Sir,
Sean Ilmari McLoughlin (12th July), having completed mandatory military service in Finland, suggests Ireland might consider allying herself with that country, which has abandoned its almost eighty year tradition of neutrality.
I myself am older than Finland’s tradition and clocked up enough years to earn a long-service hold a long-service medal with the part-time F.C.A. Like all who served in the Irish Defence Forces.
I was a Volunteer.
Compulsory military service was never imposed in modern Ireland North or South.
The “heroes” who hoisted the Union Jack over Dublin’sTrinity College on VE day kept themselves well out of harm’s way as the Red Army liberated most of Europe.
I owe my early life and security to the rational, ethical and effective statesmanship,
at home and within the League of Nations and the UN, of Eamon de Valera and
Frank Aiken and colleagues, work airbrushed out of academic histories and beyond
the ken of Irish Government Ministers and media today.
On 4th February 1942, whilst I slept securely on the Hill of Howth, Adolf Hitler visited his
friend and ally, Field Marshal Mannerheim, Finland’s Head of State, to congratulate him
on his 75th Birthday.
Thrre is a Youtube record of the meeting, the only one where the Fuhrer spoke in a conversational tone.
Sweden, another wannabe NATO member today,supplied the Reich with iron-ore, an essential commodity for Hitler’s War.
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