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‘Some people share their stories, shouting them from the hill tops. He wasn’t that sort of a man. He was a doer and just moved on. Everyone thought he was the Claremorris wonderboy and we were so proud of him.’
FAERY HAYES, discussing her father Richard J. Hayes, September 2017
At the end of the war Dr Richard Hayes returned to a life of mainly academic pursuits, but the lessons he had learned from the war were never far from his mind. He worried daily about how vulnerable Ireland was during the Emergency due to a lack of a sophisticated methods for enciphering Irish Army messages. He felt that huge improvements would have to be made given the new global political climate brought on by the onset of the Cold War.
In 1946 Hayes put his thoughts to paper, outlining his experiences as a cryptographer during the war in a lengthy letter to Éamon de Valera. Hayes informed the Taoiseach that success in dealing with coded messages largely increased with experience and the opportunity to discuss findings with others. He urged the Taoiseach to invest in a permanent cryptography unit within the Army that could be put into action in the future if the need were to arise. Hayes was scathing when comparing the resources he had at his disposal to those available to the British at Bletchley Park:
The British cryptographical staff tried to solve ciphers until there was at least two to three thousand letters of material available. They considered anything less as either impossible or depending on good luck and good luck will not appear unless there are a wide variety of averages to produce it. Here weeks were spent on material of 200 to 400 letters. It requires incurable optimism to carry on with such impossible attempts.
Hayes argued that many codes and ciphers were ultimately solved through diligence and watchfulness, and that could only be achieved through greater numbers of skilled persons working on intercepted messages. He insisted that it was often a case of the other side making a mistake in order to provide a window of opportunity for a cryptographer to carry out their work, and that increased numbers were very important in this regard. Referring to Alan Turing’s success at breaking the infamous Enigma code, Hayes explained how one ‘horrid’ enemy operator had forgot to make the second in a series of double substitutions, and the German coding system was then split open in a matter of hours. This was achieved after much time had been wasted trying to work out the complex substitutions in the preceding months.
Hayes also explained how another error by a German operator led to the solutions for all of the disc-type ciphers used by Germany during the war. He continued that the success of crytographical departments often depends on unending vigilance and, in many cases, a bit of luck: ‘An immense amount of mathematical research is necessary but it must also be of the highest standard both of accuracy and imagination but without the lucky break it is not enough. The ciphers of today demand the best brains available in quantity and all the time.’
With a deep sense of foreboding, Hayes concluded by warning the Taoiseach that Ireland ‘must not enter the next emergency without a nucleus, however small, of experienced staff. We must start in the next war where we left off in this, not surely from scratch again.’ Hayes felt that Ireland had been naïve during the war with its approach to the security of its communications, and that they had been extremely lucky in many respects with their apprehensions of German spies. He felt that a permanent crytographical unit was essential in order to read other countries’ communications and to assess the security of their own.
Chillingly, during the war Hayes had broken the cipher which the Irish Army was using to communicate with. He advised the Taoiseach that the cipher was extremely weak, could easily be cracked and that, given contemporary conditions, its security value was very low. He argued that proper enciphering equipment could ensure that greater security could be achieved in the future for the Army’s use of coded messages. He even remarked that some of the German spies had come to Ireland with safer encryption methods than were currently available to the Irish Army.
Hayes went further, saying he hoped the Irish Army would never again find itself in a war situation without an adequate version of such an important security tool. Despite Hayes’s pleas his words ultimately fell on deaf ears. His work was never preserved within the Army to any serious degree. Instead the Irish government chose to call on Hayes from time to time when they felt they needed his help. In many cases they were simply taking advantage of his good nature and unwillingness to say no.
In 1947, the Irish Department of External Affairs was offered a Swedish cipher machine and government officials contacted Hayes to ask him to test its security capabilities. The manufacturers claimed that the machine’s system was unbreakable, but after working with it for a short period Hayes was able to prove them wrong. He explained to government officials that he was able to break the code in a relatively short space of time ‘using a tedious but not very difficult method’. Hayes estimated that it could be broken in the space of a few hours with a staff of six cryptographers working to copy and count the various frequencies being used.
