The Irish General Election is over and this piece is aimed equally at all the parties which behaved disgracefully a few years ago with making heroes of Irish citizens who voluntarily joined the Irish Defence Forces, swore an oath of allegiance to Ireland and deserted during the Second World War, when recently liberated Irish territory might have been attacked by belligerent powers.
On returning home they were not court-martialled or prosecuted in a normal court. But, quite naturally, they were advised that they would not be employed by an Irish state agency for a period of seven years.
It seems that some of the deserters joined the British Forces. Had they deserted those forces and been apprehended by British authorities they would have been imprisoned, if not shot. The Irish authorities treated them very leniently at the time , though in Dail Eireann, Tom O’Higgins of Fine Gael, brother of Kevin, gave a bilious address in defence of the deserters.
A Liverpool man, who claimed to have served in the British Army, the British Navy and the British Air Force (without admitting to having deserted from any of them) wrote a book “Spitting On a Soldier’s Grave” though it appears that the Irish Authorities didn’t list any dead men amongst those not to be employed by them for seven years.
The story was put about that the deserters had joined the British forces to fight Fascism, but no evidence was adduced in support of that story. Irishmen, mainly from the IRA, had gone to Spain in the 1930s to defend the Spanish Republic from Franco’s fascistic mutineers. Other Irishmen, from Tom O’Higgins’s Fine Gael Party, had gone to Spain to support the anti-Republican mutineers. And some Irishmen who had fought against Franco joined the British Merchant Navy and other allied Merchant navies, and even the British armed forces themselves in order to fight fascism.
I don’t know the motivation of the deserters who joined the British Forces but I doubt ideology had anything to do with it. I read recently that married soldiers in the Irish Army were not paid married men’s allowances for their wives and children, until they were 23 years old. I suspect that the British Forces were better treated in this respect and that Irish soldiers who deserted considered their wives and children their primary duties, over-riding even allegiance to the State.
One champion of the deserters said that his deserter father had fought in the Far East but on returning to Ireland couldn’t get employment except looking after pigs for 16 years.It seems that when Irishmen and women were flocking to post-war Britain where there was full employment, the anti-fascist veteran couldn’t get on the mailboat, but managed to sire a large family when not mucking out the pigs.
But Ireland’s politicians, media and academic community disgraced themselves in beating their breasts over their very lenient treatment of deserters.
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