A PARDON for thousands of Irish soldiers who deserted from the Defence Forces to fight for the Allies in the second World War is on the way, Minister for Defence Alan Shatter has indicated.
While the Minister awaits formal advice from Attorney General Máire Whelan about how to proceed, he has said he regards the dishonourable discharge of soldiers who left to fight for the Allies as untenable.
Mr Shatter noted that for more than a decade the Irishmen who died fighting for Britain in the second World War had been commemorated in their own country.
“Many who fought in British uniforms during that war returned to Ireland. For too many years, their contribution in preserving European and Irish democracy was ignored.
“Some of those include members of our Defence Forces who left this island during that time to fight for freedom and who were subsequently dishonourably discharged from the Defence Forces,” said the Minister.
He said it was now appropriate to revisit the manner in which they were treated while also remembering that those who served in the Defence Forces throughout that time performed a crucial national duty.
“It is untenable that we commemorate those who died whilst continuing to ignore the manner in which our State treated the living, in the period immediately after World War II, who returned to our State having fought for freedom and democracy,” said Mr Shatter.
During that war 4,983 people deserted from the Defence Forces to join the Allied armies. Those who returned to Ireland were refused military pensions and were debarred from a range of State employment on the basis of an Emergency Powers Order passed by the Dáil in 1945.
On Monday the Northern Ireland Assembly unanimously backed the campaign for pardons for the servicemen involved.
In a significant speech on Monday night at the opening of The Shoah in Europe exhibition at the Department of Justice Mr Shatter said it was of vital importance that this and future generations remembered and learned from the horrors of the past.
He added that in the 1930s practically all visa requests from German Jews were refused by the Irish authorities.
“This position was maintained from 1939 to 1945 and we should no longer be in denial that, in the context of the Holocaust, Irish neutrality was a principle of moral bankruptcy.
“This moral bankruptcy was compounded by the then Irish government who, after the war, only allowed an indefensibly small number who survived the concentration camps to settle permanently in Ireland . . . and also by the visit of President de Valera to then German ambassador Edouard Hempel in 1945 to express his condolences on the death of Hitler. At a time when neutrality should have ceased to be an issue the government . . . utterly lost its moral compass,” said Mr Shatter.