Even though Hayes’s work was crucial to the winning of the war, no one was ever appointed to succeed him in his role as cryptographer for G2. While the Irish government clearly valued his opinions and respected his intellect, they are guilty for whatever reasons for leaving the security of Irish communications as vulnerable to attack as they were during the war. During the Cold War this unfortunately left Ireland exposed to infiltration from other foreign agents. There are no official figures available or indeed any way in which to quantify the number of Russian spies who entered this country during the Cold War, or indeed in the years afterwards. A successor to Hayes would have gone in some small way towards addressing this problem.
Despite the disappointments Hayes faced in relation to his advocacy for a permanent cryptography unit, he achieved great satisfaction through his role as the country’s National Librarian. Hayes’s varied interests were in no way curtailed during the war years. While working for G2 he carried out a series of scientific experiments on the culture of plants, and in 1943, at the height of his battles with Hermann Görtz, he oversaw the transferral of the Office of Arms from Dublin Castle to the National Library. The Office of Arms was then renamed the Genealogical Office, and took responsibility for the issuing of grants and confirmation of arms as well as the registration of civilian flags.
Hayes also spearheaded a number of important acquisitions for the library during this period, increasing its standing globally. During the war Hayes oversaw the acquisition of the Ormonde Archive from Kilkenny Castle, as well as 60,000 Lawrence photographic negatives covering Ireland in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. An early 13th-century manuscript of the Description of Ireland and Norman Conquest by Gerald of Wales was also acquired during this period. However it was in the post-war era that Hayes dedicated himself fully to this role, and when his star really shone as a talented director.
Hayes was well liked in literary and artistic circles, and in 1945 he persuaded Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw to donate his manuscripts to the National Library. When Shaw presented the manuscripts to Hayes they were the only drafts of his literary works that he had chosen to preserve. As time progressed methods for preservation in libraries around the world modernised, and Hayes was always at the forefront of any new innovation he felt could benefit the National Library.
In 1945 Hayes embarked on a project that sought to acquire archival material and manuscripts relating to Ireland that were held abroad. He successfully obtained over 5,000 reels of microfilm for the National Library from archives and other libraries across the world. His work in acquisitions as well as the expansion of collections of estate and family papers had resulted in the library’s collection of manuscripts growing rapidly. Ever the pragmatist, Hayes began work on a system for cataloguing the material. It would prove to be his greatest work in the field of academia.
In 1965, Hayes published his 11-volume Manuscript sources for the history of Irish civilisation. The publication contained descriptions of Irish archives and manuscripts located in 678 repositories in over 30 countries. It was a major bibliographical work, one which earned Hayes two honorary doctorates in 1967 from Dublin University and the National Library of Ireland. He presented a copy of the work to President Éamon de Valera, and such was the esteem in which it was held that it was still being regularly consulted by students and academics to this day.
During his tenure as director Hayes also campaigned for a new building for the National Library, as he felt strongly that there was a need for increased storage as well as reader facilities. He was aware that the Trinity College library, having been built in the 16th century, received copies of all printed works first published in the United Kingdom. The National Library, which was founded in the 19th century, was not in a position to receive similar texts, and therefore Hayes decided it would be prudent to amalgamate the two institutions, for which he drafted a plan and submitted it to the government. The plan envisaged a cooperative scheme with Trinity College, with the new National Library being built on the Trinity campus. While the two libraries would work closely together under the Hayes plan, they could also both retain their individual identities. Ultimately the government chose not to adopt Hayes’s proposals.
Over the years Hayes became firm friends with Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, and when Beatty presented his collection of oriental manuscripts to the Irish state he appointed Hayes as his honorary librarian. In order to take up his new role, Hayes retired from his role as Director of the National Library of Ireland in 1967, and was succeeded by his deputy, Patrick Henchy. Hayes devoted the rest of his working life to his role at the Chester Beatty Library. In 1970 he published his last work, the nine-volume Sources for the history of Irish civilisation: articles in periodicals. The work indexed over 150 Irish periodicals that dealt primarily with humanities and sciences.
