Coyle-Greene
Catherine Ann Cullen
Ailbhe Darcy
Madeleine D’Arcy
Martina Devlin
Moyra Donaldson
Theo Dorgan
Catherine Dunne
Anne Enright
Attracta Fahy
Tanya Farrelly
Elaine Feeney
Kit Fryatt
Mia Gallagher
Anthony Glavin
Sinéad Gleeson
Shauna Gilligan
Jackie Gorman
Dylan Coburn Gray
Sarah Maria Griffin
Vona Groarke
Mary Guckian
Maurice Harmon
Jack Harte
Joanne Hayden
Claire Hennessy
Rita Ann Higgins
Eleanor Hooker
Victoria Kennefick
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Dave Lordan
Aifric Mac Aodha
Catherine Phil MacCarthy
John MacKenna
Nuala Macklin
Alice Maher
Christodoulos Makris
Oana Sanziana Marian
Emer Martin
John McAuliffe
Felicity McCartan
Flish McCarthy
Molly McCloskey
Maria McManus
Declan Meade
Paula Meehan
Lia Mills
Sinéad Morrissey
Professor Paul Muldoon
Helena Mulkerns
Anne Mulhall
Sonya Mulligan
Christine Murray
Una Ni Cheallaigh
Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Nuala Ni Chonchuir
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Eileen Ní Shuilleabháin
Liz Nugent
Jean O’Brien
Margaret O’Donnell
Mary O’Donnell
John O’Donovan
Nessa O’Mahony
Geraldine O’Reilly
Dr Robyn Rowland AO
Karl Parkinson
Justin Quinn
Connie Roberts
Annette Skade
Kelly E Sullivan
Anne Tannam
Susan Tomaselli
Jessica Traynor
Samantha Walton
David Wheatley
Adam Wyeth

Ed Vulliamy writes: The French have an expression: on prend de la bouteille – literally, to drink from the bottle, but it can mean something different and more, especially when sent as a pun on birthday invitations. It can mean that we age like the best wine, improve with time.

This is happening to some of our finest musicians. Why should I be surprised that Leonard Cohen was even more poignant to hear in the unfriendly O2 in 2008 than he was in the more natural surroundings of the Isle of Wight festival in 1970? Why should not Joan Baez’s remarkable residency at the Olympia in Paris recently be every bit as moving as her appearances at the same festival and a benefit for Vietnam draft resisters in Chicago the following year? Baez sang deeper and darker in 2018, more than ever entwining, as she does, sincerity and grace. Why should not the Joshua Tree’s thirtieth anniversary tour out-power even the album’s debut? Why should not John Cale’s solo work, as he passes the age of seventy-five, be more restlessly innovative than anything he recorded with the Velvet Underground?

All this certainly applies to one of the greatest singer-songwriters of his generation, heading for Dublin, who is playing in the National Concert Hall tonight (July 31^st): Graham Nash. The man who broke away from the Hollies and – as one song puts it – left the “cold rain” of Manchester for Los Angeles to live, famously, with Joni Mitchell in “Our House” (two cats in the yard) and team up with Crosby, Stills and Young to form the first and greatest super-group.

Those were, as another song by Nash calls them, “golden days”, and we all know that. But the tour he brings to Ireland, accompanied by Shane Fontayne on guitars and Todd Caldwell on keyboards – and, importantly, both on vocals ‑ really is like a vintage Clos St Denis you bought in 1969 and laid down to drink in its prime ‑ now.

These concerts have played through Italy and Germany and across the UK, touching down in Nash’s native Salford for the first time since he left England for California. And – I say this after having seen and heard him play countless times over five decades ‑ they are a revelation. And not just because Nash’s songs and the message they bring are like shafts of sunlight into dark times, which they are.

I completed a book to be published in September, about music, war and peace –a kind of musical memoir of life during which war was my work and music my great love. It reaches a fairly desolate place in the penultimate chapter I would not impose on the reader by way of dénouement, which I therefore hand over to someone else, whose music and essence resist stasis. This is Nash – for an epilogue entitled “We Can Change The World”, a line from his great song “Chicago”. The ensuing interview brings not only the book but my life full circle: it was Nash’s pleading in that song: “Won’t you please come to Chicago / No one else can take your place” that I took personally aged sixteen in 1970 – I saved up £67 for the fare and went.

