Author: Declanito

Oh here’s to Adolph Hitler,

Who made the Britons squeal,

Sure before the fight is ended

They will dance an Irish reel.

Jim O’Donovan worked for “neutral” Ireland’s War-time government, in whose service his brother was a senior diplomat to the fascist states of Italy and Portugal. Jim O’Donovan was also the chief architect of the IRA’s infamous S-Plan, the IRA’s blueprint to bomb Britain into submission during World War Two with the help of Nazi Germany. Jim O’Donovan was one of a cast of unlikely characters the IRA assembled to make Churchill raise the white flag in a farce that was even more far fetched than Hollywood’s Michael Collins nonsense or, indeed, The Eagle Has Landed, Hollywood’s depiction of a joint IRA Nazi plan to whack Churchill.

Jim O’Donovan was no Liam Devlin, the free wheeling, whiskey drinking, womanising IRA Jackal Donald Sutherland plays in The Eagle Has Landed. Jim O’Donovan preferred the shadows to the limelight. He was not only a team player who assembled IRA teams packed off to England with “a couple of sticks of gelignite and an old alarm clock”. Brendan Behan, who we have already met, spent a few years in a British borstal as a result of this mad cap campaign and Dominic Adams, Gerry Adams’ uncle, was capo of the IRA’s English Midlands crew, where the IRA caused Belfast-style carnage in Coventry and some other towns which their Luftwaffe allies later targeted to even deadlier effect.

Though the legendary Tom Barry, whom we have also met, commuted to Nazi Germany to get things rolling, as always with the IRA there was a split, though not one that concerned Nazi ideology or their views on multi culturalism. Whereas Barry wanted Hitler’s support to attack British military installations in their Ulster baliwack, Seán Russell, who succeeded Barry to the IRA’s top spot, was thinking of a more grandiose alliance, Casement’s Aud on steroids if you will. At the time of the Nazi IRA alliance, Russell and O’Donovan were the only two surviving members of the IRA general headquarters staff who had opposed the January 1922 Anglo-Irish treaty. They and their like minded acolytes controlled the IRA. In the micro world of the IRA, they were players and so Barry’s plan was aborted.

And so, in January 1939, when the IRA unleashed no warning bombs on Brits in Blighty, though the ostensible reason was to force an immediate withdrawal of British forces from “the occupied six counties,” the real reason was to get Hitler’s heavies on board for a major IRA heave. O’Donovan, who was, by the IRA’s shoddy standards, a master explosives’ maker, and Russell himself traveled to the Reich to convert Hitler to Ireland’s noble cause. Although Admiral Canaris contemptuously dismissed Russell as the “music professor,” that is unfair to both Russell and, perhaps, to music. Russell was a highly respected IRA commander who had orchestrated the Bloody Sunday turkey shoot of British agents, for which Collins the Clown stole the credit.

Joseph McGarrity, who also washed up in Hamburg as an IRA emissary to the Reich, was capo of the Clan na Gael crew which, with Joe McGrath’s financial muscle, bankrolled the IRA for decades. During the First World War, when the USA was still neutral, McGarrity was involved in the Hindu–German Conspiracy, when he arranged the Annie Larsen arms’ purchase and shipment for Indian rebels. By IRA standards, he was a very serious player, so much so that the IRA signed all its statements ‘J.J. McGarrity’ up until 1969 when the organisation split into the Official (OIRA) and Provisional (PIRA) crews, after which the more socialist OIRA crew continued to use the McGarrity moniker. McGarrity, it must be noted, was the main ticket agent enforcer in the USA for Joe McGrath’s Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake scam and, tellingly, Joe McGrath and McGarrity were lifelong friends, even though McGarrity was a major IRA player all his life.

