No laughing matter

A new documentary tells the story of Mayo-reared and Jesuit-educated William Joyce - aka Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw. Donald Clarke reports.

We have always been happy to embrace as our own certain notable Irish-born Anglos - Francis Bacon will do nicely, Iris Murdoch's books may sit in the domestic section of Hodges Figgis - while other, less lovely personalities, the location of their nativity deemed a mere accident of geography, have been retrospectively repatriated with unseemly enthusiasm. The Duke of Wellington, who famously quipped that being born in a stable does not make one a horse, is one such non-Irish Irishman. William Joyce, the Nazi propagandist whose wartime broadcasts to a beleaguered Britain induced equal amounts of disgust and hilarity, is another. The man dubbed Lord Haw Haw by the British press, an active supporter of the Black and Tans during the War of Independence and a psychotically naïve English nationalist, was never likely to become a hero in post-revolutionary Ireland.

"Yet, as director Brian Gilbert reveals in Hitler's Irishman, an engaging new documentary to be broadcast tomorrow night on RTÉ 1, Joyce, who grew up in Mayo, part of a belligerently unionist household, had his supporters in Ireland. In 1976 Lord Haw Haw's body, which had been dumped in an unmarked grave following his execution for treason, was brought to Galway and reburied in a small Catholic graveyard. During the ceremony, a BBC reporter dared to suggest that the deceased may have been a traitor. "He was an Irishman!" someone shouted from the crowd.

So did Joyce's broadcasts have a serious following here? "That would be exaggerating it," Gilbert says. "But he was listened to with great interest in the nationalist community. Mary Kenny, for example, has researched it and discovered that this is probably the case. But he was listened to with a guilty glee that had no great political basis." Kenny, whose book, Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, was published in 2003, appears in Hitler's Irishman to add colour to the film's picture of a violent, boozy man who, like many of his generation, saw fit to blame what he perceived to be the world's ills - economic depression, Irish nationalism, communism - on a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

Born in New York in 1906 to an Irish father and an English mother, Joyce grew up in Co Mayo and was educated at the Jesuit College of St Ignatius in Galway. The family was frequently the subject of attacks from republican groups and Mary Kenny has discovered that the IRA attempted to assassinate William, an alleged informer, when he was just 15. Joyce, his English nationalism spurred by such opposition, fled across the Irish Sea. Inevitably, he drifted towards the burgeoning fascist movement, and when the British Union of Fascists was set up in 1932 Joyce became an even more vigorous anti-Semite than the organisation's founder, Oswald Mosley. As war loomed, his face now carrying a horrendous scar inflicted during a street battle, Joyce decamped to Germany to avoid detainment.

How Joyce went from being a fervent patriot - albeit of a positively barmy calibre - to the most vocal Anglophone mouthpiece of Britain's enemy is a question the film has trouble answering. It seems he believed that to rediscover itself, to rid itself of decadence, Britain needed to be plunged into the purgatorial fire of military defeat (or some such Wagnerian hogwash). At any rate, he ended up being loathed by his own nation and, nearly 60 years after his death, remains the last man to be executed for treason in England.

Looking at Gilbert's impressive CV - he directed the film of Michael Hastings's play Tom & Viv and 1997's Wilde, starring Stephen Fry as the eponymous Oscar - it is tempting to draw parallels. Oscar Wilde was another Anglo-Irishman who appalled England before being convicted for his supposed sins.

"That connection shouldn't be stretched," Gilbert says. "But there is something there about the Irishman who becomes the scourge of the English. A more obvious connection is with [ Wilde's lover] Lord Alfred Douglas, who really became a sort of Haw Haw. He ended up drawing up this notorious black book full of dangerous homosexuals and Jews who were working for the Germans."

Gilbert, a Londoner with a degree in English from Oxford, had long planned to tell Haw Haw's story in a dramatic feature and, some years back, bought the rights to JA Cole's 1964 biography of the traitor. Then the director's daughter Virginia, who works for the Irish production company Fastnet Films, found herself scouting around for a documentary project.

"She went to Trinity and has always been very interested in film. She worked on my film of Tom & Viv when she was very young and has always had a genuine practical interest. So when she was trying to put a slate together, she thought of me." Virginia ended up producing Hitler's Irishman. So how was it having his own daughter as a boss? He pauses and laughs. "I did have my concerns about that, but I have to say it all worked out very nicely."

Hitler's Irishman is on RTÉ 1 at 10.30pm tomorrow