'AND THEN THERE WAS INDIA' Imagining India in Ireland in the 1940s

This paper analyses the impact of the Second World War and its aftermath on Irish attitudes towards India. Sustained Irish engagement with Indian affairs seems to decrease markedly during the 1940s - especially in contrast to the years of the League Against Imperialism, or the revolutionary years 1916-23. By the middle of the war, and certainly by 1947, analogies between Irish and Indian political struggles and Commonwealth solutions were a regular feature of British diplomatic discourse, and of some Indian political discourse, but have faded from Irish debates. Analysing Irish parliamentary debates, mainstream newspapers, intellectual journals and radical republican publications this paper examines the changing nature of the Irish 'internationalist' perspective during and after the war - interrogating the impact of the policy of neutrality, wartime censorship and the growing cold war climate in Irish cultural politics.