Hayes’s last public appearance was at the opening of an extension to the Chester Beatty Library by President Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh in June 1975. During the opening Hayes gave an interview to the six o’clock news on RTÉ, which was to be the only time that he appeared on television, and to date remains the only known recording of his voice. In the years after the war he had become a member of a committee of cultural experts of the Council of Europe, and during the Cold War he proposed the large-scale microfilming of Europe’s printed manuscripts to prevent their destruction in the event of a nuclear attack.
During his later years he served on the board of the Abbey Theatre as well as the Arts Council, the Royal Irish Academy and the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs. However he derived the most satisfaction in life from his family. He was deeply devoted to his children and grandchildren, spending much of his spare time in his later years going to see his son Mervyn play rugby with Palmerstown rugby club. In 1969 his wife Clare died, and this left an aging Richard lost in many ways. Later that year he remarried, to Margaret Mary Deighan, known as Maura to her friends. Maura had been an employee of Hayes’s at the National Library, and despite the considerable age gap, his children were happy for him. They saw Maura as someone who gave Richard great friendship and company in his later years.
Despite his numerous notable achievements in the arts and in academia, Richard Hayes was never recognised by the Irish state for his role as a codebreaker during the Second World War. There are a number of reasons for this. First and foremost was his own discreet nature and reserved manner. However, perhaps the most pertinent reasons were Irish neutrality and his work being subject to the Official Secrets Act.
In 1945, Hayes received an invitation to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and during the course of the secret meeting he received a medal for his services to cryptography and for the help he had given the Liddell brothers and MI5 during the course of the war. Churchill was said to have been particularly impressed by his work in breaking the Görtz cipher, the German microdot system and the O’Reilly disc cipher system. An agreement was reached that Hayes would never publicly disclose that the meeting took place, and the awarding of this medal has to date never been officially acknowledged.
Living with the knowledge of the true level of cooperation between the Irish and the British and other Allies during the war was at times difficult for Hayes. He often found it irksome to read articles in newspapers and printed manuscripts that portrayed Ireland as neutral and cowardly during the war. Hayes voiced these concerns in an anonymous letter to the Irish Times that was printed on 4 November 1961:
During the war Irish neutrality was constantly misrepresented in the Allied Press.Security reasons prevented the actual facts and the measures taken to prevent espionage from being published, to counteract this frequently vicious propaganda. It is about time that some of the truth should be released to set the record straight. The Irish government had the situation under complete control throughout the war, and that contrary to the popular belief in the English speaking world this country was not permitted to be used as a centre for espionage. When the full story is told this will be clearer still. – H.G.
Hayes concluded the letter by suggesting that an official history of the period may never be written. Perhaps most interestingly the letter was signed off by the letters H.G.; Hayes chose these letters as a tribute to Hermann Görtz. In the course of the piece Hayes dispelled the notion of Görtz being a man dogged by misfortune. Instead he described him as an extremely lucky individual who would have been in custody a lot earlier had it not been for his good fortune.
Hayes went on in the piece to explain that the Irish security services’ control of the security situation was evident in the fact that all of the other German spies who had been sent to Ireland had found themselves in prison within 24 hours of their arrival. Indeed Hayes was right to be proud, as the G2 counter-espionage movement during the war is one of very few examples worldwide where an intelligence organisation achieved 100 per cent of its objectives.
Hayes, like many of those in his secret world, knew that Ireland was never cowardly during the Second World War, and that it did all that it could to help the Allies, bar sending actual troops. This sadly was a truth that Hayes would take with him to the grave. His fondness for tobacco was to come back to haunt him, and he suffered for much of his later years with a bad chest. His health deteriorated further, and after suffering a stroke he was taken to the home of his son Mervyn and his wife Yvonne so that he could be cared for by them.
