Ireland long ago

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Eg Germany made 1943: IRA men interned in the South after escaping from the North. Today they might be sent back to the North... staff "Stephen Burke" . Of course Stephen Hayes' kidnapping by Channel 4 and Ulster TV is oldsuch debunking is a contribution Northern Repulicans who think fashioned, comic stage Irish fare. to the campaign in the South he is a spy.

The Irish RM (Resident Magis- [again| etc) were wonderful, and the tale of the real chief of staff trate), made jointly by RTE, it was funny if you forgot the Mick Ackersley ONE of Channel 4's good things iS its Irish imports, like Radio Telefis tireann's (RTE) "The Year of the French" , an extremely good fictionalised account of the French invasion of Connaught and the Republican uprising in 1798. And last week saw the first of RTE's four-part series on World War 2 Ireland, "Caught in a Free State" • Last week, too, ITV began repeating "The Irish RM" which first appeared on Channel 4 last year. But that's another story.

"Caught in a Free State" tells the stories of a series of German agents operating in southern Ireland during World War 2. The Irish Free State remained neutral despite heavy pressure from Britain and the 'Commonwealth' of which the Irish Free State was still a member.

Britain had only given up its military bases in the Free State as late as 1938. Free State neutrality was a precarious business.

The neutrality of a member of the Commonwealth was an unexpected gain for Germany, the loss of Ireland's Atlantic ports a major loss for Britain and her allies.

On the other hand, the Free State was, so to speak, neutral on Britain's side, letting British airmen who baled out over Ireland go home rather than interning them, as German airmen were interned, etc.

The De Valera government walked a tightrope. At different times during the war there were serious British plans (1940-3) and American plans (1943/4) to invade Ireland and a German invasion was a serious threat until the tide turned against Hitler mid-way through the war.

But De Valera succeeded in exercising and giving reality to Southern Ireland's political independence. No greater test of political independence exists than that which the Free State passed through from 1939 to 1945 when the powerful state it had separated from a mere 17 years before World War 2 desperately needed the use of its ports.

But it was a costly business for Ireland. The Six Counties, of course, were at war with Germany. That war shaped the Ireland we have today because Six County involvement and Free State neutrality massively reinforced partition. Even the Irish trade unions split along the border. (They reunited in 1961).

"Caught in a Free State" looks at De Valera's Ireland through the eyes of the German "visitors" The first episode was hilarious. The fastidious Nietzsche-quoting German agent, dressed (as someone tells him) like a Hollywood film director, tries to use both the IRA and its enemies, the 'Blueshirt" fascists.

Nazi Germany, of course, tried to use discontented nationalities in Europe (Croatians in Yugoslavia, Flemings in Belgium, etc) for its own purposes - rather as Britain used minority tribes and Asian minorities in Africa. The IRA formed an alliance with Britain's enemy, Germany. One of its emissaries in Germany was the Stalinist republican Frank Ryan, released from captivity in Francoist jail (he'd gone to Spain to fight fascism) by German influence on Franco, so that he could represent the IRA in Germany.

A complicated business.

In fact, the idea that Ireland's national interests could be served by an alliance with Hitler's Reich could only occur to blinkered nationalists befuddled by hatred of Britain.

It was a disastrously stupid policy by • political bankrupts.

And what role would they have played had Germany, or Britain and Germany invaded Ireland?

Almost certainly, out of hatred of Britain and the Northern Ireland protestants, some would have played the collaborationist role that Croatian nationalists played out of hatred of the dominant Serbs and the Flemings played out of hatred of the dominant Walloons.

It's not an obvious subject for jokes. yet "Causht in a Free State" is very funny. Niall Toibin • especially funny as the chiet of against the present IRA. The subsequent episodes seem set to tell Send letters to Socialist Organiser. 28 Middle Lane. London N8. No longer than 400 words please: longer letters are liable to be cut MIKE NoNair's letter (SO 172) is, I fear, a prime example of the power of phrases and of ideology" (in the bad sense of the word) to shut out reality.

have no space to deal with Mike's arguments abgut imperialism. But let's look at what he says about the USSR.

Ordinarily, if I met someone who said that the nature of the Russian Army - that same army which crushed the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian workers, which stood as a threat over Solidarnosc, and which is today terrorising Afghanistan - is defined by the alleged fact that this 'body of armed men' 'serves the working class' , I would conclude that I was dealing with an especially obdurate Stalinist.

The further claim that bodies such as the KGB are defined 'in the first place' by their 'social ties' with the proletariat would make me wonder whether I had met a Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep before 1956.

Yet both these claims come from Mike - who, if I understand him right, considers himself a Trotskyist.

Mike's method is accusingly to ask me: is the USSR a workers' state? Yes or no?

Evidently he expects me shamefacedly to mumble 'yes' , 10 take back all my unjustified attacks on the Kremlin bureaucrats, and to agree that since the USSR is a workers' state conditions there must be pretty good, whatever the facts say.

Such bulldozer logic flattens out Trotsky's dialectical analysis of the USSR as a "degenerated workers' state" into a nonsense Trotsky himself emphasised:

"It is necessary to understand clearly that sharp contradictions Try to catch the rest of it. set in the 1890s. The actors (Anna Manahan, Niall Toibin Both Britain and plans during World War 2 to invade Ireland irrevent He froman repression that was still British policy in the real Ireland of the 1890s, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

What the two programmes together underlined for me is how LONDONDEL ARNE BALLYMERA• BANGOR OMACH BELFASILY LISBURN Rpivisions PORTADOWN NEWCASTLE CIVIL DEFENCE ¡CONTROL CENTREST A PROACTFORDUTES DUBLIN LITi TSAL young modern Ireland is. The landlord-dominated UK Ireland of the 1890s belongs, of course, to a world far distant and long dead. But so does De Valera's Ireland of the '30s, '40s and '50s.