Nash says now: “I have to believe we can change the world, and that music can be a driving force to that end.” And of course, the main reason for going to hear Graham Nash in the first place is that he is among very few to retain that faith; absolute integrity, in times when, as he observes: “we’re losing a lot of people among the musicians and songwriters who want to talk, communicate this stuff. Nowadays, the music industry throws any shit against the wall that happens to stick.”

So we can be gratefully assured of that rare probity and veracity of a Nash performance – he always cared, and he still does. His rage at Donald Trump is appositely incorporated into “Chicago”. “‘Teach Your Children’,” he says, “started out totally simple, about looking after kids on the road, and ends up being about the future of us all.”

The extra cogency is in something else. What distinguishes these recent concerts even from their predecessors is the raw intensity and poetic honesty of Nash’s communication of his lyrics and music. His songs have always been confessional, deeply personal as well as politically didactic. But now, sung in a deepened, oaken voice and more pensive timbre, they have an intimacy more direct, more devotedly attentive than ever.

In the book, Nash says that “when an audience sings ‘Chicago’ and ‘Teach Your Children’ like they do, it’s moving, it’s primitive, i’s primal chant. We’re all together at that point.” But the impact of this tour is that his more personal songs are delivered as though individually to each and every member of the audience – a quattro occhi ‑ as the Italians say, eye to eye.

Nash wrote a song that goes: “A man’s a man who looks a man right between the eyes”, and that is what he does from the stage. He himself knows this. “Sometimes,” he says, “when I’m singing to an audience, a feeling comes back that is real passion, real love, real yearning. There’s a conversation with the audience; during an entire show, whatever energy I give out comes back from the audience, there’s a cycle of giving and taking, emptying and filling. And with just Shane, that emptying and filling cycle is that much more intense, really communicating with people. I can see into their eyes, and they can see into ours.”

Of course this is more feasible in smaller theatres than those CS&N used to play in, but it is still a remarkable and even unnerving experience – he stares his audience down ‑ mindful, regardful ‑ so that each song becomes at once a personal conversation as well as a collective experience, in a new and engrossing way.

This could be because Nash is getting older, as are many in his audience – and his muses. In 1969, “Our House”– “I’ll light the fire / You put the flowers in the vase” ‑ was a charming hearthside love song at a time when domesticity was hardly a hallmark of rock and roll. On this tour, though, Nash introduces the piece with news, that “Joni suffered a brain aneurism” recently, was a while at home before she was found, and that “we’re lucky to have her still alive. Joni’s back.” The song, accordingly, began at slow tempo, Nash’s voice joyful at the bliss in “our house”, but down the years; Fontayne’s low notes like a rip-tide beneath them, the song wearing its half-century.

Anno Domini apart, there’s a purely musical alchemy at work too. The first time I heard this newly intensified immediacy was soon after two mighty concerts in London and Paris by the full CS&N band – including Shane Fontayne ‑ two years ago. Some months later came a performance at the Cigale Theatre in Paris ‑ Nash accompanied only by Fontayne. The latter concert formed part of a tour to promote a new collection of songs called “This Path Tonight”, and was more enthralling than that by the full, gale-force band. The new songs were pensive, reflective, shot through with doubt, sometimes foreboding – and the paring down of sound from the expansive musical horizons of CS&N to Fontayne’s hugely creative accompaniment made less so much more. That was 2016, this is now – and even more so.

The evening on this tour falls in two sets: one song in the second is “Myself At Last” ‑ about Nash having lost himself during the crazy days, but now found thanks to the song’s dedicatee, his fiancée, the photographer Amy Grantham. But Nash has found himself musically too.

By definition, he has played with the best: Crosby, Stills and Young. But this was always a collective, and as Nash’s memoir Wild Tales recounts, often a battle of egos.

Fontayne – who is also English, and also escaped young to America ‑ defies definition. He is more than a session man – a quintessential musician and accompanist par excellence in the way that Gerald Moore was to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, or Robbie Roberston to Bob Dylan. He was Bruce Springsteen’s partner of choice for two years and is certainly the only guitarist to play “Stairway to Heaven” to an audience including a visibly moved Jimmy Page grinning like a Cheshire cat and Robert Plant with a tear in his eye (President Barack Obama too, at a Led Zeppelin tribute event in Washington DC).

