“Neuter-ality?” The Irish Defence Forces as an institution of masculinity during the Emergency, 1939-1945

At the very end of the Second World War, the Irish Times, recently freed from wartime censorship constraints, made a rather revealing statement. It critiqued the Irish state’s policy of neutrality as amounting to a ‘policy of national emasculation.’ Clair Wills in her excellent cultural history of the Emergency refers to this view wryly as ‘neuter-ality’- neutrality as something which was inappropriately gendered. It is perhaps easy to see why the paper saw abstention from war as emasculating. As Dudnik, Hagemann and Tosh have argued, war has long been seen as a ‘natural homeland of masculinity.’ Irish historiography has justly focussed on the connection between warfare and masculinity, with significant attention paid to the construction of masculinity during times of violence in Irish history, chiefly the Irish Revolution and the Troubles- for example, in the work of Sikata Banerjee and Aidan Beatty. The history of masculinity in the Second World War has also received ample scholarly attention, as research by Martin Francis, Sonya Rose, and Christina Jarvis has shown. While the experience of belligerent states has, perhaps unsurprisingly, tended to predominate, Christof Dejung’s work on Switzerland demonstrates that masculinity could be easily reconciled with a policy of neutrality. Significantly less research, however, has explored the construction of Irish masculinity, during the Second World War, when the Irish state remained neutral.