ABSTRACT
After the flutter and failure of the British bombing campaign of 1939-40, most of the IRA would sit out the war isolated in detention camps or prisons—none more bleak than the Curragh in County Kildare. The classical years of Curragh internment, the endless months and finally years of irrelevance, were those during the Emergency, elsewhere World War II, when Dublin and De Valera had to protect the novelty of neutrality from any real and some imagined threats. Ireland, a small nation had stood alone for a few more years in part because those who had wanted to embark on more turbulent waters had been penned in the Curragh. And, by and large, the Curragh had not been used for narrow political purposes, not filled with potential subversions or former rebels or present rivals. The Dublin government, reluctant to maintain the political liability of an internment camp, began releasing men from the Curragh.
