However, Irish neutrality was a fraught affair – a delicate balancing act between neutrality and secretly aiding the Allied powers. In staying neutral, despite British and latterly American pleas to join the war, Ireland, under Eamon de Valera, successfully asserted the independence of the new state. Indeed the world war, in Ireland, was not referred to as a war at all, but as ‘The Emergency’. Ireland did not join the war, but declared neutrality. In the Irish state, popularly known throughout the war years as ‘Eire’ it was also a crucial event, though more for what did not happen than what did. It saw, as well as the deaths of tens of millions and devastation of two continents, the defeat of Hitler and Nazism, the decline of the once dominant European empires and the rise to superpower status of the United State and the Soviet Union.
The Second World War was the defining event of the twentieth century. A short history of Ireland during the Second World War, by John Dorney. An Irish Army recruitment poster during the Emergency.