Dublin referred to the Second World War as the Emergency, but, when applied to the minorities, even this concise and elegant understatement deserves a question mark, partly because for many Éire citizens the war was a time of opportunities and partly because their response to the war was largely a matter of individual choice. The chapter first discusses aspects of the ‘pro-fascism’ allegedly shared by the Protestant middle classes at the beginning of the war and then moves to the way the war encouraged a rethinking of British values as universal liberal principles. It contrasts such lofty rhetoric with the response of the Loyal Orange Institute in the three Ulster counties of Éire, suggesting that the turn to democracy owed more to tactical choices than conviction politics. What turned out to be permanent, however, was a tendency to articulate minority issues as either Irish concerns or universal claims. A parallel development took place within the Dublin Jewish community from the end of 1944, as the ‘old acquaintance’ with Britain was rapidly forgotten, and Zionism emerged as – simultaneously – more Irish and more self-confidently aligned with the nascent Israeli state.