In recent years historians have almost completely ignored Eamon de Valera’s 1948 to 1951 world-wide anti-partition propaganda campaign. This is surprising as a number of accounts from the mid-1980s, in particular those of John Bowman, T. R. Dwyer, Tom Gallagher and David Harkness, did cover certain aspects of de Valera’s anti-partition campaign. However, these works are now dated; they were too early to avail of important documents released since the early 1990s from the national archives of the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. In addition their authors did not have access to the personal papers of Eamon de Valera and Frank Aiken. Using these most recently available sources this article provides the first comprehensive analysis of de Valera’s world-wide anti-partition campaign.
Following the conclusion of World War II in 1945 the issue of partition represented a conundrum for de Valera. Due to Ireland’s neutrality, Northern Ireland’s participation in the ...
