Kevin Myers: No army can remain an army unless it punishes deserters. During the war, the Defence Forces had no choice but to prosecute such men
I THINK I may speak with a certain authority on the matter of the Army deserters who joined the British forces during World War Two. It was my column on this subject, following the visit of Queen Elizabeth last May, that prompted Peter Mulvany to begin his campaign to undo the shocking injustice of the blanket ban on state employment and state-welfare, imposed by the 1945 government on those deserters.
This issue has since been visited several times by RTE, but naturally, never to consult the journalist who had exposed the scandal in the first place. And naturally, the RTE documentary on the queen's visit managed to make no mention of the same journalist whose often solitary campaigning finally helped cause the Irish state to remember the Irish dead of the Great War, and to restore the Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge. Needless to say, the Government did not see fit to put that same journalist on any guest list for the queen's visit. This is Ireland, after all.
Now, as to the Army deserters, the issues are clear. Generally speaking, no army can remain an army unless it punishes deserters. During the war, the Defence Forces had no choice but to arrest and prosecute such men. But Oscar Traynor, the Minister for Defence in 1945, had no legal authority to suspend the implementation of martial law against individual soldiers, and instead of due process, to institute a blanket prohibition on welfare and employment. This was not merely an unconstitutional denial of the legal rights of the soldiers, but also a grave assault on the constitutional rights of their wives and children.
Moreover, this draconian mass punishment reveals the fragile grasp of Traynor's generation on the legal limitations of government, and their preference instead for quasi-judicial cultural republicanism. Once you acknowledge a rival secular authority to the courts, as the entire green spectrum -- from Sinn Fein to Fianna Fail, and even the Collins wing of Fine Gael -- has repeatedly done, then parliamentary law is only observed just as it suits the green agenda. Viscera are seldom consulted in the formulation of policy in other countries, but here entrails (of the emerald variety) have often achieved a semi-judicial status that elected law-makers (never mind their innards) elsewhere might envy.
Which is why Traynor's employment ban did not apply to those IRA internees who had been allied with the Nazis, and who were allowed back into semi-state employment with the end of the war, with even their pension rights fully restored. Meanwhile, Dublin Corporation, after consulting its republican gizzard, donated land for the erection of a state monument to the Nazi collaborator Sean Russell, thus enabling Ireland to be the only country in Europe to raise a monument to a servant of the Third Reich, while banning veterans of the war against the Nazis from state-employment FOR LIFE. The same perverse abdominal value system also allowed De Valera to commiserate with Legate Hempel upon the death of Herr Hitler, even though by then he knew all about Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau. The reward for that particular oesophageal folly was for the USSR to veto Irish membership of the UN for another 10 years, until we were finally admitted in 1955, along with such heroic entities as Laos, Libya, Jordan, Albania: thus the diplomatic price for obeying the banshee sirens of cultural-republicanism.
So, Traynor's infamous act against Army deserters was all of a piece throughout, and militarily, quite unnecessary. Once the Nazi camps had been opened, and the horrors there revealed, the government could simply have done what Canada did, which was to declare an amnesty for deserters, with honourable discharges for all. Such a solution remains a real option: and it is frivolous to suggest that this would somehow or other undermine the Army's authority today.
The 5,000 deserters who helped to end a regime of gas chambers and guillotines surely deserve that much. But no government decision on this issue can annul the legal and moral consequences of a policy that was both ultra vires and unconstitutional. The lesson surely is that whenever governments heed the sirens of quasi-judicial cultural republicanism, the real law must nonetheless ultimately impose its authority, and the price duly paid.
One Army deserter was 22-year-old Patrick Mortimer, a Dubliner who went AWOL in 1943, and followed his brother Frank into the British army. Patrick joined the Parachute Regiment, and dropped into Normandy on June 6, 1944. He then took part in the equally bloody airborne Rhine Crossing in March, 1945. At war's end, along with many other Irish soldiers, he hurried home upon hearing that, with the revelations about the Nazi death-camps, the Irish government had declared an amnesty for deserters.
But on the contrary, the government had actually begun major arrest operations of these men, with on-board searches of passenger manifests on all ferries from Britain. Patrick Mortimer was arrested as his vessel entered Irish waters early on June 6, 1945, a year almost to the very hour after he had parachuted into France.
Then, effectively barred from ever working here again, Patrick Mortimer, a gallant soldier who had helped make Europe free, left Ireland, never to return. He died in 1989.
