Is Irelands neutrality stance in WW2 unfairly criticized? (see Mod note 217)

Ireland was able to feed itself during World War II. No excuse for us not taking in 100 or 1000 times more refugees than we did.

And did Switzerland or Sweden refuse to take refugees during ww2?

Why wouldn't they, did they not have their hand in the Nazi's greasy till?

*I have no interest in your sanctimonious attempts to divert with the H&N questions

Correct, plus, according to the internet, approximately 70,000 to 130,000 Irish men and women volunteered to serve in the British armed forces during W.W. II.

That is not including the many Irish people who helped the allied war effort by working outside the state in factories, hospitals etc.

If there was any serious proposals for the large military buildup needed in offensive military equipment & supplies, particularly in air & coastal defence, made by either the British & later the Americans in the immediate event of Ireland joining the war, I've never read about it.

Such a buildup would have needed detailed planing in advance & most likely the quick establishment of Allied bases in coastal & city regions. Would the Allies have been able to supply adequate military equipment for Ireland's defence, thus undermining their other theatres of military operations of much needed supplies.

Nazi Germany would have certainly launched aerial & coastal bombing as soon as they knew about the military buildup. It would have been similar to the Belfast blitz but with Dublin & Cork suffering similar casualties.

I despise De Valera, however unless there was serious proposals made for Irish military modernisation & supplies to join the fight with the Allies, he was right to maintain the neutrality policy.

The likes of Romania and Bulgaria though switched to the allies in 1944.

Dev's offer of condolence on the death of Hitler was seen as a stab in the back to the hundreds of thousands of Irish people who helped the Allied war effort in one way or another, and an awful insult to the victims of Hitler's extermination camps, who Dev did nothing to help anyway.

Allegedly. There is no proof that he did.

Some people still think Dev was right, and there are even some people who - like DeV - are possibly not aware over 6 million Jews, handicappd, homosexuals etc were murdered.

Some people think the Earth is flat, there's idiots out there, get over it.

Move on and stop living in the past about what Dev may or may not have done. It literally has zero impact on modern day Ireland, apart from living rent free in your head and you using it consistently to try and denigrate the country you live in.

No I did not. I wrote " It was not prosecuted as a war crime at the time. Do not forget Dresden was a major transportation and communication hub supporting the Eastern Front, as well as a center for the German war machine housing multiple factories. It happened years after after the Sept '40 to May '41 Blitz in the UK, when German bombs killed approx. 40,000 to 43,500 civilians, with another 139,000 people seriously injured, and over 2 million homes destroyed.

Not saying it was right, but if you were in one of the affected or invaded countries ( inc many of the neutral countris Germany invaded), the thinking to shorten the war - and the toll in the extermination camps - was to do whatever it took to shorten the war. "They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind".

Which it did. German morale collapsed and its military industries were affected etc"

It is interesting not a single person here has answered the question: "do you think the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified? A lot more people were killed there by the USAF than in the USAF and RAF bombing of Dresden."

Just to hopefully get you to stop asking a whataboutery question that is irrelevant to Ireland's neutrality in WWII.

The bombings of Hiroshiman and Nagasaki were certainly not justified, they were war crimes, some of the worst to ever occur and the US should have been prosecuted for these horrendous actions.

Do you agree with Churchills comments on Irish neutrality in his VE day speech?

Where Churchill was of the same opinion as all of the Americans, Canadian, Australians, Kiwis, South Africans etc and who thought that de Valera’s policies nearly caused Britain to "perish forever" by denying the Allies crucial Southern Irish ports and airfields to combat German U-boats? Do you think the people in all those countries were wrong and Dev was right? The same Dev who was a holocaust denier in May 1945, despite newsreels to the contrary?

You do not think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified in that they saved millions of other lives in the far East and ended the war? You did not want the war ended?

We get it. It took 5 pages but DeV BaD mAn is what you're saying.

Can we draw a line under it now?

Well said.

The Soviet Union signed neutrality pacts with Germany in 1939 and Japan in 1941 (and helped Germany carve up Poland in 1939.)

The Soviet Union's neutrality pact ended when Germany invaded the western Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The Soviets denounced their own neutrality pact with Japan very late in the war, on April 5th 1945.

In Asia, Thailand was neutral as was the Portuguese colony of Macao. French Indochina was functionally neutral under Vichy France as an Axis-adjacent territory but Japan invaded anyway.

Lots of switching and double-crossing going on.