"Paddy fait de la résistance". The Irish in the French Resistance and section F of SOE, 1940-1945 In 1941, the Irish Prime Minister, the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, sent a note to Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs to obtain an estimate of the number of Irish people who were in occupied France. The department estimated that there were between seven hundred and eight hundred who lived there. But, to this day, it has been possible to identify more than twenty Irish by birth who served during the war in support of the Resistance, the Free French Forces (FFL) or the SOE. All those who joined resistance groups in occupied France already lived there and worked there in 1940; adding to this is a certain number born in France or French territory, but ethnic Irish.