A TG4 documentary to be shown next week will recall how city teenager Paddy Devlin travelled from Galway to Belfast to enlist in the British Army in 1941 and became one of its deadliest snipers.
As a member of the Royal Ulster Rifles, he served in a glider battalion which fought on D-Day and in the invasion of Germany. Paddy saved the lives of many of his comrades after crossing the Rhine but was himself seriously wounded.
He left his native Galway city aged 17 to enlist in the British Army in Belfast in July 1941, one of an estimated 67,000 southern Irishmen who joined up to fight Nazism in the Second World War. He was a crack shot who became one of the best snipers in the Allied forces, and fought in the Battle of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge and the Crossing of the Rhine operation.
He was wounded by German machine fire in the Rhine battle while defending his comrades, but returned to service. After the war he joined the RAF and retired as a warrant officer after 28 years.
He settled in Moycullen and wrote a memoir of his war-time experiences, a valuable record of the experiences shared by tens of thousands of Irishmen.
In this documentary Paddy's niece Elayne Devlin, explores why her uncle and nearly 70,000 other Irish men and women ignored Irish neutrality to fight for Britain in World War II.
Elaine, an RTÉ journalist, asks why her uncle Paddy and so many others risked death in battle and hostility at home to fight as a soldier of the Crown. Irish men and women who joined up to fight the Nazis were given a warm welcome in Britain during the war, but often found a cold house on their return home.
It was a tale largely written out of Irish history for more than a half a century. Their huge involvement in the Allied war effort was largely ignored, and tens of thousands of families did not speak about their members' roles in it.
"A silence descended on Irish servicemen which only began to be lifted from the 1990s onwards, when the northern Troubles were coming to an end. It is only now that their sacrifices in a struggle which claimed the lives of 5,000 Irishmen are being fully recognised," said the programme makers.
This documentary to be screened on TG4 on Wednesday next November 8 at 9.30pm, told through the experiences of one family will lift the lid on that secret history.
