Forgotten Faces? The Memory of Irish Contributions to the Allied War Effort in Ireland, 1939-2015.

"Your father is a traitor; you should be ashamed of him".

Paddy Reid Jr.'s father was outcast for his Second World War service in the British army; there was nothing honourable about aiding Ireland's former colonial ruler.

Throughout WWII, Ireland remained neutral and outlawed citizens from volunteering with belligerents' militaries, so much so that draconian governmental censorship laws attempted to cloak the existence of the 70,000 Irish citizens who chose to serve with the British forces.

As my MA research has shown, by 1945 Irish public sentiment became largely sympathetic towards the Irish volunteers' experiences.

However, the state itself abandoned commemoration ceremonies in the 1960s and refused to officially recognise their sacrifices until 1995.

Furthermore, the nation's war memorial gardens, built to honour Irish sacrifice during the Great War, lacked an additional inscription for the Second World War until the early 1990s, and only in 2013 did the government formally apologise to the families of veterans blacklisted as "traitors" for deserting the Irish Defence Forces.

By analysing qualitative research interviews conducted with the volunteers and their families, I will trace the social history of the tensions between remembering and forgetting, acknowledgment and silence from 1945 to 2015, from Allied victory, through the violence of the 'Troubles' and into reconciliation post-2000.