Nash reports that Fontayne “always supports the song”, which he does entirely. His technique and range of sound effects on this tour elevates such songs as Nash’s glorious, heartfelt homily to the great whale, “Wind on the Water”, and drives the “Marrakesh Express” along its tracks. His sonority enhances Nash’s song to articulate their sentiments afresh, be they the heavy-hearted rage in “Military Madness”, the existential ruminations of “I Used to be a King” or the layered spiritual meditations – and panic ‑ in “Cathedral”. And not just Nash’s songs: part one ends with the apparently audacious idea to cover The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life”, as recorded on Sgt. Pepper by a full, distorted orchestra. It works: thanks to Fontayne’s reworking of George Martin’s vision on a single guitar.

Todd Caldwell has for many years been the throb on keyboards beneath Crosby Stills & Nash, but plays further forward as part of a trio, never fanciful, always effective. He plays the full four octaves of his signature Hammond, as often at its high and low ends as through the middle ‑ sometimes eerie, sometimes an undertow – “I leave melody to the other guys,” he says.

And there’s another thing: Nash once told me that what he missed most about working with Crosby and Stills was the inimitable thrill of singing three-part harmony. He need do so no longer: this trio has manifestly worked and worked on vocals so that it is far from Nash plus two, rather a radiant polyphonic threesome. If tickets remain for tonight’s concert at the National Concert Hall, my advice is to get along and savour every musical drop, de la bouteille.

31/7/2018

When Words Fail: A Life with Music, War and Peace by Ed Vulliamy is published by Granta on September 6th.

Ed Vulliamy writes: As the World Cup tears through its knockout phase towards the final denouement, it becomes ever clearer: this festival ‑ indeed football itself ‑ is not really about sport; it is anthropology.

Football at this level is popular globalisation, and it is completely, wonderfully bonkers.

People still hold out: “I’m not interested in sport”; “What could be more stupid than 22 men kicking a ball around?”; “How dare they earn so much money?” Some are killjoys, some are snobs, and this attitude among the intelligentsia is new ‑ at odds with that of football fanatics like Dimitri Shostakovich and Albert Camus. But even if the naysayers are right, they’re missing out ‑ on so much weirdness, so many laughs and much international subtlety ‑ interesting rip-tides cutting beneath those 1.5 acres of grass.

Inevitable political currents run through some games, but it’s not always obvious. Both Switzerland’s goals against Serbia were greeted by festivities in Prstina, capital of ethnically Albanian Kosovo, not just because Kosovars like to see the Serbs lose but because the scorers of both goals ‑ Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri ‑ were sons of refugees from Kosovo, violently subdued by Serbia during the war of 1998-9. Both face discipline by football’s governing body, FIFA, for gestures resembling the Albanian eagle; Xhaka’s father was a prisoner in a Serbian camp.

The Kosovo narrative continued when star-studded teams of the world’s wealthiest and most famous players were rescued by the introduction of lesser-known, even obscure, team-mates as substitutes – one of them being Adnan Januzaj, a Kosovar-Belgian, who came in when his team of more illustrious names had failed to break a deadlock with England. When mighty Spain struggled 1-1 against humble Morocco, they were saved by a goal not from household names such as Iniesta or Diego Costa but Iago Aspas, one of few in the side who does not play for glamorous Real Madrid or Barcelona, but lowly Celta Vigo.

When Argentina faced national disgrace for failing to progress to the knockout stages, the winning goal that saw them through against Nigeria came not from superstars Lionel Messi, Ángel Di Maria or Sergio Agüero but Marcos Rojo, who often fails to make the first team at Manchester United. After he did so, a video went viral of wild celebrations in Bangladesh, nine time zones from Argentina, where fans rode in whooping columns of motorbikes, Argentinian flags aloft.

The serious arrival of the developing world and Asia into a game hitherto dominated by Europe and Latin America concludes football’s claim to be a genuine, popular globalisation. At one level, this is characterised by Arab money doing what one Parisian called: “making Paris St Germain no longer a football club, but a bank”. At another, it began with the football, not the money: with Reggie Miller of Cameroon taking the Italian World Cup of 1990 by storm. When Senegal knocked Sweden out of the 2002 World Cup in Japan, dawn was breaking in Harlem, and young men were skipping along parked cars in delight.

Some games are better than others, this time round. France and Argentina played a thriller as good it gets; England and Colombia were shameful, as the American referee lost control: a head-butt against Jordan Henderson and unpunished kick in the head for Radamel Falcao – England’s prize for this disgrace being a quarter-final place against Sweden this Saturday.

