Irish Question

Peaceful images of whitewashed cottages and peat-laden wagons form the backdrop to March of Time’s defence of Irish wartime neutrality. From the seminary at Maynooth to the stables of Kildare, and from the Leopardstown races to the bustling streets of Dublin, the Irish are portrayed as a proud people who are unwilling to risk their recently won independence by taking sides in another conflict - and who are ready to resist allied pressure to compromise that independence.

It was the pragmatism of Eamon De Valera - rather than the nation’s ‘poetic soul’ alluded in the final shots of this 1944 film - which guided Ireland through the war. De Valera - seen here in the Taoiseach’s office in Dublin - viewed the power to set his own foreign policy as one of the hard won benefits of independence, and this film (despite some fairly broad comic depictions of ‘typical’ Irishmen) gives a nuanced and sympathetic account of the Irish stance, drawing attention to the allies’ use of the seaplane base at Foynes, the many Irish volunteers in the British army and the Irish government’s willingness to allow its men to work in Britain as examples of Irish wartime policy which favoured the United Nations.