Alex Pomeroy | Lancaster University
A note on terminology: Throughout this article, I will refer to volunteers from the Irish Free State as ‘Free State volunteers’ so as not to confuse this group of citizens with the nationalist Irish Volunteers who fought British rule during the Easter Rising (1916) and the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921).
‘No one ever said “Welcome home, Paddy”’.
May 8th, 1945, VE Day. In Manchester, the streets were bustling with celebration as the Lord Mayor led a civic ceremony to symbolise unity across the Grand Alliance of nations that had at last vanquished fascism. A short distance away in neutral Dublin, indeed closer to Manchester than London is, VE Day saw rioting between those celebrating Allied victory and the Fascist Ailtirí na hAiséirgh party, equipped with Swastikas and other Third Reich regalia.
Staff Sergeant Donald Stuart MacPherson had been at war with the Royal Artillery since 3 September 1939, seven years after he joined the Territorial Army at their Salford recruitment centre on an April afternoon in 1932. Since then, numerous jokes were aimed at the Irishman in Britain for acting as a ‘mercenary’ by leaving Ireland. In the sea of celebrations that followed Allied victory, nobody welcomed him home.
Despite their presence throughout the war, the 70,000 volunteers from the neutral Irish Free State remain overlooked in popular memories of the conflict. Outlawed from serving with belligerents by Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, they fell awkwardly between the borders of Ireland’s neutrality and Britain’s belligerency. Aiding the Free State’s former colonial ruler breached national and cultural identities for volunteers, which often led to marginalisation both as traitors to the Irish nation, and cowards to the British due to Ireland’s neutrality.
Free State volunteers are amongst the last surviving veterans: for example, aged 105, Dubliner John Hemingway is the last Battle of Britain airman. Others became famous during the conflict, such as Brendan ‘Paddy’ Finucane, the youngest Wing Commander in the RAF at the time of his death in July 1942 and one of the poster boys of the Battle of Britain. Though Finucane’s life was recently the subject of The Shamrock Spitfire (2024), most Free State volunteers’ experiences have faded amongst the millions of Commonwealth veterans. Their stories capture the complexity of identity for young Irish citizens caught between the fight against fascism and anti-British feelings at home.
The society the Free State volunteers inhabited by 3 September 1939 had lurched from colonial rule to a zealous sovereign state in barely twenty years; many had relatives who fought for Britain during the Great War, many more had seen them embroiled in the Anglo-Irish conflict (1919-1921) and subsequent Irish Civil War (1922-1923). The partition of Ireland into the Dominion Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, laid down by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, was a constant source of indignation for De Valera and his republican Fianna Fáil government. As Neville Chamberlain announced the declaration of war, De Valera broadcast his intention to keep the Free State neutral, tying the matter to his desire to prevent Ireland’s future from being decided by Britain. This declaration ushered in the period of ‘The Emergency’ for the Free State (September 1939 – September 1946, after the passage of The Emergency Powers Act).
However, Irish independence never severed all ties to Britain. Many volunteers were born under British rule and raised within families who utilised British military service, or industrial migration to Britain, as legitimate ways to escape the poverty prevalent across Ireland. De Valera’s assertions of Irish sovereignty included protectionism and a refusal to pay Britian land annuities, which sparked a trade war until 1938. MacPherson recalled interbellum Ireland scathingly: ‘when I was 17 I hadn’t done a day’s work in Ireland – the only thing for a young man was to get out of this beknighted country’. His brothers, Billy and Davey, followed their father’s service with the Dublin Fusiliers by pursuing careers with the British military in 1930. His sister Betty followed in search of employment, then Donald himself left Ireland, ‘with one shilling and 8 pence in my pocket’, to find work in 1932.
Some Free State volunteers came from self-described ‘Anglo-Irish’ backgrounds, often maliciously described as ‘West Britons’ by Irish nationalists due to their British sympathies and protestant beliefs. Unlike earlier ‘Anglo-Irish’ identities, which were exclusively adopted by the landowning settler elite in Ireland, Anglo-Irish here reflects the close associations to Britain that remained post-independence. John Jacob, a Royal Navy veteran from Cork, described this as ‘having a foot in both camps’.
Typically, Anglo-Irish communities were proud of Free State volunteers’ service and continuation of longstanding identities. Mark Downey’s war typified this: raised in Ireland to an Irish father and British mother, he recalled ‘a lot of cousins [were already] involved. [I felt] there was pressure on me personally. [I] told father, who suggested I think about it, and after several months he realised I’d better give it a try’. He flew Spitfires over the Normandy beachhead with 602 Squadron before being wounded in August 1944. Discharged in 1946, he recalled his return to Ireland: ‘[I] never got the slightest feeling anyone felt any resentment’.
David Baynham’s time with the Royal Engineers took him across Northwest Europe and India, yet his Anglo-Irish family did not share the same ideals as Mark Downey’s. Baynham recalled an awkward reaction from the family and friends around him: ‘I had no encouragement from family, [they were] not particularly keen’. He noted of his protestant religion that there was ‘historically some association with Britain, but I don’t think that was any influence’. He joined up out of boredom and found that many British personnel were ignorant towards the Free State, noting ‘they hardly knew where Ireland was, they thought Dublin was in the North and I had to explain [the reality] – that was about the level of interest’. MacPherson’s nationality, in contrast to the ignorance experienced by David Baynham, aided his cohesion in Britain: ‘[there was] always a crack [joke] in my unit that I was a neutral – was I fighting for the money?’
Despite a muted reaction to his service, Baynham remained positive towards Ireland’s position during the war: he was ‘always in favour [of neutrality], and it meant that it kept friends and relations safe when I was away’. For Baynham, as for many others, the war was a chance for adventure to escape the toils of daily life; Ireland’s historical relationship with England did not influence his decision-making.