No doubt the usual footballing countries will close in on the final berths of this World Cup, but many have been lost on the way and there’s a new dynamic in football which runs counter to other branches of cartel capitalism, whereby the gap between the great (and very rich) and the good (not so rich) is closing. In Brazil during the 2014 World Cup, Colombia and Chile were shining stars. When the favourites met, the Brazilian hosts were thrashed by Germany 7-1, but the Germans had nearly lost to Algeria a few days beforehand and this time were dumped out by South Korea after losing to a radiant Mexico.

In Russia, Spain struggled to narrowly beat Morocco and went out to the Russian hosts – almost all of whom play against one another at home, for teams that make little impact on European club football – while the glamorous Spanish play for Real and Barcelona, which dominate Europe. Japan came close to ousting star-studded Belgium.

Mighty Portugal failed to beat Iran, Cristiano Ronaldo notwithstanding. Iran has had an estimable World Cup in the presence of thousands of women fans who are banned from stadiums back home, but filled those in Russia dressed in team shirts, their hair free and faces adorned with cosmetics and painted flags. The fact that they had to go to Russia to feel a sense of liberation might seem ironic to some – Iran’s ally in the devastation of Syria – but it’s yet another layer beneath the spectacle of men kicking a ball around. Record numbers of women have watched in the stadiums and on television – a welcome development accompanied by outrageous sexual harassment of female fans and TV presenters; Getty Images arranged a “hottest fans” gallery.

Players – especially from poor countries – have always left home to play their club football. The last team to win the World Cup with a side drawn exclusively from home clubs was Italy in 2006. But this globalisation of football has now become as surreal as it is total.  Teenagers find themselves in the most unlikely places: during Peru’s opening game against France, a commentator for the French channel TF1 commented that André Carillo “joue en Angleterre, pour le Watford”, a non-descript suburb on the outskirts of London – the weirdness is taken for granted, no question of “how did he get from the Andes to there?” Back home, for the first time, World Cup games were shown – and commentary given – on Peruvian Quecha language TV stations.

Another Peruvian, four Nigerians, a Brazilian, a Moroccan and an Iranian in this World Cup play their club football in the host nation or Russian Ukraine, despite infamously rampant racism in the crowds – what is going on when Russian skinheads have African or Arab heroes? A similar derangement plays out in Britain over the abomination of Brexit. Fans vote to leave Europe and for de facto deportation of hard-working Portuguese nurses, German and Greek doctors, Italian radiologists, Spanish bakers and Polish plumbers ‑ then boorishly swig Kronenbourg (French), Stella (Belgian), Carlsberg (Danish) and Peroni (Italian) lager to cheer on teams managed by José Mourinho (Portuguese), Jürgen Klopp (German), Antonio Conte and Maurizio Sarri (Italian), and starring Eden Hazard (Belgian), Paul Pogba and Olivier Giroud (French), David de Gea (Spanish),Andreas Christiensen (Danish), Krystian Bielik (Polish)- and the rest. Football may generate inimitable humour, but not always intelligence.

There are inevitable colonial connections: many of the Senegalese team narrowly beaten in this World Cup were born and play in France, and the French team itself was, in the year it last reached the final, 2006, subject to a racist jibe from Jean-Marie Le Pen, who thought it a shame that the team did not “represent” the nation. French star Lilian Thuram retorted that the players – eight of them black – had taken France to the World Cup final, which was more than Le Pen had done for the country. That was the last game in which Zinedine “Zizou” Zidane, a Marseille Algerian, played for France – an occasion he marked by head-butting Italian Marco Materazzi. Zidane is the living icon of French football, and was among the most successful managers of all time at Real Madrid. I’ve noticed an interesting difference between the next-door neighbours of two empires – British and French – with regard to football. Almost all Irish fans would adhere to a loyalty – or rather a disloyalty ‑ known on T-shirts as “AAE”, Anyone Against England, for obvious and visceral reasons. But at my local café du coin in Paris, it is the opposite: French-Algerians, Senegalese and Malians are fervent supporters of Les Bleus. Their logic: “We are all France.”

