Why did Ireland stay neutral during WW2...

Why did Ireland stay neutral during WW2? After the great backstab in WW1 surely they wanted to regain honour by fighting evil, instead they just sat there. Why?

The Anglo arrogance shown in this post gives a good indicator why.

I know about the whole "muh fighting english wars" but WW2 wasn't a war for England, it was a war for humanity; Nazi Germany was objectively evil.

Was it just a case of "lol who cares if they're gassing millions of innocents I'm not fighting for good because MUH ANGLOOOS"

>regain honour by fighting evil
Declaring war on Britain wouldn't go well for them.

Because they didn't want to fight a war for other people. Because they didn't have an oppressive imperialist sphere of influence to force other nations into. The war would have done them no good, even if Germany did happen to have a ruler who was genuinely evil. Which it did, of course, I'm not denying that.

>overthinking it

Let's take a look at Ireland at the time WW2 broke out.
They had both communist and fascist movements to deal with running up and down their country while the IRA at the time also pursued their own agenda.

They had lost a generation to the combined efforts of WW1 Conscription by the British, the War of Independence and then the Irish Civil War.

Their country was absolutely still in the "barely getting back to its feet" stage and the country was rife with internal issues.
Let's not forget that their industry (never mind specifically their war industry) was not exactly stellar and they could have provided very, very, very little to the war effort in terms of both manpower and equipment, not to mention the fact that most of their "soldiers"-if they had seen combat at all-were more used to guerilla fighting than regular combat.

Let's also not forget the fact that things didn't really look good for Britain at one point. Easy for us to say "why not join the good guys" but to Ireland, Britain were the bad guys who they'd just got rid of and Germany were the new boys in charge.

Despite this, however, Ireland maintained a neutral-in-favour-of-allies stance, being just about as helpful to allies as they could be while maintaining their neutral status. Whether it was sending downed British pilots north while imprisoning Krauts or feeding information on weather or positions through to England, they were absolutely leaning pro-allies.

They even turned down Northern Ireland, which was offered to them in return for their formal joining of the allies. Northern Ireland weren't even informed of this until DECADES later.

Simply put, Ireland through neutrality demonstrated a strength greater than they probably could have done by joining the allies/axis and fucking their newly formed country up even more.

De Valera is a filthy rat but he did a good job handling "The Emergency" as they called it.

What do you expect a poor country of 2-3 million people (at the time) to do?

It was feared by the Irish leadership that entering the war on the side of the Allies would lead to a second Irish civil war as Irish public opinion was pro-German.

>De Valera stressed that to enter the war under any circumstances would be divisive and that even if Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were agreed on the issue they would not be able to carry the country with them, adding that ‘the people were pro-German and ... this would drive whatever instinct they had now the other way completely on the German side’.

>Whereas the overall attitude of the ‘plain people of Ireland’ throughout the war is to be found in J. J. Horgan’s oft-quoted encounter with a West Cork farmer – ‘We would like to see the English nearly bate’ – by the summer of 1940, the apparent likelihood of a Nazi victory produced ‘considerable defeatist pro-German sentiment in Dublin aside from Republican Army. If enemy struck before Fifth Column is jailed conditions would be very serious.’

>Irish government circles began to believe that a German invasion was looming. The escalating sense of trepidation in Dublin was exacerbated by the first in a series of British warnings about the likelihood of invasion, when on 1 June 1940 F. H. Boland received a letter from the United Kingdom legation stating that ‘there were a growing number of indications that such an invasion is not only serious planned and prepared with the help of the IRA, but is imminent’. This warning evidently was on de Valera’s mind when David Gray visited him on 6 June: “He went to the map of Donegal Bay, where Lough Esk extends north of the border, 50 miles to the north-east, the head of Lough Swilly. ‘If I were the Germans’, he said, ‘I would land at these points and proclaim myself a liberator. If they should do that, what I could do, I do not know.’”

>Be Ireland
>Just recently became independent
>Still recovering from an independence war and a civil war
>Small population
>Poor
>Basically no army
>Still salty about Northern Ireland
I wonder why they didn't join.
Hell, both the UK and Germany had plans to invade Ireland.

Ireland was an Axis power