Ireland's attitude to Jews in the 1940s continues to stir up controversy in advance of Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow, writes Jon Ihle.
Two years ago, the winds of history kicked up a perfect storm of Holocaust controversy when the President, Mary McAleese, in an interview with RTÉ radio, let drop the infelicitous comparison between the prejudice towards Catholics in Northern Ireland and attitudes towards Jews in Nazi Germany.
That she made the remark from Auschwitz, at a forum commemorating the liberation of the concentration camp 60 years earlier, at which she had already declined to apologise for Éamon de Valera's infamous condolence visit to the German legation upon the news of Hitler's death, only made the gale swirl more ferociously around the vortex.
It seemed our head of State, while not quite prepared to accept a measure of responsibility for Europe's greatest moral catastrophe, was nonetheless content to leverage its cosmic resonance to advance utterly parochial concerns. That ill breeze is blowing stiffly again this month, as tomorrow's national Holocaust Memorial Day has been heralded already this month by two associated occurrences: the death of Terry Samuels, the first among Ireland's tiny contingent of Holocaust survivors, and the broadcast of Cathal O'Shannon's much-debated RTÉ documentary, Ireland's Nazis.
Samuels's death reminds us that the Holocaust is passing from living memory; Ireland's Nazis showed us how the trauma lives on. As William Faulkner famously wrote of the American civil war: "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past". There was a certain defensiveness in some of the reaction to O'Shannon's documentary that was perhaps more revealing than the work itself.
One leading member of Dublin's Jewish community told The Irish Times how a nun had said she felt sorry - not that such things had happened, but that it had to come out at this stage. "I felt the opposite," she said. "I didn't realise how much collusion, blindness and indifference there was to what the Nazis had done."
Confronted with the fact that Ireland had been more hospitable to Nazi sympathisers after the war than it had been to Jews, some of us preferred to extend our holiday from history. The arguments were familiar: the war had nothing to do with us; we were neutral; the Constitution recognised Jews as Irish; the Allies also committed atrocities (Dresden, etc); Flemish, Croatian and Breton SS members were just nationalists who, like us, suffered as oppressed minorities.
Indeed, it's easy to see why this rationale has proven so attractive. The social conditions that prevailed in Ireland - devout Catholicism, ethnic nationalism, unresolved sectarian conflict - were similar to what the Nazis found and used to their advantage in Flanders, Croatia and Brittany.
Crucially, Ireland lacked the reagent of Nazi occupation to activate any latent fascist or anti-Semitic tendencies. Perhaps what cut so close in O'Shannon's documentary was the suggestion that, no, Ireland wasn't all that different from other European countries' people, whose moral fibre snapped at just a slight tug from Hitler's grasp.
But has Ireland revised its position on the chief questions of the 1930s and 1940s in the decades since? "It's not just that we took a holiday from history then, it's that we've taken one ever since," said Rory Miller, an Irish historian who has written on the Holocaust.
"Sure, we didn't kill anyone, but because we feel so righteous, we don't see that we didn't save anyone either." This problem - that not only did Ireland fail to live up to its virtuous self-image, but that its virtuous self-image hasn't experienced a revision as a result - has troubled other observers, too.
"Our reluctance to challenge our standards and examine our defects is similar to our reluctance to confront the truth about the Magdalene laundries or paedophile priests," said Raphael Siev, curator of the Irish Jewish Museum. "We are not saints and scholars, we are ordinary people with faults and flaws." De Valera's scrupulous but obtuse neutrality and SeáLemass's discredited economic nationalism - which combined to keep Jewish refugees from reaching Irish shores - have certainly been discarded by the Irish political class. The Catholic Judeophobia evidenced in department of justice memos of the time has also been mostly jettisoned from Irish culture. Yet when it has come to demonstrating a proactive willingness to engage the ambiguities of Ireland's conduct with respect to the second World War, the record is less assuring.
Despite being a signatory to the Stockholm Declaration on the Holocaust in 2000, Ireland was one of the last European countries to institute a national Holocaust memorial day. The first was held in 2003, largely as a result of lobbying from an ad hoc committee.
Discounting Jewish religious memorials, there is only one monument to the Holocaust in Ireland - in Listowel. There is also one monument to Seán Russell, the IRA chief of staff who died on a Nazi submarine.
"There's a sense that our hands are clean, but that's a superficial consolation," said Oliver Donohoe, education and information office for the Holocaust Educational Trust of Ireland. "You had people signing the declaration, but very little happening on the ground." Michael McDowell's address at the first Irish Holocaust Memorial Day went some way towards bridging the gap between statement and action, as he acknowledged that Ireland had betrayed its own Constitution in failing to protect Jews.
But the fact remains that up to 200 Nazi sympathisers, according to O'Shannon's research, either settled in or passed through Ireland after the war - substantially more than the estimated 30 Jews given a permanent asylum here between 1933 and 1946. That's the past that is living with us today.