What if Ireland had not been neutral during WW2?

That's a very narrow and frankly out of touch view of things. There were many Irishmen who looked at the situation and who volunteered to sign up in other countries armies during WW2. Because they thought this was a) the right thing to do and/or b) for the bit of adventure. I have relatives on all sides of my family who did just that. In doing so, they helped protect this country that hid behind the flimsy curtain of neutrality.

The principal reason the Republic did not join in officially was the same old mantra - the enemy of my enemy is my friend etc etc. That was Dev's official position but of course many ordinary Irish people looked on far differently at the situation. Not the first or last time there's been a disconnect between state and people here.

I don't see how Ireland could have joined the Allies without previously having purchased / or been provided with adequate modern military weapons, particularly anti aircraft batteries & aircraft, adequate naval ships & anti invasion equipment upgrades for the Army. There was no serious attempts made to upgrade militarily in the years leading up to war, nor proper funding available & by the time conflict had started in Europe Ireland was last on the list for modern military hardware which the United States was sending to other nations. Some attempts were made but little equipment was supplied.

Britain didn't have the spare resources to defend Ireland, although she could easily have invaded with outdated forces anyway. Luftwaffe bombing raids on Ireland would have been disastrous without adequate air defences.

As for the treaty ports, these had not been moderised properly since WWI & air defences were totally outdated, Britain spent massive amounts on defensive preparations on naval defences around it's empire, particularly Singapore & didn't have the spare funds available. The treaty ports had negligible airfield provision nearby & it would have taken a while to put these in place.

We read historical accounts of Britain & later on America trying to persuade Ireland to join the war, but we hear little of how they were going to defend Ireland from German military actions / nor how Ireland's military forces was going to be given adequate modern military upgrades to fight in this war.

Senior Irish military staff were present at many British GHQ military meetings up until 1945, yet we don't hear of any plans for military aid to help Ireland play it's part in a modern destructive war.

IF the Germans had invaded southern England & gained a foothold, it's likely that Britain would have put massive pressure on Ireland to allow military forces & bases to be established as a defensive redoubt to fallback in case of further German advances in England.

Like what happened in Iceland in May 1940 British forces would possibly have initially established bases in Ireland with Canada providing military assistance, & later on as in Iceland in June 1941 (way before Pearl Harbor & Hitler's declaration of war) the USA would have taken over responsibility for military defences.

It would have been up to De Valera & the Irish government what role they would have played in such a scenario, would they have played their part in an Allied victory or carried on pretending to be neutral like Denmark did under Nazi occupation?

Any other army or country during WW2? Surprisingly rare actually. Only one US army soldier had the death penalty actually carried out during WW2 and zero British were executed iirc.

I don't think you can count Nazi Germany, being an evil regime in itself. And before you bring up the Soviet Union, summary executions without a trial? Lovely example to follow.

Well you're welcome to your narrow bigoted view of Irish & European history. The rest of us will keep ours. WW2 was a major European conflict you do realise, that expanded to war zones around the globe. Not some silly little war that your hated Brits were waging. Take away the tunnel vision and look at the wider picture. People like you would be happy if we were all speaking French, Spanish or German here now.

We're talking about desertion here, not any other crimes.

Ok I see that now.

The right choice then and even with hindsight.

We were and remain a small bit player in such matters. We could quite easily be swept up in a major conflict if one arose now. It's a conceit to pretend otherwise. Neutrality is for big nations and empires, not the minnows.

We speak English as our primary language due to our proximity to a larger neighbour. If our island was located adjacent to France or Germany, we'd likely have been heavily influenced/ occupied by them. If events had turned out differently in previous centuries, we could have had significant Spanish or French control of our island. If events had turned differently in WW2, we might be speaking German now.

Ja das ist wahr.

You wrote "We speak English as our primary language due to our proximity to a larger neighbour". But in fact we speak English because of invasion and colonisation, which is not a function of proximity. Case in point; Australia.

