The Republic of Ireland confronted another squalid episode from its history as an independent nation and dealt with it honestly and well. In acknowledgement of a period of persecution and cruelty, The Defence Forces (Second World War Amnesty and Immunity) Bill passed through the last stage of the parliamentary process and was welcomed by all sides of the House. Soldiers who had deserted to fight with the allies were pardoned.
The story is sad, sad, sad. During the Second World War, around 7,000 men – a sixth of the Irish Army – deserted, of whom the vast majority promptly joined the Allies. (There were about 60,000 Irish citizens in all fighting for the Allies, many thousands of whom died.) The deserters had many different motivations. For many, it was clear that there was little point in having an Irish defence force. Only paranoid nationalists thought the British likely to invade, and only those whose hatred of Britain trumped reality doubted that if the Nazis won, they would trample over neutral Ireland with alacrity. Among the young men who absconded, apart from those who wanted to fight fascism, there were those who believed this the best way of defending Ireland, those who wanted adventure and those who wanted the higher wages. Many would serve with great distinction.
They would have known that they would face problems when they came home. Desertion is not a minor matter, however pure your motives and however important your role in helping to defeat an evil tyranny. Censorship had kept Ireland largely in ignorance of Nazi atrocities and vocal and intimidatory republicanism was pro-German on the my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend principle. (When as a small child in the 1950s I asked my Sinn Fein grandmother how she could have a photograph of Hitler at the bottom of her bed considering what he had done to the Jews, she explained solemnly that I was a victim of British propaganda.)
For someone whose political career had started in revolution, the theologically minded Taoiseach Eamon de Valera was unusually devoted to diplomatic protocol, hence his procedurally correct but otherwise infamous decision to
respond to the news of Hitler’s death by visiting the German embassy to sign the the book of condolence. To some extent, for he had been covertly pro-Allies, he was pretending an even-handedness that he did not feel.
So de Valera would not have been in favour of tearing up the rule-book on what should happen to deserters, however what happened was nasty in the extreme. In the Dail, there were many vindictive British-hating nationalists who ensured that the deserters were not just formally dismissed from the defence forces, but that their names were published, and under special power known as ‘the starvation order’, they were banned from having public service jobs for seven years and were widely condemned as traitors. Many had years of unemployment because of widespread discrimination and they and their families were shunned. Only about a hundred of those men are still alive,
but some of their children tell terrible stories about the prejudice and poverty of that time.
Ireland has grown up, since the Queen’s visit British-Irish relations have never been better, and the Jewish Alan Shatter, the Defence Minister, made the cause of righting this wrong his own. “You can be proud of your contribution or your relative’s contribution in the fight against tyranny and this contribution is now fully acknowledged by this State,” he said yesterday.
Even more significant in the Dail was the hope expressed by the defence spokesman from de Valera’s party, Fianna Fail, that those who had fought against the “horrendous regime of the Nazis” would take some consolation from the universal Dail support for the bill. An even more startling sign of maturity was that the Sinn Féin defence spokesman, Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, welcomed the decision to pardon the soldiers and denounced fascism in all its forms.
It’s good to know that even those who defend the IRA’s record no longer boast about a period when its leadership worked for a Nazi victory and enjoined its Belfast supporters to defy the curfew and keep the lights on to guide German bombers to their city.
