Frank Aiken

Frank Aiken was chief of staff of the anti-Treaty IRA at the end of the Irish Civil War, and then spent half a century as an Irish government minister. He was born in County Armagh and commanded the Fourth Northern Division during the War of Independence. He tried to stay neutral when the Treaty split the movement, and took the anti-Treaty side only after his men were attacked. Made chief of staff in 1923, it was Aiken who issued the order to dump arms in May of that year, ending the civil war without a surrender or a settlement. He entered the Dáil in 1923 and was a founder of Fianna Fáil. As minister for defence and then for the coordination of defensive measures he ran Ireland's neutrality during the Second World War, including its censorship regime, which was strict enough to cut references to concentration camps from newsreels. His longest and most distinctive service was as minister for external affairs from 1957 to 1969. There he made Ireland a persistent independent voice at the United Nations, arguing for the admission of the People's Republic of China against American objection, for decolonisation, and above all for a treaty to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. He proposed it first in 1958 and pushed it for a decade. When the Non-Proliferation Treaty was opened for signature in 1968, Ireland was invited to sign first. He served in the Dáil for fifty years. He was also the minister who introduced Ireland's first national development plans in the 1940s. Ireland's decision to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty first was a deliberate acknowledgement of his decade of work, and the agreement is still occasionally called the Aiken plan in Irish diplomatic usage.

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