Fighting tyranny - A pardon is the least we owe soldiers

Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War sustains one of the great, circular parlour games so beloved by professional historians and others with less objective, more politicised views.

Because the debate is fuelled by perception it can never be concluded, so all participants can imagine themselves vindicated. An Irish resolution to an Irish disagreement as it were.

Officially, Ireland called that almost unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe The Emergency, possibly imagining that by softening the vocabulary they softened the reality. Many Irish people celebrated their Republicanism, or at least they thought they did, by treating their countrymen and women who joined Allied forces to fight the greatest evil the modern world has known with considerable and persistent disdain.