Most Free State volunteers, however, possessed the same nationalist Roman Catholic identities that were once suppressed by British rule. De Valera had long since promoted the upkeep of such identities and set forward his vision for a sovereign, Catholic Irish state in a 1943 address to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the revived Gaelic League:
The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit.
From 1932-1938, De Valera restructured the Anglo-Irish Treaty to establish Irish sovereignty. In 1933, the oath of allegiance to King George V was removed from the Irish constitution, with two further acts in 1936 and 1937 reducing the role of the Crown in Ireland. Crucially, in 1937, a plebiscite introduced a new constitution which made the Free State a Republic in all but name. The following year, the Royal Navy ceded control of the ‘treaty ports’ of Cobh, Berehaven, and Lough Swilly, thus ending British military presence in the Free State.
Historically, however, many Irish families were divided by their desires for the regular pay that army service would bring, and their nationalist ideals for Irish independence. Reverend Brother Columbanus Deegan, who would serve in an RAF salvage and repair unit during the war, came from one such ‘typical’ family divide. His father's family had fought on the Somme whilst his mother's brothers were killed fighting with the Irish Volunteers during the Easter Rising.
Of course, for some nationalist communities, British service could not mix with Irish nationalism and several Free State volunteers recalled the potential for abuse and harassment their service brought. Dermot Clarke grew up in the nationalist Ballsbridge area of Dublin, yet he joined the Merchant Navy to satisfy his thirst for adventure. However, he hid his occupation when he returned on leave, as ‘at that time to be in British uniform [you were] very likely to be beaten up’. Similarly, Donald Stuart MacPherson’s first leave after the events of Dunkirk included an interaction with an anti-British neighbour, who was ‘delighted to hear they were getting a hammering’. MacPherson was all too aware of that hammering, having recently been reassigned from the Orkney Islands to an anti-aircraft unit on England’s south coast to repel the potential Axis invasion.
Yet nationalist identities did co-exist with equally longstanding traditions of British military service. In December 1920, British Black and Tan auxiliary forces razed large swathes of the city of Cork during the Anglo-Irish war in retaliation for ambushes on British forces in the area, causing the modern equivalent of £87m of damage. However, instead of open hostility towards British uniforms, John O’Regan recalled walking around West Cork in his Chief Petty Officer’s Uniform, ‘and was completely accepted as I was’. Seafaring identities seemingly surpassed national loyalties: George Forde recalled that the Royal Navy was ‘full’ of Cork men continuing their proud tradition of maritime service despite the British-inflicted scars on their hometown.
Even Free State volunteers in the British Army, the clearest reminder of British rule, could be accepted by nationalists. Richard Barry, who served from February 1940 to April 1946 with the Royal Army Medical Corps, recalled the situation around him: ‘it was a pretty common thing. Carrigtwohill has a strong Republican tradition and also a surprisingly strong tradition of service in the British Army and Navy’. He continued, ‘whatever the troubles between England and Ireland, they didn’t really compare them to the possibility of having the Germans and Hitler in charge of Europe’. Therefore, whilst it must be acknowledged that the Free State volunteers were drawn from a population who saw anti-British sentiment as a core part of national identity, it was more common to find that for many people, British service could co-exist with Irish nationalism.
To quote historian Richard Doherty, ‘it might be more accurate to say that there are almost as many views on the war in Ireland as there are survivors’. In the immediate post-war years, Irish governmental and charitable relief efforts to the shattered European continent were huge, an effort by De Valera’s government to counter Allied critiques of neutrality.
Many veterans felt that Irish citizens were sympathetic to their wartime service, however, most felt ignored by successive postwar governments and only 12,000 returned to Ireland after 1945. Donald Stuart MacPherson struggled in the aftermath of victory: he believed ‘the flower of Irish youth rotted in other countries’, including his brother Davey, killed in North Africa during 1942. Donald was so disturbed by his wartime experiences and the attitudes against volunteers that he did not re-settle in Ireland until 1975. Indeed, it took heated debates within Dáil Éireann before the Unemployment Insurance Act of December 1946 enabled former volunteers in Ireland access to British military pensions. Employment opportunities were scarce, and those who had deserted the Irish Defence Forces to fight with Britain were banned from state employment and benefits as traitors – only receiving an official (and, usually, posthumous) pardon in 2013. Remembrance ceremonies were held unofficially, until the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s stopped them altogether in much of the Republic.
Since the Good Friday Agreement, the Irish state has slowly attempted to commemorate the sacrifices of their citizens during the Second World War. So often in history and current affairs, regional identities and boundaries impart labels onto individuals acting to transcend them for greater causes. As the 80th anniversary of Allied victory approaches in 2025, with an inevitable wave of public commemorative events, it would perhaps be best to end as I started, with the words of Donald Stuart MacPherson,
‘We weren’t fighting for King George; we were fighting for the world’.
Further Reading:
Richard Doherty, Irish Volunteers in the Second World War (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).
Brian Girvin and Geoffrey Roberts, Ireland in the Second World War: Politics, Society and Remembrance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000).
Bernard Kelly, Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen after the Second World War (Dublin: Merrion, 2012).
Clair Wills, That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War (London: Faber and Faber, 2007).
Alex Pomeroy is a postgraduate researcher at Lancaster University. His current research involves investigating histories of memory and cultural identity surrounding the Second World War in the Republic of Ireland., which will be sponsored by the ESRC. His secondary research interests involve air power during the Second World War, and the interaction of sport, particularly football, with state and society.
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