A scientist who was born in Co Tipperary and who advised Churchill on the D-Day landings has been honoured with a heritage plaque in Britain.
Prof John Desmond Bernal, a pioneer of molecular biology, was born in Nenagh in 1901 and was educated there and in Bedford before winning a scholarship to Cambridge where he studied physics.
A pioneer of modern X-ray crystallography, a method of photographing the structure of molecules, he became a scientific adviser to Lord Mountbatten during the second World War. He was a co-inventor of the Mulberry floating harbour and helped establish the physical condition of the beaches where the allies would land in occupied France.
He demonstrated to Churchill the necessity of a floating harbour when he used paper boats and simulated waves in a bath on board the Queen Mary en route to the Quebec summit in August 1943.
An English Heritage blue plaque has been erected at 44 Albert Street, Regent's Park, London, where Prof Bernal lived. He died in 1971.
His awareness of his Irish identity was apparent when he wrote of his boarding school experience in Bedford that he lived "like a hostage in an enemy land".
While at home on the family farm at Brookwatson outside Nenagh, he was friendly with the fifth Earl of Rosse's family whose observatory has been restored in Co Offaly.
At Cambridge, he moved from Catholicism to communism and became an apologist for the Soviet system. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953.
As a Marxist, he wrote about science in a political context, and believed socialism was necessary for science to reach its full potential.