Garret FitzGerald, who served as minister for foreign affairs between 1973 and 1977, was a committed Europhile. His tenure as minister coincided with Ireland’s first presidency of the Council of the European Union, then the nine-member European Economic Community (EEC). FitzGerald’s parents were involved in the 1916 Rising, but he did not see Ireland’s embrace of the EEC as a betrayal of their fight; as early as 1962, after Ireland first sought to join the EEC, he insisted: “The voice of Ireland will be heard in Europe in the decades ahead. But for the sacrifices of those who won our freedom, none of this could have been.”

EEC membership would lead, he hoped, to a discarding of economic dependence on Britain, for which some diminution of sovereignty was an acceptable price. But that same year, secretary of the Department of Finance, TK Whitaker, in correspondence with Fianna Fáil minister James Ryan, referred to the need for a realistic acceptance of Ireland’s status: “Nobody so loves us as to want us in the EEC on our own terms.” Taoiseach Seán Lemass also doused Irish piety about neutrality with cold water that year, telling the Dáil Ireland would be prepared to yield “even the technical label of neutrality ... we are prepared to go into this integrated Europe without any reservation as to how far this will take us in the field of foreign policy........

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