That was never proven nor was it proven that Dublin did get bombed for sending fire trucks to you lot during the Blitz.

The reason they were shunned by their government was because the country could of been invaded at any moment by the UK or Germany.

You have to remember that it was such as short time after the Irish War and that the party in power at the time lost the civil war. They blamed Churchill for the civil war.

However, I think he was a leader and if it were not for him, there would of been serious morale problems during the war.

Edited by corkery (24 May 2013 10.01pm)

No they didn't speak German.

Germany is a very recent nation. The fact is that the Anglo and Saxon languages that mixed in with our other influences wasn't the same language that the new Germans spoke.

It's like saying that English is French because we share a language heritage.

The language of these shores has never been the same as another country's language. The nearest we would have got to that was when the Romans were here or when only the elite Normans and their court spoke only French.

Guy Liddell, the director of wartime British counter-espionage, wrote that he had asked Colonel Liam Archer of Ireland's G2 military intelligence about U-boat landings, to which the alleged reply was: "They are here in force, we can't do anything." According to Liddell, Archer said that a U-boat called in three times a week at a base at the mouth of the Doonbeg river, County Clare. Archer, who was a senior liaison officer at a secret meeting with the British, is on record as telling them that some Irish ports did not even have permanent military guards (but not as admitting that U-boat packs were flocking to Irish coastal waters).

Archer also gave British intelligence details of equipment, found on three captured German agents in Skibbereen, which included explosives inside a tin of French peas intended to blow up Buckingham Palace. Archer would not let the Brits interview the three German prisoners.

Proof enough for me. Not to mention the countless sightings (by english soliders that had nipped over the border for a pint) of U boat officers in pubs, in the south, in uniform, having a beer and a bit of RnR.

One other point I would like to raise, I accept it was the government that was mainly to blame for the "indifference" but I don't remember to many protest marches being recorded in the WW2 history books.

To balance things it should also be pointed out his involvement with failure's such as the Dardanelles campaign in the First World War, The Dieppe Raid and the Norway invasion.

I still think he was a very good Second World War leader but very far from perfect.