To further complicate the Irish desk for Hitler’s Abwehr, Frank Ryan arrived in Berlin on 4 August 1940. He had certainly taken the road less travelled. Having been on the losing side in the Irish Civil War, Ryan fell into what would be considered in contemporary Catholic circles the bad company of the narcissist crackpot Peadar O’Donnell and the Protestant crackpot George Gilmore, two Civil War veterans who went Communist after the Free State was established. The upshot of this for Ryan was that he ended up leading a few score of Irish volunteers to fight alongside Samuel George Montague Nathan and other demobbed Jewish, homosexual Black and Tans for Republican Spain in the Spanish Civil War, where Mussolini’s crew quickly arrested him and sentenced him to death by firing squad.

Thanks to the efforts of De Valera’s government, Ryan, who was connected, was released into the loving care of Hitler’s Abwehr, who packed him off to Berlin where he met Russell who, true to form, was up to no good. Between them, Ryan and Russell fed the Gestapo a crock of blarney, the executive summary of which was that, as with Casement and Lonely Banna Strand, legions of IRA volunteers were just waiting to get their hands on German weapons to crush the “British Army of Occupation” once and for all. The Nazis, who had undoubtedly heard such blarney before, were doubting Thomases. They said they wanted De Valera on board. The IRA said no problem. As we shall see and as those IRA men who faced his firing squads or his hangman’s noose soon found out, Dev was not on board with their plans of a U boat Armada sailing up the Corrib.

Thus, though things were going swimmingly on the Eastern Front in 1941, Germany’s Irish Front lacked ballast, never mind any semblance of sanity The IRA kidnapped, Keystone Cops fashion, Stephen Hayes, their own chief of staff and tortured him into confessing he was a spy. Hayes escaped their clutches and, for self-preservation if for no other reason, he handed himself into Dev’s secret police and grassed up O’Donovan and the rest of the IRA crew who had tried to kill him.

Though Hayes was saved, Dev was to give his former mates a very bloody nose in response to the murder of some cops and their wholesale theft of the Irish Army’s weapons and ammunition. Flogging, internment without trial and the death penalty for subversive activities became the order of the day, with 1,000 interned and Patrick McGrath and Thomas Harte executed by firing squad for killing cops and, in George Plant’s case, for murdering Michael Devereux, a suspected IRA informer. Although Hayes was later sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on account of his IRA activities, Cahill, who beat the Tom Williams’ murder rap, maintained Hayes was a tout and that, inter alia, his touting to the Branch led to the capture of Wexford IRA arms dumps, for which the IRA executed Wexford IRA man Devereux, and, for whose murder, George Plant, a Protestant IRA veteran, was controversially convicted by a Free State military court and quickly executed by firing squad in Portlaoise Prison. In the related inquest into the death of Seán McCaughey, the Belfast IRA man jailed for kidnaping and torturing Hayes, former IRA C/S Seán McBride, who had defended Plant and shown up his trial for the farce that it was, forced the head of the Free State Army’s garrison in Portlaoise Prison to admit he would not treat a stray dog the way he treated McCaughey; Ed Horgan a G2 connected “peace activist”, who joined Ben Gidley, a notorious Mossad operative to attack, ridicule and undermine my own peace efforts, later held that position at a time when 17 Free State soldiers were assigned to take Operation Harvest’s David O’Connell from one cell to another to have a dentist examine him; given how Horgan’s heavies handled their prisoners, such dental examinations were both necessary and frequent. Indeed, when one considers such things as PIRA’s murder of prison warder Brian Stack, one has to realise that PIRA are often in the cheap cells when it comes to sadism.

IRA big shot Charlie Kerins was hanged as a common criminal on December 1, 1944, for the murder of detective sergeant Denis O’Brien. The relatives of these dead cops still place ads in the papers on their anniversaries, a source of wonder and affront to IRA flunkeys who still commemorate their own button men from that and earlier eras. In any event, by 1945, the IRA had been well and truly trashed North and South of the border.

