Sir, – May I reject Jack Northwood’s (June 27th) analysis of our campaign’s raison d’être? Military law is an essential part of any military structure and the offence of desertion can have a detrimental impact on military discipline.
Our concern relates to the application of legislation in an arbitrary manner by the De Valera government to punish Irish Defence Force deserters en masse and in absentia rather than seeking to have such breaches of military law adjudicated within the military court system of the Irish Defence Forces at the time. Indeed some deserters who lost their lives were still listed as deserters post mortem, effectively spitting on these soldiers graves and stigmatising their families in perpetuity.
It is a basic tenet of Irish constitutional law that citizens have a right to defend themselves; and defendants subject to military law, even when on active service, have the same rights to a defence, as the Shot at Dawn Campaigns have proved. The Emergency Powers Order (362) 1945, introduced by the Irish government to deal with deserters was a vindictive rough political instrument of injustice, arbitrary in its application, and by disregarding their fundamental rights as citizens denied Irish deserters who had joined the allied effort in their fight against fascism the right to defend themselves before a military tribunal. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – While I have no objection to pardoning those men who deserted the Irish Army to join the British in the second World War, I’m a little taken aback by the outraged tone of Robert Widders’s letter (June 24th). Perhaps he knows of an army somewhere else in the world which doesn’t object to its troops unilaterally decamping for a battle in which they are not directly involved (rightly or wrongly) after having sworn to serve at the orders of their own officers?
If he does, maybe he could write a book about its campaign history; it should be a short read. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Robert Widders baldly states (June 24th) that the Irish government publicly vilified Irish soldiers for the “crime” of fighting against the Nazis.That is patently untrue as he notes in the very first sentence of his letter. They were court-martialled, and properly so, for desertion, which is what happens in nearly every army worthy of the name.
Not for the first time I get to read the condescending idea that fighting for someone else’s army during a war, however great, trumped any duty Irish men had to their own country. – Yours, etc,