On the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, Ryle Dwyer reflects on the conflict in which his father was killed. ONE of my earliest memories of studying history in primary school is of a Christian Brother condemning Daniel O’Connell for denouncing bloodshed. It was as if O’Connell was guilty of some kind of treason. That Christian Brother saw something glorious about killing and dying, but, as the son of a soldier killed in Germany during the Second World War, I had a different perspective.

Growing up in Tralee during the 1950s there was no television, so movies were a popular form of nighttime entertainment. War movies were particularly popular, but I realised very early that when the soldiers would be coming home at the end of the movie, my mother would always be crying silently, so my brother and I learned to go to those movies by ourselves. We also developed a habit of not mentioning the war at home...