It is unfortunate that too often in public debate contributors can tend to talk past one another rather than to one another. Such was the case recently when my colleague here at UCD, Professor Diarmaid Ferriter, took the Minister for Defence, Alan Shatter, to task for remarks he made on Ireland’s war time neutrality.

In his characteristically unsympathetic style, the Minister had insisted that ‘…we should no longer be in denial that, in the context of the Holocaust, Irish neutrality was a principle of moral bankruptcy.’ He went on to demand acknowledgement of, and apology for, the State’s treatment of those that had deserted the Irish Army and had joined the Allied forces over the course of the Second World War. They had, in the Minister’s words ‘ …fought for freedom and democracy’. That speech had been delivered at the January 2013 opening of the exhibition The Shoah in Europe and was made as part of a plea to maintain an accurate historical memory of the Holocaust and Europe’s cataclysmic moral failures therein.

Subsequently, in the context of the Irish Government’s May 2013 apology and amnesty to those same Allied servicemen, Professor Ferriter published an article in The Irish Times in which he complained of, ‘… distorted and simplistic accounts of a complex period of Irish history.’ His cited examples of this were the minister’s aforementioned speech and a recent article by British journalist and author, Ben Macintyre, who had linked the issue of the amnesty with the wider subject of the ethics of Irish war-time neutrality.

While it is not clear to me that a ministerial speech and a single newspaper article – separated by four months – constitutes a ‘fashion’ (The Irish Times headline to the article was ‘Denigrating neutrality during second World War has become fashionable’), Professor Ferriter decried what he saw as a growing tendency to ignore ‘…the nuance, context and shades of grey that form the basis of the documented history of Irish neutrality and the evolution of national and international policy at that stage of the State’s existence.’ He proceeded, most convincingly, to outline precisely those nuances that had underpinned both the principle and practice of war time neutrality. He also highlighted the costs of that neutrality in the subsequent development of the state. His expose was, to my mind, both sophisticated and accurate but I also think it rather missed the essential point.

Setting aside the Macintyre article – which was as unremarkable as it was unreflective – the criticism of the Minister’s contribution was misdirected. First, the Minister did acknowledge (albeit obliquely) considerations of security and political stability which had underpinned the policy choice of neutrality. Second, the context of his speech is important. This was an address reflecting on the failures of Europe – indeed those of humanity – in facing down the barbarism of the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism upon which it was founded. In such a context how could one not critically reflect on the choices made by Irish policy makers of the period: on neutrality, immigration and refugee policy – each of which were briefly addressed in that speech? Finally, and crucially, I do not see the minister making an attempt to boil away complexity, thereby reducing an understanding of Irish neutrality to some cartoonish binary choice. Rather, I see an effort being made to redress both a contemporary and historical tendency to present neutrality itself as a morally preferable policy.

Here I would invite historians to excavate the narrative(s) in which Irish neutrality has been – and continues to be – offered: not as a strategic policy option or the result of a complex set of political, diplomatic and cultural choices but simply and starkly as a more ethical state of being. In my own work on Irish foreign policy, which has relied in part on historiography, it has been fascinating to trace the evolution of Irish neutrality through multiple iterations and definitions. One of the many threads within that cloth has undoubtedly been, however, the claim that neutrality placed the state on a morally superior plane to those countries that have committed to their mutual defence. In contemporary debates too, the ‘tradition’ of neutrality is frequently offered as part of a value set defining a pro-active, engaged, ethically-centred and progressive foreign policy which facilitates the state’s engagement with international peace and security.

In my reading of the minister’s speech he is challenging this assertion with a strikingly alternative (and similarly reductionist) claim: that Irish neutrality was a morally repugnant act which placed the state and its people on the wrong side of history and humanity. For all of the reasons that Professor Ferriter gives – and which any sustained reading of European history will also provide – that argument fails to account for many and complex factors. However, the minister’s comment in his speech that ‘…there were questionable things both done and not done and we should not be in denial nor should we ignore that the conduct of our State, at that time, in the eyes of some, delimits Ireland’s moral authority and credibility…’ is one that should be taken seriously.

Neutrality has no a priori moral standpoint. Context – as Professor Ferriter argues – is everything. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan put it well in 1999 when he remarked that ‘In the face of genocide, there can be no standing aside, no looking away, no neutrality – there are perpetrators and there are victims, there is evil and there is evil’s harvest.’ Similarly, in its more formal review of its own peacekeeping operations in 2000, the Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations concluded that neutrality ‘…can amount to a policy of appeasement’ and that ‘…in some cases, local parties consist not of moral equals but of obvious aggressors and victims’ necessitating the use of armed force as a moral requirement. This is the kernel of what I perceive to be the Minister’s broader argument. Nor is this necessarily undermined by Professor’s Ferriter’s demand for a sophisticated understanding of why the Irish State adopted – and held to – a policy of war time neutrality. One can excavate and better understand the many reasons for that policy. That does not necessarily, however, provide moral justification for it.