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

Wrong.

You wrote

"From p. 408 of That Neutral Island:

"On 11 June [1945] the Irish Press carried an article by Liam MacGabhann entitled 'Buchenwald becomes Box-Office'"

You did not give a link to the page of the Irish Press until a later post. Liam MacGabhann did not say WHERE Buchenwald became Box-Office. It could have been UK, US, Ireland, wherever. It transpired it is Ireland he was referring to, which means The Nazi death camps were worldwide news months before June 11th everywhere else - or practically everywhere else - except Ireland.

Thank you for proving my point, which I have been making all along.

You're not even reading my posts Francis.

You still don't know what a source is and think a link is the ultimate authority. Do you really think Wikipedia articles littered with "[citation needed]" have greater legitimacy than books published by academics because you can link to the former?

ooh ‘you were talking to someone’ who proved your bias? how convenient again.

As a point of interest to another poster as we chatted about museums.

I did not use it to prove any point I was making.

You meet people all the time who conveniently echo the point you are trying to spin.

Was I using it to prove any point Francis?
He was young, and had great fun with other young men and women from the US and Britain.

You think nobody in Ireland was related to or knew the hundreds of thousands of people who volunteered to help the Allies during the war, or knew how some of those were treated when they came home? You should read a few books.

Soviet forces liberated the first major Nazi camp in July 1944. Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945. Buchenwald in on 11th April 1945. The camps were well known about worldwide ( except by the general public in Ireland of course).

On April 12, 1945, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower visited the Ohrdruf concentration camp.

All of that is beyond doubt,

Have you primary sources for when details of Irish people were eventually allowed to be exposed to information about the outside world including news of the Concentration camps? And how censored was it then, if it was still censored? Nobody seems to know exactly, although someone writing in the Irish press in June 45 said something about some other thing in some place.

NB the Irish government received news of the atrocious conditions some Irish seamen were in a Nazi slave labour concentration camp in 1944, from a letter smuggled out.

You insinuate it.

There were over 35,000 Irish soldiers killed in WW1. Many of them would have been members of the Irish Volunteers who joined up at the urging of the naive fool John Redmond. He stupidly thought that it would help Ireland get Home Rule. Obviously it never would. Then 1916 happened and the British government's reacton ensured that Irish independence was the only option. Redmond was rightly discredited as was the irish Parliamentary Party that wanted "Home Rule". The threat of conscription in Ireland caused more resentment. In 1918, the Irish electrate overwhelmingly voted for indepedence. The Irish War of Independence followed. This happened approximately 20 years before the outbreak of WW2. All that influenced Irish neutrality because there seemed to be a distrust of the British government in general and Churchill, a negotiator and signatory of the Treaty in particular. The Irish people would not have been too keen to trust people like Churchill.

Against all the odds, Ireland defeated the British Empire. For the British, it could never have been seen as a defeat so the Treaty was, in reality, a political face saving exercise. In the North, the attitudes of some Unionists with their herrenvvolk attitudes to Irish people was not too far removed from the Nazi racial superiority ideology. As Edward Carson found out, the Unionists were just pawns in British politics rather than being considered "British". The actions of the Auxillaries and Black and Tans terrorists were still in living memory at the time.

Obviously, there was a reluctance for Irish people to be used as cannon fodder in another European war. And as for the numbers of Irish men serving in Allied armed forces and Irish people working in the UK, the economic conditions in Ireland, with high unemployment was a factor for some. There was also he fact that some Irish people had fought in the Spanish Civil War and knew what Germany intended. These people fought against Franco's side. All these dynamics influenced Ireland's policy on neutrality. Neutrality was almost an inevitability given Ireland's history with the UK.

First I heard they were showing anything in May. Show your source for MAY and JUNE.

It is still 9 or 10 months since the first major Nazi camp was liberated.

Incidentally, Dev knew of Irish people dying in Nazi Concentration slave labour camps in 1944 but did not want to anger the Nazi regime. In fact, the Irish government was first notified of Irish merchant seamen being held in German labour camps by March 1943. The Irish Legation in Berlin was fully engaged in the matter by October 1944.

Many if not most of the Irish sailors felt their neutral country abandoned them.

Oh FFS your claim that everyone knew bar Irish people 10 months before has been debunked way back.

You are not seriously back for more on that are you?

Censorship was still in place in 1944.

Atrocities on both sides were not reported. Dresden was reported as just an air raid as you said yourself not an atrocity

It confirms the article I read on RTE I asked for verification of.

I will post it tomorrow.

Jesus, you really need to walk back earlier from stuff you claim that gets debunked. Embarrassing

Dresden was reported as a major air raid with civilian casualties. It transpired that civilian casualties were less than 25,000 people, which was a fair bit less than the London Blitz.

The holocaust was a different scale. The Nazi Concentration camps were not announced in Ireland until well after the war in Europe was over, as you said yourself. People in Ireland were not even allowed hear the Nazi word, such was the extreme censorship, and keeping people ignorant of world events.

Wrong, totally wrong. Do you never read posts? For about the fifth time this thread, I am telling you the Allies had verified film footage of the camps in April 1945, for example (quote)

"General Dwight D. Eisenhower's visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp in April of 1945 drew great interest from the American public. His tour of the camp helped generate a massive publicity campaign to expose the crimes of the Nazi regime to the world. The flood of reports that filled Western newspapers and magazines following Eisenhower's visit shocked Americans with grisly details about the Nazi camp system."

The British also liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 45 and it was filmed.

Even when Auschwitz was liberated in Jan 45, Soviet military film crews documented the aftermath, recording the tragic state of the remaining survivors, the physical devastation of the camps, and the harrowing evidence left behind by the SS.

Ignorance of the government is no defence: you cannot seriously claim the government here did not know of Nazi atrocities in April 45 and use that as an excuse for keeping the public here deprived of that information, and as an excuse for condolences for the man whose brainchild the camps were.

By the time of Hitlers suicide, which was more important: the dignity and feelings of the victims of the war and those who resisted Nazism, or the dignity and feelings of the Nazi regime?

If you think the later, how come Dev was the only P.M. in the world to express condolences?