But not before sending another strange ambassador, in the form of Henry Francis Montgomery Stuart, to the German Fatherland. Stuart, who was born in Australia, married Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne’s daughter by executed 1916 leader Foxy Jack McBride, in 1920 when he was 17 and she was 24. Though Iseult was the result of a graveyard fling on a tombstone Maud Gonne had had with Lucien Millevoye, a far right French politician, they kindly pretended to be aunt and niece to appease Irish Catholic sensibilities. As with Seán McBride, who Foxy Jack sired to Maud Gonne and who later went on to be the IRA’s Chief of Staff and a Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot, Iseult had a very cosmopolitan upbringing as her mother shunted her between the flesh pots and literary saloons of Paris, Dublin and London, where another whack job, Nobel Prize winner, WB Yeats, proposed marriage to both mother and daughter, both of whom had previously been seduced by Ezra Pound, the famous fascist poet. Francis and Iseult settled into Dublin just as the Civil War, which their dysfunctional family fully embraced, kicked off. Stuart dabbled in some recreational gun running and was interned. Yeats, meanwhile, slagged off his young rival in his poem. “Why should not Old Men be Mad?” as a dunce,

Though Yeats was a better poet, Stuart, the Young Pretender, was obviously more craic, as he was to prove by taking a further dive off the deep end and getting into bed with none other than Adolf Hitler, through the good offices of Helmut Clissmann, the Fuhrer’s long suffering secret service agent in Dublin. As Hitler invaded Poland, Stuart headed off to a lecturing post in Berlin, capital of the Reich, of the goose step and of all things anti British and anti Jewish. Stuart’s good fortune spurred the IRA’s top brass to pay him a Three Stooges style visit. Seán MacBride, Stuart’s brother-in-law, Seamus O’Donovan, and IRA Chief of Staff Stephen Hayes got Stuart to deliver IRA felicitations to the Reich and to ask if they had a few U boat loads of weapons to spare.

During the War, then, the IRA had McGarrity, O’Donovan, Russell, Stuart, Ryan and God knows who else prancing about the Reich. When, in 1996, Stuart was elected a Saoi of Aosdána, a pretty prestigious gig in the Irish art world, Irish language “poet” Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who was to achieve notoriety by campaigning for the rights of Irish-speaking pedophiles to ravage their way through Nepal, predictably objected but in vain as she was regarded as a scatty old bat with a penchant for sucking off MI6 agents. While the Aosdána storm in a tea cup was brewing, Irish Times columnist and notorious Zionist apologist Kevin Myers (whose career would later be destroyed on charges he was an anti-Semite), branded Stuart as a Nazi sympathiser; Stuart sued for libel and the case was settled out of court after the Irish Times, the Irish Loyalist Paper of Record, fully accepted “that Mr Stuart never expressed anti-Semitism in his writings or otherwise”.

Rosaleen James, who Stuart bonked in Berlin, had no such qualms. James was a mystery, something the likes of Walter Mitty, Mata Hari and the March Hare might have conceived between them. Although British, with a fondness for Ukrainian cock, she broadcast Nazi propaganda into neutral Ireland and participated in the failed, almost comical effort to recruit Irish prisoners of war to join the Nazis against Great Britain—quite a series of performances, considering her only contact with Ireland had been a 1937 week-long stint in a Dublin whore house. Immediately after the war, MI6 wanted to hang James as a traitor, but she escaped to Ireland, became fluent in Irish Gaelic and, under the assumed name of Róisín Ní Mheara, organized a number of Irish government-funded Jew-bashing conferences. James’ award-winning autobiography, which denied the Jewish Holocaust, was published in Gaelic in 1992.

Although the Irish literary establishment loved Róisín Ní Mheara’s unapologetic Nazism, the IRA-Nazi meeting of minds was not primarily about liquidating the Jews, the gypsies and the transgenders. It was about giving “England” a bloody nose and there is the rub. Even if the Nazi submarines had managed to land and offload their cargo, it is doubtful Dev would or could have suffered the IRA’s antics in silence. The IRA were worse than useless allies to the Germans and Dev could not have been much better. Though my Republican father never bought Dev’s Irish Press again till the day he died because of his capital punishment policies, there were much bigger things at stake than Dev’s personal riches. Had a robust Border campaign kicked off, Ulster’s Loyalists, backed by Scottish regulars, would have mercilessly crushed all before them and that is without Canadian, English or Australian help. Any such campaign would have been at best a very minor irritant to the Allies’ war effort and Dev and anyone else implicated would have had hell to pay for it.