Icons like Zidane matter, cogently and often poignantly. Edin Dzeko, the Bosnian ace striker for Roma, was burned out of his family home in the Serb-occupied part of Sarajevo and grew up in his grandmother’s house under siege. Across the Bosnian refugee diaspora, Dzeko is adored for having renounced offers of more lucrative nationality to play for Bosnia-Herzegovina; a child survivor of the Srebrenica massacre living in St Louis, Missouri, told me once: “When Dzeko scores, every Bosnian scattered across the world scores with him”. Dzeko’s team-mate Vedad Ibšević was, as a child, hidden in a hole while his house was burned down and father killed in a town called Vlasenica. He scored the goal that qualified Bosnia for the 2014 World Cup, and said: “for some people, it was just a goal ‑ for us it was the whole story”.  The Bosnian football team is the only functioning ethnically-mixed organism in the riven, scarred country. Even the football federation operated, until UEFA intervened, a sectarian rotating presidency between ethnicities. But not the team: if Pjanić the Bosnian Croat passes to Misimović, the captain and a Bosnian Serb, who lays it on for Dzeko, a Bosniak Muslim, you do not refuse the ball, you play it all you can.

Football is a global conversation. There’s a world of difference between getting into a taxi at Madrid airport and consulting your city guide in the back seat, and engaging the driver in a discourse on whether he supports Real or Atlético, and how each team is doing. The latter may even get you a lower fare, as well as a good chat. I have been to Rio de Janeiro – arguably football’s Mecca ‑ once only, and my abiding memory is of the “Fla-Flu” derby between Flamingo and Fluminense – to have seen it set the course for a week’s chatter and made my stay an entirely different prospect and experience to that of a tourist or visitor on business.

This is not just true of the obvious Spain or Brazil. I watched a European Champions League final between Manchester United and Chelsea in Beijing, in bars packed all night with Chinese fans – it humanised and redeemed a city I confess to having otherwise disliked. When covering the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991, we reporters based in Baghdad were allowed one request each to the office of Saddam Hussein’s spokesman Tariq Aziz. While most colleagues sought political interviews, mine was to go to a football match, duly arranged. After the match (between the police and university – the police won) and a marvellous afternoon, I got talking to a begging waif on account of his (very unofficial) shirt of Juventus Turin. The lad knew all about Juventus players, games and statistics from Iranian TV – which, he said, “is better because they don’t interrupt the play with Saddam speeches” – but when I asked the boy his age, he replied: “I don’t know.”

Some supporters are better than others, for sure. Two years ago, at the European championships, while awful English and Russian fans kicked and punched one another and smashed windows in Marseille, rival Irish and Belgians staged such a funny joint street party in Bordeaux that mayor Alain Juppé said he hoped they would return and declared the fans “a disgrace to hooliganism”. (Ireland had lost 3-0 and of course the supporters cared, but not enough to spoil the occasion.)

But football does encourage tribal hatred ‑ and cause appalling violence – as well as generate banter and hilarity. My own trajectory as a supporter took a U-turn the night I watched the 1985 European Cup Final between Juventus and what had been my family team, Liverpool (my grandfather had been a Liverpool season ticket holder during the 1920s).

The scene that greeted us when we arrived at the Heysel stadium in Brussels was unforgettably horrific: two charges by Liverpool fans at Italians who for the most part had come in family groups from elsewhere in Italy rather than Juventus’s home of Turin, pinned them against a wall, whereupon a third, lethal charge collapsed the wall, and thirty-nine Juventus supporters were crushed to death. The reaction among Liverpool fans, at Liverpool Football Club and in the British media – excuses about the condition of the stadium and its policing and ticket sales policy – was so revolting I spent that summer driving to Turin, and, in shame and penance, joined the Juventus supporters club Primo Amore.

Juventus is the best anthropological example of football as a state of mind and way of life, a social, not just sporting, institution. Italians either adore or despise “La Juve”; there is no middle way. There exists a concept called Juventitá – Juventusness – which is supposed to encapsulate a set of values. The club, known as La Vecchia Signora – the grand old lady – is rich, successful, belongs to the Fiat car company, and prides itself on – as supporters’ banners proclaim – “Tradizione”, “Onore” – tradition and honour. The team is supported across the country but in Turin not so much by locals as by “immigrants” from the poor South who came during the 1950s to work for Fiat and adopted the boss’s team as a matter of identity in the North.

