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

The Allies had thousands of weather station including a vessel 5 miles from Belmullet if they wanted. The Axis did get intelligence from Ireland. How do you think Sean Russell magically appeared in Germany, and who later died on a German submarine? There was more than one Nazi wireless in Ireland you know. And there were numerous other means of communicating with Germany other than by radio. As with Enigma, at times the Allies had to let a lot - if not most - information get though, otherwise the Nazi would know the code was broken.

What do you think of the Nazis ( oops, sorry, I was not supposed to use that term, they did not exist during "the emergency") segregating Irish merchant sailors and working them to death in slave camps? Do you think it fits in with the fact Nazis thought we, the Celts - were lower down in terms of race than the English? Maybe not as low or hated as Jews but certainly lower than the English, according to the Nazis themselves.

Hempel never tell Dev that? He had Dev and our government fooled, and Dev fooled most of the rest of us though propaganda and extremely strict censorship, not reporting Axis atrocities etc. By even commiserating with Hempel over Hitlers suicide, as if Hempel the Nazi and Hitler were decent guys, and disregarding the damage ( 70 million dead ) the Nazis like Hempel and Hitler has caused the world.

So no proof of sucking up to Hitler then? Just the link you keep spamming that has absolutely nothing to do with Irish neutrality or the war. Just deflecting again.

As for the Irish prisoners in Germany, isn't it funny that even faced with extra punishment they refused to renounce their neutrality!

You prove my point.

Dev did not tell us about our high merchant shipping losses ( higher percentage wise than the Allies ), and he never told us about the Nazi death camps either. Strict censorship. Our media was not allow to use the word Nazi. They told us about the Dresden bombing though, strange enough.

Now, at school did they tell you how Germany segregated some Irish merchant sailors and put them working to death in slave concentration camps? While the Germans generally treated British merchant sailors better?

Did they tell you it was the Germans who dropped about 50 bombs on us and sunk 16 of our ships, not the dastardly British? That unlike the Germans, the British gave any of our seamen a tot of rum and were treated well?

My school-friend's uncle was a prisoner in Auschwitz. I do not see how some Irish people being affected by Nazi atrocities proves that wartime censorship was malicious.

Press freedom could be a big problem as it could not be overseen by the British war office, so even pro-British Irish newspapers might be spilling secrets without meaning to. But you don't care for practicalities, you're only about outrage.

So no, you've no proof of Ireland sucking up to Hitler! There is no need to spam links that have nothing to do with the subject. In regards the prisoners I already asked you, Why do you think they maintained their neutrality when faced with extra punishment?

Irish censorship not biased?

Dev and co. never told us about the Nazi death camps either. Strict censorship. Our media was not allow to use the word Nazi. They told us about the Dresden bombing though, strange enough.

They refused to work for the Germans as they maintained their neutrality.

Personal insults don't change the fact that it achieved nothing. It's was half baked and failed as result.

Trying to talk it up is ridiculous.

The Dresden bombing was not seen, at the time, as a massacre of civilians but as a successful strategic military strike against Germany.

How does publicising an Allied victory (how it was seen in 1945, not afterward) prove anti-Allied bias?

A lot your thinking about the war is distorted by anachronisms imo.

It’s fine for people to have diverse opinions about past events. On this matter we suffer from being in the Anglosphere and having to listen to fairly poorly informed commentators in Britain hold forth. I would have preferred us to have fought on the Allied side but neutrality made a lot of sense at the time given the fact that we had just freed much of the island from centuries of oppressive British rule. We owed them no duty of loyalty whatsoever - quite the contrary. Any critic of the policy should be just as critical of the many other neutral countries, eg, Norway, which tried to stay neutral initially, and should excoriate the likes of Finland which fought alongside the Nazis. Anyway, as things turned out our neutrality had a distinctly pro-Allied tinge to it.

Just reading some more history on the "special" place of the North during WW2. Conscription was introduced in the UK but not in the North. Apparently, Churchill considered it too much trouble and de Valera was against conscripting Irish citizens and Nationalists. Some Unionists were worried that workers from south of the border would take the jobs of Unionists who had been called up. Arguably, the Unionists have something for which to be grateful to de Valera. If that is not enough, the de Valera government also interned over 500 IRA members during the war. Irish history is rarely as simple as it looks on the surface.

The speed of decrypting is also a factor.

"..In 1941, the US Navy refused, for security reasons, to equip the British Navy with their ECM Mark 1 encryption devices, so the British Admiralty introduced "Naval Cypher No. 3" for Allied radio communication and convoy coordination in the Atlantic. The B-Dienst concentrated on deciphering the new code, in September 1942 and from December 1942 to May 1943, 80 percent of the intercepted radio messages were read but only 10 percent were decrypted in time to take action...."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_code_breaking_in_World_War_II

A lot of the arguments and debate around citizenship and identity that where dealt with in the GFA crystallised during that period and debate around conscription.

Unionists made the same arguments about being 'separated' from the UK as they still are about the Sea Border/WF
Same internal divides too between the hardline Unionist and the moderate Unionist. The issue cost NI PM Andrews(considered a moderate and against conscription on pragmatic grounds) his job - replaced by hardliner Brooke.
Similar to how the PSNI warned of the risk of returning violence if the imposition of a hard border went ahead in the Brexit/WF debate, it was the warnings from the RUC about the levels of resistance among Nationalists and even among some in the Orange Order and Unionists that eventually silenced Brooke and other hardliners.

The book is called Colossus but it's not solely about that machine. Its about ALL the machines ("computers") including the American ones and Japanese code breaking. The project management covers all the activities. Any one who works in IT will recognize the principles of project management though it doesn't describe it as such.

Certain people on this thread would benefit from actually reading books rather than monologuing from half truths they've found on the Internet and conspiracies and old wives tales and assuming it's all correct.

Because even the books can be wrong and authors and historians wrong or biased. You have to use critical judgement. Even a solely Irish viewpoint is institutionalised by being insular.