Stuart has confronted outcome of his actions

Some years ago, when I was talking to the writer Francis Stuart, he mentioned, as I thought, that he had met Pol Pot in Paris. It struck me with appalling force that he would have, wouldn't he? As a notorious collaborator with one gang of genocidal maniacs, the Nazis, there seemed to be no reason why the subject of last week's debates at Aosdana should not be on good terms with another, the Khmer Rouge.

After a second or two, reason returned and I realised he was talking about a minor Irish writer, Paul Potts. But that's the thing about Stuart. Once you know the company he kept during the war, you are inclined to hear whatever he says as further proof of his guilt.

I'm all for engaging with past deeds but I find the recent rhetorical onslaughts on Stuart disturbing. Scapegoating, the loading of a society's sins on to a sacrificial victim, is not much nicer when practised by anti-Nazis than it was when the Nazis did it.

As a child, I lived literally over the wall from the Dolphin's Barn Jewish cemetery in Dublin. Looking at the small, neatly arranged graves, we told ourselves that the Jews were so mean they buried their dead standing up in order to save space.

We told grim stories about what would happen if you dared to enter the nearby synagogue. We laughed at the ridiculous names over the kosher butcher shops on Clanbrassil Street. When members of the Jewish community visited their dead on Saturdays, we thought nothing of extorting money from them to "mind" their cars. They were outsiders, visitors to our territory merely on sufferance.

We partook, in other words, of the casual, low-level anti-Semitism common in most European societies before the Holocaust. Only this was a good two decades after the Holocaust. That monumental moral disaster had done nothing to alter the climate. The broad, casual contempt for Jews which existed in the popular consciousness of Christian Europe for centuries was, in Ireland, unaltered.

I'm not suggesting that conscious anti-Semitism was indulged in by a majority of Irish people in the 1960s, merely that no very profound change had occurred in the persistent sub-stratum of unconscious prejudice. The horror of what had happened in their societies under Hitler, and to a lesser extent Mussolini, forced most of our European neighbours at least to acknowledge the profound implications of their attitudes to the Jews.

Our isolation during the war and the Holocaust saved us from such reflections. Only a handful of Irish intellectuals, such as the playwrights Denis Johnston and Samuel Beckett and the essayist Hubert Butler, had direct experience of fascism. Francis Stuart was one of them.

Stuart was undeniably a Nazi collaborator. And he did, in his broadcasts to Ireland from Hitler's Germany, use coded anti-Semitic phrases. He made pointed references to the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Bob Briscoe, who was Jewish. He talked about international cabals of bankers and financiers, a conspiracy theory whose meaning, in the context of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the torrent of fascist abuse of Jews, was unmistakable.

None of that was, is, or ever will be excusable. And attempts by friends of Stuart's like Anthony Cronin to excuse it on the basis that Stuart was an innocent, or that his talks were unpolitical, confuse the issue. The savage repression of Jews, even before the Holocaust began, was open, public and impossible for an intelligent resident of Berlin to miss. And there were, as I said, anti-Semitic elements to the broadcasts.

But Stuart was, in the overall scheme of things, a very minor figure. If we want to talk about Irish guilt regarding Nazism and the Holocaust, there are more obvious places to begin.

Arthur Griffith published anti-Semitic tracts. The IRA declared war on embattled Britain and collaborated at the very highest level with the Nazis. Senior officials in the Department of Justice, during and after the Holocaust, successfully opposed efforts by Jewish refugees to seek sanctuary in Ireland. Some officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs, most notoriously Charles Bewley, were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler.

In the State and even in the church, there were people who defended Nazi collaborators. Fine Gael's James Dillon, when he was minister for agriculture, urged law students to model themselves on Archbishop Stepinac and Ante Pavelitch who "so gallantly defended freedom of thought and freedom of conscience" in wartime Yugoslavia. The latter had run Croatia for the Nazis, slaughtering Jews and Serbs in the process. The former had supported him.

Moreover, Andrija Artukovitch, minister for the interior in the Nazi puppet government in Croatia, escaped justice for his involvement in horrendous war crimes when he was smuggled into Ireland in 1947 with the help of the Franciscans. He stayed for a year and then entered America on Irish identity papers. While in Dublin, he lived, ironically, on Zion Road.

The difference between Francis Stuart and all of these other collaborators is that he, at least, engaged with the consequences of his actions. Other writers who had been drawn to right-wing totalitarianism and then become disillusioned with it - W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, for example - took refuge in an artistic flight from reality. Stuart's work, after the war, became infinitely more real.

HE moved towards, not away from, the terrain of his shame. War-time Germany, murder, violence, guilt and redemption became his subjects. Instead of hiding himself behind his books, he made himself the subject of his novels, especially in his most important work, Black List, Section H. He presented himself to his readers.

And remember, it is as a writer that Stuart is important. As a political figure he is negligible. We are discussing him only because of his postwar novels, and in those novels he is, at the very least, a man exposing his past.

Who else, in a society with comparably guilty people at many levels, has done anything like this? Does Fine Gael, when it commemorates Arthur Griffith, draw attention to his anti-Semitism? Did the Department of Foreign Affairs publish a report on fascist sympathisers in its ranks?

Did the Department of Justice issue a detailed explanation of policies that let Jews die rather than allow them into holy Catholic Ireland? Does the IRA go around telling us about its pro-Nazi activities? Has anyone other than the writer Hubert Butler, vilified at the time for his impertinence, asked any questions about how a war criminal like Artukovitch was given shelter and comfort by Church and State?

And yet, ask anyone about Irish collaborators and, if they have anything at all to say, it will probably be "Francis Stuart". It is some trick to take the one person who has had the guts to acknowledge the awkward truth and make him the scapegoat for a much broader malaise. But it's a trick that we have, over many years, practised to perfection.