THERE WAS a little quiet corner of Ireland where the convulsions that overtook Europe in the second World War had a strange, subdued resonance. That place was in the townland of Airglooney, not far from the town of Tuam in Co Galway.
There stood the beet sugar factory. Its manager and one or two of the engineers were German. Our next door neighbour, Mr Kaplan, was Austrian. His wife was Austrian. Several of the specialist operatives were Czechs. In some ways they represented the races and cultures that jostled and shouldered one another on mainland Europe.
They had come to Ireland because their expertise in beet sugar production was sought when the government set up our own industry at the start of the 1930s. Of course there were Irish people in the management echelons and my father was one of them. We all lived in the small estate of houses built on the periphery of the factory.
There was something of the culture of its occupants in the air. We grew up hearing the music of Schubert and Mozart and the voice of Richard Tauber from records and radio. The Czech musical influence came in the sound of popular pieces like Dvorak's Slavonic Dancesand Smetana's The Bartered Bride.
My mother learned how to prepare and cook the Hungarian dish, goulash, from Mr Kaplan. We developed a taste for sauerkraut and for frankfurters My brother Tom and I, young children at the time, often wandered in and out of the houses of our neighbours, who did not seem to mind. We heard German, Czech and Hungarian spoken. The smell of paprika, of cigars and of continental cooking wafted about.
We were too young to sense or to understand the kind of national tensions that must have ruffled that small industrial community. How Mrs Kaplan felt about her country being forcibly absorbed into Greater Germany I do not know. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia it must have raised the hackles of the Czechs in our midst.
A good friend of our family, Ludwig Matiscek, came from the German-speaking area of that country, known as the Sudetenland, and I think he was happy to come under the aegis of the Fatherland.
Then I remember the concerned faces of my father and mother as they leaned towards our wooden radio cabinet to hear that France and Britain had declared war on Germany.
Though the country, led by Éamon de Valera, took a neutral stance, there was great uncertainty about what might happen. Fearing that a factory might be a target for bombing raids from either Britain or Germany, the Irish Sugar company built air-raid shelters behind our houses. They were small and murky and damp-smelling; ours soon filled up with water.
Of course, many of the several hundred Irishmen working in the factory joined the Local Defence Forces, a volunteer branch of the Irish Army.
One day there was some excitement when thousands of men were marshalled to conduct manoeuvres over the fields, scrubland and streams just north of us in the Kilbannon area. My father took us to the top of the lime-kiln in the factory from where we watched the distant movement of men and vehicles.
When our family left Tuam in 1942 the war had been raging for more than three years, with the German forces dominant. After that, the huge Soviet army went on the offensive and kept going until they put an end to Hitler’s evil regime.
We heard that Mrs Kaplan had a nervous breakdown when the Soviets entered her home city of Vienna, their undisciplined soldiers looting, raping and wrecking. We heard later that Mr Matiscek’s family had been chased out of Czechoslovakia, losing all they had.
After the war, some of the continentals visited their ravaged homelands to search for any relatives who might have survived. Many of the sugar beet plants there had been completely destroyed.
When the EU was established, primarily to prevent further wars in Europe, the sugar factories again thrived there. Years later, when an open market was introduced, their greater capacity and cost-effectiveness put an end to our own sugar industry. The factory in Tuam closed in 1987 and was later levelled to the ground. The houses are still there but the memory of the second World War in Airglooney is almost forgotten.