The Irish in the Resistance Clodagh Finn and John Morgan | Gill Books

Irish writer and Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett famously returned to France from a holiday in Ireland when World War II broke out. ‘You simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded,’ he said later. His clandestine work with two resistance groups is well-documented, but there were many other ordinary Irish people who joined a growing underground network to take a stand against the Nazi occupation of Europe.

Some took up arms. Others gathered intelligence, sheltered fugitives, hid Jews, carried messages, committed acts of sabotage, broke codes or spread propaganda. Some Irish people even died for the Resistance.

Discover forgotten figures such as Janie McCarthy, a teacher from Killarney who was active in five different resistance networks in France; Captain John Keany from Cork who parachuted behind enemy lines to help the Resistance in Italy; Margaret Kelly, the Dublin founder of the world-famous Bluebell Girls cabaret troupe in Paris, who hid her Jewish husband; and Catherine Crean, the Irish governess sent to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp for helping Allied airmen in Belgium.

These stories and more demonstrate the bravery, courage and humanity of Irish people in the direst of circumstances, uncovered now through the meticulous work of Clodagh Finn and John Morgan.