Irish D-Day Catholics ‘owed great deal of gratitude’

The Royal Ulster Rifles Museum in Belfast has the medals of a County Roscommon-born soldier who was recognised for his role during the war by the Irish government.

Cpl Michael O’Beirne, 44, who was a tenor with the Royal Carl Rosa Opera Company, served with 2nd Bn Royal Ulster Rifles and was killed on 9 July 1944.

His display contains both his British medals and an Emergency Service medal from Ireland.

Dublin-based historian Diarmaid Ferriter said nationalist soldiers from across the island may have joined for the spirit of adventure, or for economic reasons.

“We know that a private in the Irish Army at the start of the Second World War was being paid 14 shillings a week,” he explained.

“If you went into the British Army you were being paid over nine shillings a day.

“There was also those in the Irish Army who did not want to spend the war, given that they were soldiers, not being involved in combat.”

Many soldiers in the Irish Free State were co-opted into civil projects, he added, such as turf cutting at Phoenix Park in Dublin.

“Many of them didn’t see that as soldiering.”

In February 1939, then Taoiseach (Irish PM) Éamon de Valera, announced the Irish Free State would be neutral if war was to break out.

In a speech, he said: “With our history, with our experience of the last war and with a part of our country still unjustly severed from us we felt that no other decision and no other policy was possible.”

A decade ago, some 6,000 soldiers who deserted the Irish Army to fight for the British during World War Two were granted pardons.