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Post by guillaume on Jun 6, 2009 12:05:21 GMT
Today is the 65th anniversary of the allied Army invasion of the Beaches in Normandy. This reminds me of the attitude of the "new" Republic of Ireland during WWII. Ireland, under the leadership of De Valera, decided to remain "neutral", not to get involved in any sides. This position had created some controversies among some historians and analysts. Why did Ireland remained neutral, while most of the world was fighting ? Some analysts think that some people in the Government and around the country were actually "inspired" by the national socialism in Germany and the fascism in Italy. So they did not want to get involved against an ideal they thought was great. We can also think that Ireland didn't want to fight alongside his "old" enemy, Great Britain. And we can think that the Republic was really new and fragile, and an involvement into the Conflict would had destabilised the new political structure. Military speaking, we can think that the Irish Army was so weak, that a confrontation with the most powerful German, would have completely destroy it in no time. I always thought strange that the German didn't try to invade Ireland. From the coast of France (which was occupied at that time), it would have been easy for Hitler to send couples of boats to the Irish Coast, and the invasion would have occurred easily. An occupied Ireland by the German would have been for them an extremely good strategic position, because of its proximity to the British coast. I do not support the German Army at all, I just thinking... Since when, Hitler would have respected this "neutrality" ? In a recent documentary saw on RTE, the Nazi propaganda was sending lots of propaganda films to the Irish people, trying to get them involved against the "evil" British.
Tell me what you think, you certainly know this crucial part of History more than I do.
PS : The Video-ADD on the right besides the video is added by YouTube ! NOT BY ME. IGNORE IT.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 18, 2009 11:59:15 GMT
The Germans did not invade Ireland because the British retained air and naval supremacy - any serious invasion fleet would have had to include a large number of slow-moving and vulneable transports. Even if an invasion force had landed safely, the British would have intervened immediately and it would have been easier for the British to send in troops from the North and Britain than for a German landing force to be reinforced from the Continent. Given that it was impossible for a German force to hold Ireland, we were more valuable as a neutral because this meant the British didn't have access to certain bases. There were elements within Ireland who were pro-Axis, either from ideological sympathy for fascism or because they thought my enemy's enemy is my friend. Irish neutrality, however, was more about assertion of Irish sovereignty against any residual sense that the state was a British satellite. The central problem with Irish neutrality in retrospect is that it encouraged a false self-righteousness. It was quite commonly said that Ireland had been spared from war because we were particularly moral and religious, and there was a tendency to exaggerate the sense to which it vindicated economic policies based on self-sufficiency (we were never really self-sufficient in that sense). The government spent a great deal of time worrying that returning emigrants after the war would bring back subversive ideas; the general sense of official relief when it was realised they weren't coming back was pretty unedifying. This complacency fed into the failure to adjust to postwar economic conditions and the "lost years" of the 1950s when Ireland was basically a storehouse of cheap labour for Britain.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Jun 18, 2009 13:20:47 GMT
Hibernicus, I wonder if it is possible to read Irish history from independence to Lemass as an effort to keep Ireland poor as it was more virtuous? It seems there were quite a few co-conspirators at the time and that, given the purpose of this forum to talk about Irish Catholicism, a share of the blame is laid at the Catholic Church'es door.
But regarding the substantive issue - it would be interesting to speculate how effective a German occupation of Ireland would be without British intervention, against a hostile population and sizable force opposing who were specifically trained in guerrilla rather than conventional warfare.
As regards neutrality, it was a very popular policy at the time. If I am correct, only one TD objected to it - John Dillon, and he was obliged to leave Fine Gael as a result. It is hard to imagine what condition the country would be in had we entered the war. Not to mention how much use we would have been to the Allies.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 19, 2009 17:37:50 GMT
British intervention I think would have been more important - the guerrilla warfare of 1919-21 was on nothign like the same scale as what happened on the Continent and would have faced much more ruthless repression than what the Black and Tans did. A lot of the militar planning was based on the assumption that the War of Independence was equivalent to 1940s partisan warfare, which it wasn't. It was James Dillon (John was his father). Sections of Fine Gael and even some Fianna Failers would have been prepared to end neutrality if we got a deal on partition, but this was not discussed publicly. The main contribution would have been the supply of bases, whcih would have allowed Allied planes and ships to operate about 200 miles further out in the Atlantic and correspondingly reduced the scope for Luftwaffe and U-Boat attacks on Atlantic convoys. There was alos some fear that Irish neutrality would affect Irish-american opinion in the US, which is why the allies went to such lengths to portray de Valera as a virtual collaborator. I think Dev was afraid of being a second John Redmond, afraid of a new Civil War, and most of all did not want to roll back his 1930s reassertions of full Irish sovereignty even for the sake of ending partition. These were legitimate reasons and neutrality did help to heal Civil War divisions, but I think he overdid it and there was a price to pay in terms of self-righteousness and self-deception.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 19, 2009 17:42:52 GMT
I don't think there was a deliberate attempt to keep Ireland poor - it was more a question of policies whose first aim was self-sufficiency but which couldn't deliver the living standards people expected, and of glorifying poverty as virtuous as a form of emotional compensation (poor countries near to rich ones, such as Latin American countries comparing themselves with the US, often claim to be spiritually or culturally superior to offset their material poverty). De Valera did make speeches comparing Ireland to the servant in the big house who if he left to set up on his own might have to accept that he would lose some of the luxuries of the big house in return for no longer putting up with the kicks and cuffs of the young master. He was criticised for implying that independence would make people worse off; I think his main emphasis was on self-sufficiency, and of course he was talking to an audience for whom the Big House was a recent memory.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 24, 2009 9:31:59 GMT
One believes that this thread should lead to a discussion on Irish neutrality in WW2.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 25, 2009 11:37:02 GMT
That was the idea but it has overlapped into a discussion of the thos of the De valera regime and whether (if at all) it had ideological affinities with the Axis.
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