His master's voice

Those who worry that everything that makes Ireland different is being submerged in the flood tide of global modernity, may find some comfort in the persistence of at least one mark of cultural distinctiveness. Nowhere else in Europe, perhaps in the world, would it be possible to debate the cultural legacy of fascism, Nazism and collaboration with such wilful ignorance and such intellectual laziness as it is in this country. Anywhere else, the debate that broke out among leading members of the intelligentsia in 1996 when Francis Stuart was elected to the honorific position of Saoi of Aosdana would be a serious business. The question of whether or not a leading novelist like Stuart was a Nazi collaborator during the second World War would be answered by reference to his writings and, in particular, his radio broadcasts from Berlin.

Yet it has taken Brendan Barrington's superbly scholarly edition of Stuart's broadcasts to show us how such crucial moral and cultural debates ought to be conducted: calmly, rigorously and on the basis of real evidence. If Stuart comes badly out of this fascinating book, the polemicists on either side of the debate that raged around him don't emerge with much credit either. As Barrington writes in his long, authoritative and brilliantly argued introduction, "the debate was incoherent on the level of fact: accurate information about Stuart's collaboration with the Nazis . . . was scarce, and a number of old myths and red herrings resurfaced . . . Through it all, hardly anyone seemed to have any idea of what Stuart had actually said over the German airwaves."

Greatly to the credit of Stuart's literary executor, Paul Durcan, Barrington has been allowed to publish the full texts of those broadcasts, garnered from the transcripts kept by Irish military intelligence and, to a lesser extent, from the BBC's monitoring reports. In addition, his introduction deals extensively with Stuart's pre-war fiction and non-fiction work insofar as it bears on his attitudes both to the Jews and to the Nazis. Taken together, this evidence completely and irrefutably demolishes the myth that Stuart and many of his defenders attempted to sustain: that he was a political innocent with no sympathy for the Nazis, who merely broadcast some mild talks on cultural and literary matters.

Barrington starts with a Lecture on Nationality and Culture, written by Stuart and published by Sinn Fein in 1924. In it Stuart urged on Ireland the example of Austria a few years before: "At that time Vienna was full of Jews, who controlled the banks and factories and even a large part of the government; the Austrians themselves seemed about to be driven out of their own city." Stuart compared Austria's need to rid itself of Jewish influence with Ireland's need to overcome British domination. That this attraction to the emerging far-right movements in Europe was no momentary fad is clear from Stuart's 1933 novel Try the Sky, which has a sympathetic portrayal of brown shirt thugs fighting on the streets.

Anyone tempted to take refuge in the notion that this was, after all, a work of fiction rather than a self-conscious political identification, can turn to the text of Stuart's broadcast from Berlin in November 1943: "I admired Hitler from the first days of power in Germany . . . In another book of mine . . . written in 1932 and published in New York and London in 1933, I described a clash between brown shirts and government forces in Munich, in which I did not hide my sympathies for the revolutionaries, as they then were. "

In any case, anyone who has been reading the broadcasts chronologically will by then be in no doubt that Stuart's role was that of an active Nazi propagandist. Though they are by no means rabid, and though they almost always avoid overt anti-Semitism, the talks are completely in accord with Nazi policy. That policy, after all, was to keep Ireland neutral, not to stir up a large pro-Hitler mass movement, which would merely have given the British and the Americans an excuse to invade. With the possible exception of refusing to abuse the Russians, for whom he retained an affection, Stuart does all that his masters can have desired.

The purpose of Nazi propaganda to Ireland would have been fourfold: to get the IRA to stir up trouble in the North; to soften up the Republic for a post-war future of German domination; to abuse the Allies and to sanitise their own actions. Each of these tasks, Stuart takes on with evident enthusiasm. As a fellow traveller of the most prominent group of Irish collaborators, the IRA, Stuart's constant calls for a United Ireland are par for the course. The other parts of his agenda involve a degree of hypocrisy that would be risible if it were not so nauseating.

The contradictions are gross. On the one hand, Stuart wants to share his passion for Hitler, for whom he declares himself "completely fired by enthusiasm" and whom he compares, grotesquely, to Parnell, Lincoln and, believe it or not, Gandhi. On the other, since he is speaking as a diehard Irish nationalist, he has to avoid the suggestion that he is urging the adoption of the Nazi model: "I do not say that Ireland should become a small replica of a National Socialist Germany."

Out of one side of his mouth, Stuart justifies the Nazi conquest of other European nations, retailing without irony the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum: "Germany . . . had too little living space for her population." Out of the other, he rails against British imperialism in Ireland and elsewhere. In the same breath, he is a virulent nationalist and an apologist for Germany's imperial campaigns. When he says that the attitude of ordinary Europeans is "Let these people stay in their own countries and look after their own affairs", "these people" are not the Nazi invaders but the Allies. While burning with indignation over English interference with Irish affairs, he talks blithely of "the former Poland, the former Czechoslovakia . . . now under German administration."

Through all of this double-speak, however, one theme is clear and consistent: Ireland must prepare to become a loyal member of Hitler's post-war international system. He uses codes, of course. Nations like Ireland "will have to live as members of a group or family . . . but with certain duties and responsibilities towards the family." Ireland will have to "take its place within the European system that is coming." We will have to educate ourselves on "the closeness of the ties between Ireland and Germany." Instead of identifying ourselves with "Chicago and Manchester corner boys", we should adore the brave, thoughtful German supermen who "can overcome all human limitations".

Does all of this vile propaganda make Stuart's post-war achievements as a novelist redundant? On the contrary, it makes those novels much more important. For thanks to Brendan Barrington's exemplary scholarship we can now see them as works of European significance: the attempts of a deeply implicated collaborator to cope imaginatively with the burden of guilt.

Fintan O Toole is an author and an Irish Times journalist