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Ireland
Michael Collins: “Tell Winston we could never have done anything without him”
29
Jun
2023
By MICHAEL McMENAMIN
The “common understanding” between Churchill and Collins was the Irish Free State as a free, self-governing Dominion, the same as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Against them were arrayed the Conservative Party “die-hards,” Sir Henry Wilson and Andrew Bonar Law, and the anti-Treaty IRA hard-liners. Eamon de Valera exhorted the latter to wade through “the blood of some of the members of the Government.”
Great Contemporaries: Eamon de Valera and a Long, Fraught Relationship
22
Jan
2021
By CHARLES LYSAGHT
Winston Churchill was not a man to bear grudges, and firmly admired the Irish. Yet he was strangely oblivious to the widespread, albeit not universal, hostility still felt towards him in nationalist Ireland. In 1953 he faced a libel action in Ireland arising out of his memoirs. It was brought by Eric Dorman-Smith, an Irish-born general whom he had dismissed during the Desert War. He expressed doubt that “an Irish jury would necessarily be unfair or that they would be prejudiced against me.” His legal advisers knew better. They made sure the case was settled before it got to be heard before a jury in Dublin. When Churchill died in 1965, de Valera, now President of Ireland, lauded him as a great Englishman. He could not omit to add the rider that Churchill had been a “dangerous enemy” of the Irish people.