By July 1940, with MacBride's successful securing of a reprieve for Tomás MacCurtain, he had manoeuvred himself into a potentially powerful position. With both eyes firmly fixed on the emerging ‘New Order’ in Nazi-dominated Europe, he had skilfully cultivated links with German representatives in Dublin, both official and unofficial, while remaining ostensibly on the right side of the law at all times. His reputation in Irish public life was growing; and David Gray, the American representative in Ireland from March 1940, remembered him as ‘the brilliant, unsmiling, young Dublin barrister who was defiantly defending such members of the IRA as the de Valera police had taken into custody’, As well as the MacCurtain reprieve, he had been associated with a number of legal successes, most importantly, the habeas corpus ruling of 1939 and the stipulations of the jury in the inquest into the death of Jack McNeela in April 1940. These cases had cemented his position as the legal representative of the republican movement and the subsequent years of the Emergency would flesh out Seán MacEntee's later charge that MacBride was ‘virtually Standing Counsel to the illegal organisation’.

The ‘illegal organisation’ – the sacred name of the IRA was rarely used by government ministers to describe these national apostates – had also reason to feel optimistic by the summer of 1940. Long-standing secret contact with the intelligence agencies of Nazi Germany appeared to be bearing fruit; if the calibre of German spies parachuted into Ireland may have raised some eyebrows, the seemingly unstoppable march of the German army across Europe was reassuring.