Unreliable allies: Policy Exchange, unionism and British-Irish intelligence history
Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris with First Minister Michelle O'Neill, Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, pictured on Saturday at the restoration of devolved government , after intense negotations which saw a strong emphasis on the UK Government’s relationship with unionists (Northern Ireland Office, OGL).
Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this post with the button below.
The British-Irish intelligence relationship came under scrutiny this week, in a report by the conservative think-tank Policy Exchange, entitled Closing the Back Door: Rediscovering Northern Ireland’s Role in British National Security.
In the process, Policy Exchange has revived some old myths about the Second World War, stating:
Allied intelligence officers, meanwhile, were extraordinarily nervous that well-established German intelligence activity in Ireland would tip off the Wehrmacht as to Operation OVERLORD’s objective of landing at the Normandy beaches.1
In support of this claim, Policy Exchange cites P. Duggan’s Neutral Ireland and the Third Reich, a work written in 1989, before the records of MI5, GC&CS and Ireland’s G2 military intelligence became available. More recent scholarship has established that the views of intelligence officers who had close dealings with Ireland were very different.
In fact, counterintelligence and security was one of the areas where British-Irish co-operation was closest. The head of MI5’s Irish section, Cecil Liddell, established strong liaison with G2. In his official section history, he wrote that ‘it is at least arguable that, as things turned out, Eire neutral was of more value... than Eire belligerent would have been.’2
It is perhaps characteristic that Policy Exchange should have interpreted the secrecy of intelligence as evidence of security failure. It has long been Britain’s most distinctively neoconservative think-tank, promoting a revival of Cold War era intelligence and security policies.
During the peak years of the War on Terror, Policy Exchange director Lord Godson sought inspiration in earlier models of covert action:
During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence. At the moment, the extremists largely have the field to themselves.3
Among the carefully chosen recipients of the Information Research Department’s covert propaganda was Godson’s father, the former US labour attaché, Joseph Godson, whom the IRD’s Josephine O’Connor Howe described ‘as an energetic septegenerian, with vigorous anti-communist views, and a reputation for indiscretion, though there has been no evidence of this in IRD’s dealings with him.’4
The younger Godson has been distinctive in applying the neoconservative crique of Cold War détente to the Irish peace process, something I examined for openDemocracy back in 2009. In 2004, he strongly criticised the implications of developments in Ireland for Israel/Palestine.
..they believe that the IRA, like the Palestinians, has a great number of very good excuses to go back "to war." That process, of depriving the insurgents of "excuses," inevitably comes at the expense of Unionists and the Israelis.
But what is the definition of victory in Northern Ireland? The British do not define "victory" as the military defeat of the IRA. Firstly, they do not believe it was possible, but even if it was possible, they do not believe in such a defeat as a matter of principle. Victory, as far as they see it in Northern Ireland, is to persuade Sinn Fein/IRA to accept the use of democratic methods. In other words, they have a methodological definition of victory, but have no particular end point of a settlement in mind.5
This argument is somewhat at odds with the policies of the Conservative Party which Lord Godson now represents, and which supports both the Good Friday Agreement and a negotiated, two-state settlement in the Middle East.
It may be that Lord Godson’s views have shifted. Despite his suspicions of Irish influence, he supports the Northern Ireland deal negotiated by Rishi Sunak (a former Policy Exchange staffer), which leaves intact Northern Ireland’s enhanced relationship with the EU single market.6
This is reflective of a deep tension between Policy Exchange’s neoconservative internationalism and its support for the high Tory nationalism of Brexit. By supporting Britain’s departure from the UK, Policy Exchange helped create a tectonic shift against unionism in Northern Ireland, and to remove Britain from the councils where EU states recently supported aid for Ukraine over the objections of Hungary.
The invasion of Ukraine has created the conditions for a revival of Cold War liberalism, changing the debate about defence across Europe, including Ireland. Yet in its approach to Brexit, Policy Exchange has adopted an authoritarian nationalism not far removed from the America First politics of Donald Trump, the deadliest threat to liberal solidarity.
Policy Exchange’s critique of Ireland is of a piece with recent Conservative Party rhetoric on the subject, a sop to unionist leaders which cannot disguise the fact that it is Brexit that has done most to undermine the United Kingdom.
Marcus Solarz Hendriks and Harry Halem, Closing the Back Door: Rediscovering Northern Ireland’s Role in British National Security, Policy Exchange, 2024 p.21.
Cited in Eunan O’Halpin, Spying on Ireland: British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality During the Second World War, Oxford University Press, 2008, p.293.
Dean Godson, The feeble helping the unspeakable, The Times, 5 April 2006.
J. O’Connor Howe, Information Research Department, 31 August 1976. National Archives, FCO168/7715.
Dean Godson, Lessons from Northern Ireland for the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, October 2004, archived at the Internet Archive.
Dean Godson, The post-Brexit crisis in Northern Ireland is finally over, The Spectator, 1 February 2024.