Juventus is what I call “Peronismo calcistico” – football Peronism: the pan-ideological, united organism of the leader and masses in one identity. Two great leaders of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti and Enrico Berlinguer, deployed much energy in the organisation of strikes at Fiat, yet both supported the company’s team, and were Juventino. In 2006, when the club was punished for corruption with purgatorial relegation to the second division for the only time in its history, most of the team’s stars – many of whom had just played in the Italian side which won the World Cup of 2006 ‑ stayed rather than desert the sinking ship for other top-flight teams. “Un gentiluomo non lascia mai una vecchia signora”, said striker Alex Del Piero, “a gentleman never leaves an old lady”.

I have spent much of my life as a war correspondent, and football has served me well in that regard, got me out of a few close scrapes. One night, I accompanied 1,600 Bosnian Muslims rounded up and deported for “ethnic cleansing” on a terrifying convoy at gunpoint and through a battlefield. When time came for drunken Serb militiamen – AKs at the ready – to haul the deportees from their cars in order to steal them and everything else they had, I dreaded our turn – a stowaway reporter, a “media spy”. In the tense huddle, I noticed a Red Star Belgrade badge on one of the armed men and said to my Slovenian colleague: “Andre, tell that man I saw his team win the European Cup in Bari last year”, which I had. The man –from the mountains and probably never having seen Red Star live ‑ was astounded. “Did you see our players, fans and flags? Did you hear our songs?” he asked, wide-eyed. “Yes, yes ‑ fantastic!” I lied (it was a boring  game and the supporters terrifying). The conversation went on some time, in detail. Then he waved us through.

Working on the narco-traffic wars in Mexico, when I find myself in cartel-controlled places like Tamaulipas or Sinaloa, I tend to wear a Mexican national shirt or, better, a T-shirt showing a scene from the 2014 World Cup in which Aren Robben of Holland collapses to the ground, ostensibly tripped by Mexican captain Raphael Márquez. There is clearly no contact, but the ensuing penalty eliminated Mexico – “No Era Penal” roars the T-shirt, it wasn’t a penalty.

When a gringo enters a bar in scary Matamoros or Culiacan, the cartel “halcones” or scouts are supposed to question him pretty thoroughly. But in this T-shirt, things go differently. Why are you wearing that? “Porque no era penal!” – and the conversation inevitably begins, and proceeds to other games ‑ maybe even a high-five, certainly another beer. Football changes the subject; they forget to kill you.

The World Cup is all about flags, nations ‑ and on the surface of things, the cynics would appear to be right. But there’s an important element of pastiche, almost self-mockery in football  ‑ hence the wig-wearing and dotty hats – that knows this is all ridiculous. One can debate forever when and where patriotism ends and nationalism begins (and as a British citizen, I abhor both, especially these days). But in stupid times of ugly nationalism, football can – though not always ‑ encourage the opposite, despite appearances – the “fan parks” in Berlin for the 2006 World Cup and beneath the Eifel Tower for the Euros of 2016 were hilarious global villages of fun and encounter.

Football can also turn the world upside down: this is a cogent time for Mexico to deprive the United States of a place in the World Cup, as they did. I remember watching Mexico beat the USA on television in Tijuana in 2008 – the victory followed by a spontaneous march to the borderline, flag-waving, giving the finger North. It’s a way of saying: you may have the power and money, but we have the football, and we’re better than you.

Then there was this: during interviews we were conducting for a film with Colombian government negotiators and generals and commanders from the Marxist FARC guerrillas forging the peace accord in Havana, almost all of them remembered a scene described by General Oscar Naranjo, who later became deputy president: “When the Colombian team was playing and they [FARC] arrived wearing their yellow shirts, the colors of the team, I thought: we have a country that is Colombia. Which we love, and we have to find a solution.”

My advice to those who yearn for this world-wide fiesta to end, who wonder why every bar along 34th Street in morning-time Manhattan was full of sky-blue striped Argentinians on a Monday lunchtime, green-shirted Mexicans on Tuesday, then yellow-shirted Colombians on Wednesday, is: lap it up! Look it up in what are more than just the “sports pages” for the next ten days or so; enjoy the fact that all this is crazy stuff, and the more world there is in the World Cup, the crazier it gets.

6/7/2018

The abbé de Saint-Pierre, who has done me the honour of making me one of his correspondents, has sent me a fine treatise on the best method of re-establishing peace in Europe. The whole thing is very practicable: all that is required to make it work is the agreement of Europe ‑ and a few other small trifles of that kind.
Frederick the Great of Prussia, writing to Voltaire in 1736
A European: someone who feels nostalgia for Europe.
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 1986

Enda O’Doherty writes: Seventy years ago this week, and exactly three years after the German surrender in May 1945, a large group of statesmen, writers and intellectuals, animated by sentiments of European patriotism of varying strengths, met in the Ridderzaal (Hall of Knights) in The Hague for what became known as the Congress of Europe.

