From 1740–1922, as many as seven million people emigrated from Ireland to North America. Arguably, if there are any patterns in modern Irish history, a cultural analysis of this vast flow may help to reveal them. For while the Irish question is usually defined in Anglo/Irish terms (those of conflict) it has more universal import as the adjustment of Irish identity and culture, both personal and national, to the demands of the modern industrialising world. Emigration afforded one such response; Irish nationalism another; Irish American nationalism linked the two. More humans were directly and articulately involved in the migratory response than in the nationalist, both cumulatively over time and in the degree of freely active personal involvement. If scholars such as Robert Kennedy, Cormac Ó Gráda and others have studied emigration in terms of Ireland’s economic modernization, we would suggest that it may be studied culturally as a revealing cross-section of Ireland’s attendant psychic modernisation.

The most remarkable aspect of Ireland’s aberrant history in the later nineteenth century is surely the disappearance of nearly half her population. This was largely due not to heavy mortality during the Great Famine, but to massive emigration. Of few enough Irish families might it be said, in the words of the Vicar of Wakefield, that all their adventures were by the fire-side, and all their migrations from the blue bed to the brown. For both Irishmen and Irishwomen emigration became an expected episode in the life-cycle, akin to marriage or inheritance. Thus for the generation entering the employment market in about 1876, when the pace of post-Famine flight had already slackened, the probability of eventual emigration was still almost one-half. For those of either sex remaining in Ireland, the chance of marriage was only three in four For earlier generations, particularly of those brought up in the south-west, the likelihood of emigration had reached the extraordinary level of two in three.

In an article published in 1970 Professor Harkness has examined in some detail the negotiations between Britain and the Irish Free State during the economic war, particularly as they affected the relationships of Britain and the Commonwealth. This article discusses an aspect of the dispute not covered in his paper, the part Northern Ireland played in the quarrel, and in particular its role in making a final settlement more difficult. It also examines how the economic war affected relations between Britain and the province.

Although in the end the dispute proved, at least to Malcolm Macdonald’s satisfaction, that ‘the difficulty between North and South still lies at the root of the Anglo-Irish problem’, this was not evident when it began. In 1932, at the outbreak of the war, the question of partition did not arise. As Professor Mansergh has pointed out ‘the coin of contemporary political controversy in Ireland’ concerned the oath of allegiance, the position of the Governor-General, the question ofthe treaty ports and even the right of Ireland to secede from the Commonwealth.

Éire was economically and militarily impotent, strategically significant, and the only European neutral behind allied lines in World War II. Although the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, refused to co-operate openly with his protectors in Britain and his friends in America or even to distinguish publicly between them and Nazi Germany, he wanted Anglo-American aid, and he wanted it without conditions. He wanted what the American minister at Dublin, David Gray, called a ‘free ride’

On St Patrick’s Day, 1941, de Valera announced that he would send a special agent to purchase American food and weapons and expressed the hope that Ireland’s friends would help the mission. Acknowledging that the war was causing shortages, he repeated earlier claims that the belligerents, blockading each other, were blockading Éire, a land determined to avoid involvement in any ‘imperial adventure’