The Irish had the same democratic rights as everyone else in Britain. Irishman were bundled off to Australia for political activities,

The Irish did NOT have any democratic rights from the mid 1600's when Cromwell invaded until 1930-ish when they won their independence (at the cost of thousands of lives lost and tens of thousands Transported - the GHreat Hunger death toll excluded)

The song :"The Wearing of the Green" was written to tell the world of the law passed in Ireland (around the time of Culloden in Scotland) which forbade the wearing anything green as a display of "Irishism" - the perpetrators were immediately gaoled and transported for the offence unless they or their family was known to the British Authorities, in which case; man, woman OR child - they were summarily executed - - - - without benefit of a trial.

Add to this the "Liberation of the death camps" Britain knew of Auschwitz before the war began and did nothing about it. The death camps were, in fact, liberated (approximately 95% of them, anyway) by the US and Russian forces - NOT the Brits.

Germany did not suffer during WW1 - their soldiers did at the front - but at home things were quite 'normal' - as they were in Britain. Germany did not actually suffer until AFTER the war in the ridiculous economic and political sanctions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles by the French and the British - a position the US President (?Wilson) fought to water down due to consequences he could see - the sanctions were designed to destroy Germany and fragment it and cripple it to the point that it would NEVER be in a position to threaten France or Britain again (apparently the Frogs deigned not to acknowledge that THEY had done the same thing the previous century under Napoleon without sanction)- the direct result of those sanctions was WW2 - which happened as it did because the Germans realised they had to cripple France & Britain to have any chance.

Finally - to the bombing again - BRITAIN was the first nation to bomb a city full of civilians when a bomber stream went off course early in WW2 and bombed Berlin. The Blitz was, in fact a retaliation for that action. Previously the Germans had confined their raids to military installations, radar installations and airfields.

I suggest you actually READ history instead of rendering your own anglophilic version of it. Nobody was mentioning MODERN Ireland. No-one - not even the Irish are saying the 20th Century was a time of oppression - they recall it as the century of LIBeration.

We were talking the whole time about 19th Century Ireland and the disastrous famine.

Your turnabout is puzzling - in one post you attack with profanity and belittlement and in the next you agree but push an outdated "Empire" barrow no-one (least of all a Scots-fathered, Irish convict-descended Australian) wants to hear about.

Hope this puts it all to bed.

Frankly, I'm not interested in warped and misrepresented WW2 history - especially as I am a WW2 scholar (among other things)

You ARE English, are you not?