Perhaps it's evidence of Godwin's Law, but I made a reference (originally an inaccurate one - thanks Aonghus) to a Dublin statue of a celebrated Republican and a Nazi sympathiser, Sean Russel. It was something of an off-the-cuff remark in the thread about Sean Kelly's release. The thread soon took an off-topic, but quite interesting course charting through Fascism to Eire's role in World War 2.

Follow up:

The debate touched on the Irish government's sympathies with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regieme of the time, at which point commentor Aonghus points out a quote from a page hosted at University College Cork:

Though neutral, he assisted the Allied cause in various ways. Allied airmen who landed or crashed in Ireland were quietly returned to Britain; German airmen were interned for the duration. Militant IRA members who might have sabotaged the British war effort were imprisoned. Irish volunteers manned lookout stations all along the Irish coast and reported any sightings of U-boats or bombers to the British. Irish fire brigades were sent north when Belfast was bombed.
Judaism: The Jews of Ireland

I had heard something similar before where United Irelander gave the Republic a big-up for it's role in World War 2 - although dismissed it rather more quickly due to my own impressions of the aforementioned individual's bias and/or put it down to viewing the past through green-tinted spectacles.

Now my impression was always that the Irish government, out of pure spite and pettyness, refused to enter the Second World War fight against Nazi-ism out of pure spite and hatefulness towards the British. That said, we're made aware in school that large numbers of Irishmen came up from that self-same Republic to fight in the British army, leaving me with the idea that the Republic's people were much less bitter than the actions (or lack thereof) of De Valera's government would have one believe.

According to Aonghus however, it the opposite is true - that Da Valera's government would have entered the war but for public opinion being against him. Aonghus has not commented often at EU so far, but when he has I've found his comments interesting and reasoned so I do give them considerable time.

Nevertheless the question remains, if De Valera wanted to enter the war but feared the public reaction - how much guts must it have taken for those who did to set aside the prejudice and bigotry held so dear by some of their countrymen, to go so far as to sign up to the British army, to fight for what they knew was right only to be disowned upon their return. The intellectual powerhouses (sorry couldn't resist) of Sinn Fein deride the annual poppy appeal for retired servicemen as a symbol of British imperialism and the 'occupying forces' (and just today Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinnes called unionists bigoted!), and yet how many thousands of southern Irishmen gave their lives alongside their Northern brothers? What's worse is that Sinn Fein also try to equivocate the sacrifices these men made with the cowardly murders and bombings of the Provisional IRA's campaign of death!

The Irishmen who fought in World War 2 I truly admire, much as I admire current Catholic police recruits who must often endure intimidation, ridicule and sometimes threats from their own community. I think it's a shame they often don't get the same admiraion at home - be it in Ireland for the soldiers, or in their own communities for the PSNI officers.

But I have one last question. Why was I so sure Ireland (or at least their government) had acted like such bitches during World War 2? Why was it so easy to believe that anti-British hatred would overcome any sort of sense of what's right and wrong? And, aside from the propaganda effect, why was it so hard to believe what Young Irelander had said on the topic?

Personally I put it down to Sinn Fein's hijacking of Republicanism. De Valera had been part of the fight for Ireland's secession from the United Kingdom. In a sense I therefore saw him as a precursor to Gerry Adams and his government as the Republic's 1940 equivalent to Northern Ireland's Sinn Fein. With "Irish Republicanism" today so steeped in bigotry and anti-British hatred, it's hard to imagine it existing any other way. Even now I wonder what Dev's real reasons were - but at least now I have something to think about.