Although Ryan’s left wing supporters maintain he and Russell were not German agents, that is to miss the point completely. Hitler’s Reich, as well as Churchill’s British one, were playing high stakes’ roulette and Ireland could not afford to be at the table in any shape or form. This is evident from Germany’s kid gloves treatment of Frank Ryan, whose views would have been a one way ticket to Auschwitz, had the Nazis not seen some considerable mileage for themselves in leveraging his Irish contacts.

As it was, Russell died on German U Boat U-65 100 miles off the Irish coast and, after the legendary IRA commander was ceremoniously fed to the fishes, Ryan, who accompanied him, had to return to Germany and spend his final months dodging RAF air raids. Though Operation Sea Eagle itself (Operation Whale, “Unternehmen Walfisch” in German) was an Abwehr May 1941 plot to fly Ryan, a transmitter and a cache of money into Ireland, it was as hare brained as the rest of their plans and likewise came to nothing.

Charles Henry Bewley, a member of the infamous Bewley’s family of beverage magnates, was Ireland’s chief diplomat to the Third Third Reich, as well as a confused convert from Quakerism to Cathoicism. As well as being beaten up by Briscoe’s Jewish Irgun thugs, his main claim to infamy is he was a paid apologist and propagandist for the Nazis, with whom he sympathised in their war against “Communists, Jews and Freemasons,” all of whom he loathed. As a barrister, he prosecuted Republicans in the sham Civil War courts of the Irish Free State and he had an abiding hatred of Éamon DeValera. Influenced in his sectarian views by Fr. Denis Fahey, honoured by Pope Pius X1 with the Order of the Grand Cross of St Gregory the Great for his work, employed by Joseph Goebbels as a propagandist, arrested and interned by the British in Merano, Northern Italy in May 1945. he settled down in Rome where Mgr Hugh O’Flaherty, ‘the Vatican Pimpernel’ who had rescued thousands of Jews and escaped POWs from the Nazis, became his best friend as he lived out his life in the Eternal City without even an Irish pension to show for his troubles.

Even though he too paid a high price for hobnobbing with the IRA’s retards, O’Donovan was also connected. Archbishop McQuaid arranged for O’Donovan’s four children to get good free schooling at Ireland’s top Catholic schools when O’Donovan was interned and the Deputy Garda Comissisoner wanted O’Donovan charged so that he would lose his job and pension as “he cannot have it both ways.” Many, like the Deputy Garda Commissioner did, of course, have it all ways. Dan Breen, Frank Aiken, Kathleen Lynn and any others, who harboured Nazi sympathies, carried on as before and did not lift a finger to help the IRA’s World War Two martyrs who faced firing squads, hangman’s ropes and concentration camps from Dev’s lot. Ryan died in the Reich and when his remains returned to Ireland, my mother and I, as well as armies of Communists, Republicans, Special Branch officers and sundry hangers on, attended the service in Whitefriar St. church on 21 June 1979 as well as the subsequent interment in the Republican Plot of Glasnevin Cemetery. In later years, I organised a meeting of Argentinians at the height of the Falklands/Malvinas war and was half-tricked into facilitating supporters of the Baader/Meinhoff group having a meeting but the Communists, Republicans, Special Branch officers and sundry hangers on were having none of it, a further real case, as with getting arms from the CIA in the USA or from Gadaffi in Libya, of being damned if you do and damned if you do not.

That said, James Brady and Frank Stringer, two Irishmen from the west of Ireland who fought bravely for the Waffen SS on the eastern front during the Second World War, escaped damnation, as did Donegal’s 2nd Lt. Doctor Patrick O’Neill, who was killed on the Eastern Front in the uniform of the Waffen SS Sturmbattalion 500. Brady was involved in Operation Panzerfaust — the arrest of Admiral Horthy — which Kildare resident Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favourite soldier, masterminded. Ireland’s Protestant churches salute these brave men every November.

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