Behold, Operation Emerald Sealion! Just when we thought it couldn't get any uglier the umentionable sea mammal takes a whole new form!
Brian Hanley, History Ireland Vol. 13 No. 3, May/June 2005, notes IRA statements in 1940, as the Nazis overran western Europe:
Offically Neutral, in practicality?
- "in July 1940 the IRA leadership issued a statement [which] made clear that if "German forces should land in Ireland, they will land ... as friends and liberators of the Irish people". The public was assured that Germany desired neither "territory nor ... economic penetration" in Ireland but only that it should play its part in the "reconstruction" of a "free and progressive Europe". The Third Reich was also praised as the "energising force" of European politics and the "guardian" of national freedom. ... In August [1940] the IRA confidently predicted that with the assistance of "our victorious European allies" Ireland would "achieve absolute independence within the next few months"."
- In the illegal War News, the IRA's main publication, "Satisfaction was expressed that the "cleansing fire" of the German armies was driving the Jews from Europe. ... War News condemned the arrival in Ireland of "so-called Jewish refugees", along with unspecified numbers of "Albanian, Abyssinian, Mongolian [and] Tartars"."
- Cumann na mBan saw the Nazis as "fighting Ireland's battle and the battle of all oppressed nations within the empire".
- Nazis "planned NI invasion" with IRA help, BBC, 14 November, 2003.
- Secret files shine light on IRA/Nazi contacts, Reuters, 14 Nov 2003.
- Hitler and the IRA, Gary Gratton, Belfast Telegraph, 14 Nov 2003.
- As Frank McGahon says about the IRA's support for the Germans: "England's difficulty would certainly have been Ireland's opportunity: Ireland's opportunity to live under the Nazi jackboot."
- A past we'd rather forget by Henry McDonald sums it up: "In the 1940s, the IRA was allied to one of the most evil regimes in human history. Had they succeeded in their goal of uniting Ireland on the back of a Nazi victory, every man, woman and child would have become vassals of the Nazi empire. And, as Micheal Burleigh emphasises .. Hitler planned to eliminate the Jews of Ireland as part of his maniacal project to destroy entirely the Jewish people. Yet this collaboration with Nazism is rarely mentioned in the traditional nationalist narratives of the twentieth century."
- When brave American troops landed in Northern Ireland in 1943 to prepare for the liberation of Europe, the IRA denounced the American military presence in Northern Ireland and threatened to attack them.
Speaking as an avowed Irish Nationalist, Ireland would be given a hammering that would make us look back on Cromwell with fond memory.
And we'd deserve it.
Falkenburg