The names of 134 Irish merchant navy and fishing fleet seamen have been added to the official roll of those who died in the second World War.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWCG), which records all British and Commonwealth deaths in the first and second World Wars, have officially recognised the men’s deaths as war fatalities.
The men were included because Ireland was part of the Commonwealth until 1949.
The CWGC have arranged, with the relevant Irish authorities, for the Irish Seaman’s Memorial in Dublin to be adopted as the official commemoration location for the casualties. Their names will be maintained in perpetuity by the commission.
Though Ireland was officially neutral in the second World War, Irish merchant ships and fishing vessels were frequently targeted by German warships and submarines or by British mines.
Thirty-three men were lost when a German U-boat sank the SS Irish Pine on November 16th, 1942, despite it being clearly marked as a neutral ship.
The Irish Pine had been bought by the Irish government in 1941 to keep Ireland in vital supplies. It was sunk in the mid-Atlantic two days from Boston.
The SS Kyleclare was sunk by another German U-boat on February 21st, 1943. The captain of the U-boat that sank her claimed he could not make out the ship’s neutrality markings. Eighteen died in that incident.
The National Memorial to Irish Merchant Seafarers located on City Quay Dublin. Photo: Bryan O’Brien / The Irish Times
Eleven men died when the MV Cymric disappeared on February 24th, 1944, while carrying coal from Scotland to Lisbon in Portugal. She was last sighted off Dublin and the cause of her disappearance remains unknown to this day.
The ST Leukos, an Irish fishing trawler, was sunk by a German U-boat on March 9th, 1940, off Tory Island in Co Donegal with the loss of 11 lives.
Twenty-four of the men died when the SS Ardmore, a cattle boat, hit British anti-submarine mines which had drifted westwards from the Bristol Channel to the Saltee Islands off the coast of Co Waterford on November 12th, 1940.
The addition of the 134 men was the culmination of nine years of lobbying by the In From the Cold Project (IFCP), which seeks to remember forgotten casualties of the second World War and have them included as official deaths by the CWGC.
“Persistence pays. There never was any policy to exclude these men from their proper commemoration,” said Terry Denham, founder of the IFCP.
“It simply seems as if everyone at the time overlooked the fact that Ireland, despite its neutral status in the war, was still a member of the Commonwealth until 1949 and so these men properly qualified for CWGC commemoration.
“Commemoration may have come late but they are now properly recognised.”
To date, IFCP has obtained CWGC commemoration for 8,451 forgotten casualties and has found the graves of about half of those.
Denham said: “I have to confess that we regard this as one of our biggest successes since our formation over 25 years ago.”