One reason for this was the unwillingness of an isolationist society to confront the fact that large numbers of its citizens had left to fight for another country. Another was the effectiveness of censorship during the war in excluding the volunteers from public knowledge. The Dublin Evening Mail ran into trouble with the censors in September 1939 when it published a recruiting notice for the Irish Guards and an appeal from the British Legion. The following year the Irish Independent was ordered to submit all copy before publication when it published a photograph of an Irishman in British Army uniform. In 1943 the editor of the Drogheda Independent remarked on the problems of policing material on the volunteer:

So many people in my circulation area are either dying for foreign powers or marrying other people who are preparing to die for foreign powers or are having christened the children of people who are feared to have been lost in service of foreign powers, i have to be continually on the lookout.

In effect, the censors wanted to exclude all matter that might suggest large numbers of Irish people were fighting in the British forces or that there was sympathy for the British cause. De Valera expressed his unease at the prospect of large numbers of Irish citizens returning to Eire in British army uniforms to Maffey at a meeting in October 1939. When Maffey responded that the military authorities in Britain would have difficulty providing their personnel with civilian clothing, de Valera suggested that an overcoat covering the uniform would prove adequate. He then recounted a story about a visit he had received from a friend then serving on the Western Front during the First World War. De Valera had given his own greatcoat to the individual, who was then smuggled out of the Irish leader's home. While the British did attempt to deal with this problem by providing clothes depots for Irish military personnel, the system did not always work nor did some Irish servicemen want to accept the restriction on wearing uniforms in Ireland. Some of those interviewed by the Volunteers project mentioned the uniform issue, and while all were aware of the clothes depots not all used them. Martin Lynch returned to Limerick on leave and wore his British uniform without incident there. Others were not as lucky; James Farnan recounted how while coming out of mass he was told not to wear his uniform by the local Gardai ( Police ) Though warned not to wear it again he continued to do so; indeed he was married in his uniform shortly after this and continued to wear it while on honeymoon in Kilkenny. Brian Bollingbrooke recalled that when one of his friends was to be married in Ireland all those who returned for the wedding smuggled their uniforms in with them and wore them at the ceremony. Clearly there were differences between the official position and day-to-day experience in various parts of Ireland. Nevertheless, the Irish government was extremely sensitive to public expressions of pro-British sentiment of which this was the most tangible. As in other areas of public life censorship was applied with draconian vigour to the volunteers. Restrictions were placed on death notices for Eire citizens killed fighting in the war, but these did not satisfy Aiken, who decided in 1941 that ' the time has come to stop all this business '. Aiken's decision effectively prohibited all information concerning Irish deaths in combat. At first it was permissible to publish information on cause of death, rank and regiment for individuals with addresses in Britain, but not for those with homes in Eire. However, even this was prohibited when it was discovered that many families were publishing two death notices, one with a British address containing all the military details and the other with an Irish address duly sanitized. From May 1943 all newspapers were prohibited from publishing any information in a death notice that alerted readers to the individual's involvement in the war. Aiken personally made some exceptions for political reasons, but in effect those who volunteered and died had entered a shadowy world from which they never reappeared. The restrictions could have comic as well as tragic aspects to them. One item that irritated the censor read, " The many friends of Mr John A. Robinson, who was involved in a recent boating accident, will be pleased to hear that he is alive and well . . . He is a particularly good swimmer and it is possible that he owes his life to this accomplishment. " Robinson had been an Irish Times employee but joined the Royal Navy. In December 1941 his ship the Princess of Wales had been sunk, and his survival could only be reported in this indirect fashion. Even then, the censors were appalled and complianed bitterly to the editor of the Irish Times about the impact of the item. For this and other misdeeds the newspaper was ordered to submit all copy prior to publication from the end of December 1942 until the war ended. The tragic consequences of this policy can be appreciated in the correspondence between Lady Gore-Booth and Independent Newpapers Ltd concerning an obituary for her son Hugh, killed in action in 1944. The censors would not permit the inclusion of the phrase ' killed in Leros ' so his mother had to amend the text. The sanitized version appeared in the Sligo Independent, his local newspaper, and it defies belief that anyone reading it would not have been aware that Hugh had been killed on active duty. By prohibiting the place and cause of death the censor was in a way excising a part of Ireland that he and his minister were uneasy about. His mother described Hugh Gore-Booth in the obituary as follows:

He was at heart Irish to the core, and not in any narrowly accepted sense or form any dogmatical or doctrinaire point of view, or based on set views. By birth baptised Church of Ireland, he was however persuaded by the plain and puritan form of Presbyterianism, which fact may have been the result of his sojourn and contact with the Scots. However he was a Gael too ( it had grown into his blood ) and an Irish speaker. In no way could he be more happy than by spending his holidays in the Gaeltacht of his native Connaught and in the south west of Ireland. By his death we have lost the kind of man we can ill afford to lose and Ireland has lost one of her sons in whom the Irish spirit of thirst for adventure, romance and love of knowledge was traditionally exemplified.

It is probable that Aiken and Coyne were unable to appreciate the complexity of an identity such as this and therefore failed to nuture it as a more sophisticated society might have done. Aiken defended his policy on the grounds that publication of details which alerted readers to a deceased's involvement in the war would threaten Irish neutrality, though he also questioned the motives of those wanting to put in such information.

Defence Minister Frank Aiken, who had a similar political background to De Valera.

The censors maintained that publication would lead to serious breaches of public order, though why this might be the case is never clearly explained. More telling is the view expressed by Coyne to one journalist: that those who volunteered had not done so for moral or idealistic reasons but were in fact mercenaries. This is a view difficult to sustain given that individuals could earn a lot more working in British war industries than risking their lives fighting in North Africa or Italy. However, it is a view consistent with Irish nationalism's belief that those who joined the British forces did so for reasons other than well-intentioned ones. The majority of those interviewed by the Volunteer project confirmed that there were many and complex reasons for volunteering. Those who deserted from the Irish armed forces to do so were vigorously pursued. The Irish government took the decision, apparently prompted by de Valera, to distinguish between those who had deserted and remained in Ireland and those who joined the British war effort. The latter were to be treated more harshly by the authorities; indeed their punishment was taken out of the hands of the military and brought under the Emergency Powers legislation. . .