The distinguished attendance included former French prime ministers Paul Ramadier, Paul Reynaud, Léon Blum and Édouard Daladier; future French president François Mitterrand; Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak and former prime minister Paul von Zeeland; Italian prime minister Alcide de Gasperi; former British prime minister Winston Churchill and future prime ministers Antony Eden and Harold Macmillan; future German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and future president Gustav Heinemann. Also present were a number of literary and artistic figures and various committed European federalist intellectuals whose names are less well-known today, of whom the most important in terms of the work of the congress was probably the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985).

Federalism was one of a number of idealistic, internationalist, peace-oriented movements of the mid-twentieth century which was able to draw enthusiastic adherents into its ranks, even in what one might have thought was the unsympathetic, isolationist political culture of Great Britain. In 1940 the British movement, Federalist Union, had 200 branches and 10,000 members, drawn principally from what Hugo Young called “the usual cadre of pious dreamers”, but not just from them: some powerful political figures also endorsed the idea. The federal movement in Britain lost ground, however, during the war, when the experience of conflict, sacrifice and eventual victory elevated the status attached to the nation. It also moved towards a split between those who wished to work towards a European federation and those with their eyes fixed on world government, the latter tendency, in Young’s words, having “the early effect of returning such credibility as federation had to parsonical irrelevance”.

Federalism in continental Europe had the support of some heavyweight political figures, such as Paul-Henri Spaak and Italy’s Altiero Spinelli. It also had philosophical underpinnings, in the French-speaking world in particular, in various movements dating from the 1930s such as “personalism”, a Christian tendency which rejected both liberal individualism and communist or fascist collectivism; there was, however, a tendency among some postwar federalist intellectuals to reject parliamentary democracy as a model or at least to despise “politicians”. Corporatist modes of thinking, even Pétainist inheritances, were not entirely absent.

The two main forces present at The Hague in May 1948 might be represented by two rival organisations, the United Europe Movement (UEM), which later became the European Movement, and the Union of European Federalists (UEF). In fact the latter eventually affiliated to the former, so as not to be locked out of whatever discussions on the future of Europe might be developing, one must assume. At this stage, however, the direction of the UEM, represented by Winston Churchill and his son-in-law Duncan Sandys, was largely focused on blocking the federalist option in the wider European movement, promoting instead the idea of enhanced cooperation between European governments.

Churchill’s standing among Europeans in 1948 was immense, even if the British people had in 1945 chosen to have the fruits of the peace distributed by a Labour government. And his pro-European rhetoric was eloquent and impressive, persuading most of his listeners of Britain’s deep commitment to unity, perhaps at times even himself. Churchill, Hugo Young argued, “remained always a European of highly romantic disposition. His idea of Europe was benign and passionate, informed by the prescience of the historian as well as of the public man. The flaw lay in his description of what Europe was, where its limits lay.” In other words, Churchill was all in favour of Europe and the European idea; he just did not believe that Britain was a part of it, seeing its destiny far more intimately tied with those of “the English-speaking peoples”. As early as 1930 he had written: “We have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe but not of it. We are linked but not comprised.” This may well be the essential and authentic British position on Europe (or a benign version thereof), the Europhile Edward Heath, who led Britain into the EC in 1973, having been something of an aberration. True, Margaret Thatcher, in her famous speech at Bruges in 1988, told her listeners that Britain’s destiny was “in Europe, as part of the Community” but perhaps this was principally a by-product of her great confidence at the time that she could thoroughly reshape that Community on a new basis of the dominance of British – mercantile and liberal – values.

The ideological tussle at The Hague, which was principally fought out between Sandys and the federalist Denis de Rougemont, was represented by the former as a difference of approach between sensible men and utopian dreamers. The British did not want any undue emphasis on concrete structures or “machinery”, more a meeting of minds, a positive feeling, an alignment of aspirations. This would involve few or no actual commitments but perhaps a lot more meetings and fine-sounding resolutions. In the longer term some of those who at the time suppressed their own doubts for the sake of “unity” came to regret their weakness. The French socialist minister André Philip, active in the European Movement, wrote more than two decades later: “To the degree to which we buried the genuine problems we allowed ourselves to be sidelined by the establishment. In our fight for Europe we did not spill any blood, which is excellent and I am grateful for it, but we spilled too much champagne.”