It was not inevitable that we would be colonised by a near and large neighbour, or have our indigenous language replaced by its. Denmark, after all, was never colonised by Germany, and they still speak Danish. Portugal has yet to be colonised by Spain, and they speak Portuguese.

Even where invasion or annexation does take place, language replacement is not the norm. The Finns still speak Finnish, despite having spent 600 years as part of Sweden, followed by a century as part of Russia. Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and several other countries all speak their native languages, despite having been incorporated into the Austrian empire. Poland was divided between Prussia, Russia and Austria in the 1790s and didn't emerge as in independent country again until 1918 - almost exactly the same period, incidentally, that we spent as part of the UK - and they still speak Polish. Greece was part of the Ottoman territories for several centuries; they do not speak Turkish there. And so forth.

As for "speaking German now" if WWII had played out differently; Nazi German did of course invade and occupy many countries, but it didn't force or attempt to force any of them to adopt the German language.

This trope is trotted out mostly by English people who assume that other invading/colonising powers would behave as Britain did in fact behave.

While they suppressed the Polish language, this was part of a general policy of attacking Polish society and culture, and it certainly wasn't done with a view to forcing Poles to adopt German. In the Nazi worldview the Poles weren't German, that was the whole point, and the last thing the Nazis wanted was to make them appear German, or to share the benefits of "German culture" with them. German culture was for the Volkdeutsch. Polish schools, newspapers, etc weren't replaced with German-language schools and newspapers for Poles; they were just closed. Poles were expected to learn enough German to receive orders from, and provide services to, Germans. What Poles spoke among themselves was not something the Germans cared much about.

We shifted towards English in the late 18th centuries and since by choice ... for economic advantage. Exactly the same process that natives of many other states learn English, the driver of many language schools here. Note language schools that survive on their economic merits and which don't need to be heavily subsidised and propped up by state interventions and cash. If some form of gaeilge was the language of Britain across the water, that's what we'd speak now. We are as the French say, an island behind an island. No escape from our basic geography.

Much of what you say I agree with, indeed I've said much of it myself already in this thread. However, if we are discussing the historical hypothesis of Éire's entry into the war, at whatever point, the issue of censorship as applied by the FF government is an issue worth examining particularly as it relates to public opinion.

The country already had a tradition of censorship 'to maintain moral standards' so there was little questioning of it initially but as the war progressed and it became a tool of FF/Dev policy supressing even criticism of the government the voices challenging its application increased. In his public pronouncements de Valera often identified Irish neutrality as being divinely inspired and it's in this context the exceptional nature (even among neutral states) of censorship in Éire at the time should be viewed. Censorship and neutrality were a virtuous circle, neutrality equalled our interest ipso facto anything that endangered it needed to be suppressed.

"In 1942 the details of what the Nazis were doing in Poland and the occupied parts of the Soviet Union were not really known, either in neutral or allied countries."

The telling word in that sentence is 'really'. What does it mean, can it mean different things at different times during the war? If we are talking about a recognition of Nazi aggression and a dismissal of German propaganda surrounding its invasion yes I think this was widely known. If we are talking about Germany's annexation of part of Poland (General Government} under Hans Frank the Nazis never made any secret of this. If we are talking about what Germany called 'extraordinary suppression measures' namely summary executions of civilians regardless of whether they were Jewish the information was certainly available and not just from Polish exiles.

Regarding the Holocaust and when people knew or wanted to know, Deborah Lipstadt wrote an interesting book 'Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945' (1985) where if I remember right she puts the date where FDR privately acknowledged the Nazi's extermination of the Jews as sometime in early 1942. Anyway this is a whole different subject.

To summarise, I contend that our neutrality was popular domestically but due to the extraordinary level of censorship was artificially maintained and promoted by the FF government.

Good luck bringing these guys to justice, do let us know how you get on. :D