Though it had long been a part of the United Kingdom, Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom in 1921 following the Anglo-Irish War. Ireland remained a nominal member of the British Commonwealth thereafter, but tensions between Ireland and the United Kingdom remained. Consequently, when the Second World War broke out in September 1939 Ireland elected to remain neutral. While some Irish citizens would subsequently fight in the war in the British military, Ireland itself proved unwilling to follow its former imperial master into the fray.
Within Ireland itself, a significant minority of the population held sympathies for the Axis powers, and some hard-line former revolutionaries even advocated joining in the war on Germany’s side. The general consensus, however, was that the proper course for Ireland was to maintain neutrality. When, in June 1940, the British government offered to unify Northern Ireland with the rest of the island if the country entered the war Irish President Eamon de Valera rejected the offer, and Ireland prepared itself to repel an invasion – not knowing if that invasion would come from Germany or Britain.
While Ireland would maintain its neutrality as the war progressed, it did offer some assistance to the Allies. In a few cases, Ireland allowed British ships damaged in the Battle of the Atlantic to be repaired in Irish ports, and Allied aircraft were allowed to fly over a thin corridor of Irish airspace. The Irish intelligence service would also cooperate with American and British intelligence, and the Irish even contributed critical weather data for the D-Day landings at Normandy. Still, Ireland remained firm in its commitment not to engage directly in hostilities.
Geisel comments on the shortsightedness of Irish neutrality in this cartoon. In it Hitler approaches the island on a snake-laden submarine, promising that he will “bring snakes back to Ireland” – a reference to the legend that St. Patrick had driving the snake of Ireland into the sea in the fifth century. The message here is that Ireland was vulnerable to a Nazi invasion if British resistance crumbled, and that failing to support the British put Ireland itself at risk. The cartoon ran the day after St. Patrick’s Day in 1942 and seems to be intended for an Irish-American audience.