No effort to publicly mark VJ Day in the south, despite Irish sacrifice
There will be a ceremony in Belfast on Friday, August 14, in the Memorial Gallery. The official view in Dublin appears to be that there was no World War II and that, consequently, no Irish citizen, military or civilian, could have been involved.
I appreciate the niceties of the neutrality of the Irish Free State and the relative comfort and peace of the Emergency, which I enjoyed myself. However, for many Irish citizens (and their descendants or relatives), the situation was more complicated.
I was a five-year-old child in Singapore on the night of December 7/8, 1941, when the Japanese bombers arrived. My Irish-born father was a colonial police officer.
I did not really understand much about war and never fully appreciated the joys of dodging submarines up and down the Indian and Atlantic Oceans (or of being an unwelcome ‘evacuee’ in South Africa) during most of 1942.
For a child, it was pure fun, apart from dropping beloved sunglasses into Freetown Harbour in Sierra Leone. Back in North Tipperary, I enjoyed going into Portumna for ‘the rations’ with my Grandy — and reading ‘Curly Wee and Gussie Goose’. For my mother, watching the postman every day for the ‘Dear Mrs O’Connell, we regret…’ letter could have been less fun.
Unlike most of my male relatives, who were wearing British uniforms, my maternal uncle and godfather, Rickard Deasy (who, in my father’s absence, was my surrogate father and soul guide), served five years in the Irish Defence Forces.
For three and a half years, my father was not wearing any uniform at all, but an oft-repaired pair of shorts. De rigueur gear for a guest of the Emperor in Changi, outside Singapore. Diet not great. No sushi or sake. A bit too much sweat in the noonday sun. And sometimes fear.
It would have been nice to have had a discreet semi-official occasion. Not for revenge, but to remember for a few minutes, not just “the running-dogs of Western Imperialism”, but the hundreds of thousands of people from all backgrounds, all over Asia, who suffered and died, including those children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki whose deaths gave me my father.
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