Hayes was a lifelong atheist, and wished to receive no church service when he passed away. He initially requested that he be cremated; however, he finally came to the decision that he would have a Church of Ireland service. In January 1976, Richard J. Hayes passed away in his sleep. He was buried in Deansgrange Cemetery after a small service attended by close family and friends. As his remains were lowered into the ground his heroics passed with him out of mainstream popular memory.
In 1980, his second wife Maura presented his papers to the National Library of Ireland. The collection contains huge volumes of notebook paper detailing his mathematical workings and calculations, which he painstakingly persevered with during the course of the war. One of the most notable items donated was a child’s school copybook belonging to his eldest daughter Joan. When Hayes was helping her with her homework he had a eureka moment with one of the German codes, and scribbled his calculations into the copybook.
Perhaps this exercise book is most telling of the man. Hayes was a forgotten patriot and a man of many talents. He was a loving father, an aesthete, a brilliant academic and librarian, a lover of rugby and, lest we forget, Ireland’s most famous Nazi codebreaker. Hayes’s contribution to Irish history is huge, yet he is largely forgotten, a tragic cruelty of fate, as he almost single-handedly ensured that Germany decided against invading Ireland during the war, and was instrumental in enabling all German spies to be arrested by the authorities.
Among his greatest achievements was the breaking of the Görtz cipher and the microdot system. His work ethic and diligence in terms of the O’Reilly cipher had a direct effect on the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge; as such he is spoken of highly in MI5 and OSS accounts of the war. His commitment to his work and his sense of national duty and quiet patriotism helped see to it that Ireland did not suffer the same fate as some of the more active participants in the war. He saw his role as a codebreaker as something to be done to the best of his ability, and when the war ended he simply moved on to the next challenge.
Unfortunately for Hayes he was lost in terms of the historical record, and the narrative that Ireland was cowardly in their neutrality during the war has largely been maintained in mainstream historical discourse. The truth is much different, and the remains of a forgotten war hero lie in the Hayes plot in Deansgrange Cemetery in South Co. Dublin. Sometimes heroes aren’t statesmen, they aren’t soldiers, they aren’t carved into marble statues on city streets. Very often it is those who work quietly in the shadows to whom we owe the greatest debt of gratitude.
Hayes’s brilliance as a codebreaker was facilitated by the great men who worked with him in G2, especially Col Liam Archer and his successor, the man who recruited Hayes: Col Dan Bryan. Bryan was dynamic in his thinking, and his writings on security policy did much to lay the foundations for Irish security during the war years. Many others failed to recognise the threat that Germany posed, and Bryan often found himself alone in his beliefs.
Undoubtedly his background in the IRA during the War of Independence stood him in great stead, and gave him a thorough awareness of the necessity for secure intelligence and security systems. Bryan was also instrumental in operating the ‘Dublin Link’ between MI5 and G2. This alliance proved to be highly significant in the defeat of Nazi Germany, and Hayes’s work in breaking various codes allowed MI5 to take their policy of strategic deception to new levels. The relationship was to be beneficial to both sides, in that they could call on each other’s expertise at various critical junctures during the war.
After the war Dan Bryan transferred to the Military College before eventually retiring from the Irish Army in 1955. During his later years he wrote articles and appeared on RTÉ to discuss the Emergency, although he rarely went into detail on the activities of German spies or the complex security arrangements and relationships that defined most of his career. Bryan passed away in 1985 and was buried in Gowran in his native Kilkenny. He donated his papers dealing with his career to his alma mater, UCD, bringing to an end one of the most secret chapters in Irish history.
Whitehall in London is adorned with statues of Montgomery and Churchill, and Britain’s greatest codebreaker Alan Turing has been honoured with a statue in Manchester, yet to most people in Ireland, Hayes, Bryan and other Irishmen who played such a crucial role in World War II sadly remain largely forgotten. This is a wrong that shouldn’t be allowed to stand. For when Ireland was at her most vulnerable, and when Britain stood alone in the world against Nazi Germany, our country was spared the horrors of World War II through the patriotism of a few brave men and the quiet heroism of a humble librarian.