Irish children like Queen raise arms in salute

It’s an image that has sparked outrage across the water, but children much closer to home were just as rehearsed in the gesture.

Britain’s future queen was not the only one performing nazi salutes in the 1930s — a photograph from the Irish Examiner archive, dating back to a time when fascism was rife across Europe, shows a group of young Irish girls adopting the same pose that has Buckingham Palace in uproar.

Captioned ‘Young Blue-shirts saluting at Charleville, Co Cork in April 1934’, the image features girls as young as six or seven, of an age with the Queen when, in 1933, she extended her innocent arm in what, in hindsight, was a highly offensive manner.