Somewhat marginalised by the politicking skills of Sandys and the British, Rougemont stepped sideways into the realm of culture, presenting a document on “the responsibilities of the mind in the struggle for peace” that he had edited with the benefit of suggestions from a number of eminent European intellectuals including Raymond Aron, Alberto Moravia, Salvador de Madariaga, Karl Jaspers, TS Eliot and André Malraux. Even in this area, however, Sandys tried to undermine him by setting up a rival committee under British chairmanship. Meanwhile, wrangles continued over the inclusion in the Congress’s communiqués of references to “federation” or “federal union”. In the end Rougemont, blocked from delivering a defining introductory address, did manage to smuggle some of his ideas into the closing “Message aux européens”, not least the appeal to the “forces vives” of Europe (vital forces, that is churches, employers’ and union federations and other corporate bodies and not just political parties). (Interestingly, the message does not seem to have foreseen European decolonisation: the “greatest political and economic organisation of our time” was going to be built “along with the overseas people associated with our destinies”.)

One observer and marginal participant at the Congress, the French sociologist Raymond Aron, could not restrain his (habitual) scepticism at the sight of hundreds of earnest delegates, “representing no one but themselves”. The whole thing, he felt, was little more than an exercise in propaganda, “in the noble sense of the term, the art of open persuasion”.

It may be a little harsh to conclude that a gathering including so many eminent statesmen, who had in the past been and in the future would be elected to the highest offices in their nations, represented no one. For some of the pur et dur federalists, however, these men (and indeed they were all men) were not the future but the past, mere politicians slow to go anywhere and always conscious of the shocking lack of imagination and idealism of their electorates. Yes, one could imagine getting much further much more quickly with the vital forces …

It was not to be the Congress of Europe at The Hague and what has been called its forty-eightist (1848) spirit which was to launch European construction. What the Congress did quite directly lead to was the creation of the Council of Europe (in 1949), a body which of course still exists and which has responsibility – in an admittedly somewhat nebulous way – for matters of culture and values in Europe. Today’s European Union on the other hand grew out of the European Coal and Steel Community, an eminently down-to-earth and practical body sponsored by the French politician Robert Schuman and public servant Jean Monnet, strongly supported by various, chiefly Christian Democratic, European statesmen.

It is questionable whether this bicephalism (one organisation concerned with ideas and ideals, another with “practical matters”), dating from the first decade of European institution-building, is beneficial. Can the EU exist without idealism? Can values be promoted and their implementation where necessary enforced without political muscle? There are of course forces which are attempting to inject ideas and ideals into the EU project, but one sometimes has the suspicion that their project remains, often proudly, a rather EUtopian one (see, for example, https://european-republic.eu/en/).

It is sometimes said that the problem of creating a European democracy and a consequent sense of belonging to a common project (Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl is the splendid German word) is that there is no European demos. But this is not quite true. There is such a demos, and it can be numbered in tens of thousands of people, perhaps even hundreds of thousands. It is represented in every member state of the European Union. Unfortunately it consists almost entirely of intellectuals.

The Hague Congress was seventy years ago and precedes the first concrete steps towards European union. Nevertheless, some of the main fault lines evident then still exist, in particular the gulf that can exist between driven, but quite unrepresentative, idealists and politicians who are either (as were the British in 1948) engaged in a rather cynical hot-air exercise or are reluctant to become too enthusiastic about a project that they see their electorates as being lukewarm to.

The great French socialist leader Jean Jaurès wrote about the necessity to “aller à l’idéal et comprendre le réel”, that is to move towards one’s long-term aspirations while keeping a firm grip on political reality. It would perhaps be better if today’s inheritors of the federalist mantle, who dream of a “European republic”, would fully take on board the actual state of public opinion in Europe; equally it would be better if mainstream politicians began to realise that given what is at stake they now have more to gain from clearly and openly opposing the ideas being put forward by populists and “national-conservatives” than from trimming their sails for fear of losing a few points of electoral share.

Sources
This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair, by Hugo Young (1998)
Denis de Rougemont: Les intellectuels et l’Europe au xx^e siècle, by Nicolas Stenger (2015)

8/5/2018