World War At Home - Northern Ireland
Listen to the stories in full from February 24th on your local BBC radio station or by visiting www.bbc.co.uk/ww1
The Garda Training College in Templemore, Co Tipperary housed some of the first German POWs shortly after the opening shots of the First World War were fired.
Today Templemore Barracks is famed for being the training college of the Irish Police Force, the Garda Siochana, but for six months from September 1914 to March 1915 it housed over two thousand military prisoners in makeshift camps.
And while the Western Front was seeing its own truces over Christmas 1914, in Tipperary the locals and POWs exchanged gifts through barbed wire fences as the Germans sang carols in their native tongue.
