Let's do better than the indifference we showed during the Holocaust

The Archbishop of Armagh Seán Brady gave an interesting St Patrick's Day message recently.

"IT is also my hope that the recently announced forthcoming referendum to the Irish Constitution concerning the complex subject "of the constitutional right to Irish citizenship to children born on this island to parents who have no right of residence" and related matters, will be conducted in a tempered, compassionate and responsible manner."

It was a particularly appropriate message on that day on which people of Irish descent were celebrating their ancestry around the globe.

Most of the members of our own Government were celebrating with those people abroad. Irish emigrants have been allowed to make their mark in their adopted countries. They may not have always been welcome everywhere, but they were able to form new lives for themselves. In the last half-century descendants of Irish emigrants rose to become national leaders in various parts of the world.

These included people like Presidents John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in the United States; Prime Ministers Brian Mulroney of Canada; Jim "Spud" Bolger of New Zealand and Paul Keating of Australia, as well as President Charles de Gaulle of France, who had an Irish great-grandmother.

"Surely," the Archbishop said, "our centuries-long experience of being ourselves an emigrant people, should help shape our views towards emigration policy."

Our national experience may go back over the centuries, but it is an on- going thing. My maternal grandmother emigrated to the United States to pursue a career in nursing prior to the first world war. She married and reared her family there, but returned to retire in this country after almost 50 years. One of her sisters married and settled in South Africa and another in Australia. Both died in their adopted countries after full lives. Another sister spent some years nursing in England, but ended her days in this country.

How many people have similar stories in their own families? Irish emigration is still a living issue, as a great many people were compelled to emigrate during the 1980s. We were looking for special concessions for Irish emigrants to the United State by way of Donnelly and Morrison visas until no so long ago.

Although it may not be fashionable in these days to give the Christian Brothers any credit, I believe from my own experience that they deserve acclaim for providing an egalitarian education stressing that we are no better and no worse than anybody else. They also emphasised as a central tenet of true Christianity that people should behave towards others as they would wish the others to behave towards them. Maybe nobody can always live up to that Christian ideal, but we should try, because ultimately the alternative is anarchy.

This week witnessed the timely publication of a fascinating book on Irish relations with Germany between the two world wars. Dr Mervyn O'Driscoll of UCC brought out Ireland, Germany and the Nazis: Politics and Diplomacy, 1919-1939 (Four Courts Press) which, among many other things, casts a cold eye on this country's attitude towards the plight of Jewish people in Europe on the eve of the Holocaust.

On April 25, 1934 Georg von Dehn-Schmidt, the German Minister to Ireland, asked the Department of Justice to supply "the names and addresses of Marxist and Jewish organisations" in this country. The official who received the request was not amused.

"Hitler is apparently not satisfied with driving the Jews out of German," the official noted. "He wants to keep his eye on them in all parts of the world."

The request was refused, but our authorities essentially did nothing to help Jewish people. "Although overt anti-Semitism was untypical," Dr O'Driscoll concludes, "the Irish were indifferent to the Nazi persecution of the Jews and those fleeing the third Reich."

By 1938, Joseph P Walshe, the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, was anxious to learn how many Jewish people had managed to migrate to Ireland in recent years. He found that the total Jewish population of the country amounted to only 0.13%, and the tiny number represented by that statistic had only increased by 1.7% in the previous 10 years. Jewish immigration to this country was utterly insignificant, even if one were to assume that the total increase in the Jewish population resulted from immigration. The increase was just 0.002% an electricity blackout on a Saturday night could have more impact on the population growth.

Before allowing refugees into this country from the continent, the Irish authorities demanded an assurance that those people could support themselves and not become a burden on the state.

"A successful applicant in 1938 was typically wealthy, middle-aged or elderly, single from Austria, Roman Catholic and desiring to retire in peace to Ireland and not engage in employment," writes Dr O'Driscoll. "Only a few Viennese bankers and industrialists met the strict criterion of being Catholic, although possibly of Jewish descent, capable of supporting themselves comfortably without involvement in the economic life of the country."

The official attitude towards refugees was so hostile that the Irish Coordination Committee for Refugees was set up to moderate the callous hostility of the Departments of Justice and Industry and Commerce, but the new committee ruled that practicing Jews were ineligible for aid from Ireland. Jewish communities abroad were assumed to have sufficient resources to aid Jewish refugees.

"In practice, Jewish converts to Christianity, especially Catholicism, were favoured," Dr O'Driscoll observed.

Yet even this was positively liberal and tolerant in comparison with the attitude of the Irish minister to Germany Charles Bewley, who endorsed the most bigoted form of Nazi propaganda, which he justified as something that could be taken at face value. All Jews should be punished for the crimes of any Jewish person, in Bewley's demented view of the world.

In 1943 Oliver J Flanagan railed in the Dáil "against the Jews who crucified Our Saviour 1,900 years ago". He went on to compliment the Nazis for routing the Jews out of Germany, and he added that we should drive the Jews out of this country. (He later apologised for those comments).

The Holocaust was one of the greatest outrages against humanity in all recorded history. It was so bad that people living in the comparative sanity of this country should hardly be blamed for not anticipating the lunacy of Hitler, or his henchmen.

But the fact still remains that we sat by in mute indifference while the greatest outrage of modern times was being perpetrated, and we should learn from our mistakes. This country should use EU presidency to ensure the emigration debate does not "fall victim to scaremongering and myths," Archbishop Brady declared.

"The objective of our presidency should be to provide the most enlightened legislation possible and avoid a 'fortress Europe' mentality."

Justice Minister Michael McDowell has been articulate on the need for a wide range of reforms, but in terms of legislation he has provided more sound and fury than legislative action. Now he is moving to secure reform by denying citizenship to the most helpless new-born infants.

Could he have picked on a more defenceless category of people? If this is his sense of justice, then God help us all!