Free State used Nazi ruling to bar Jews

Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
Sunday December 8, 2002
The Observer

Ireland was still using the Nazis' racial criteria to keep Jews out of the State eight years after Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker.
A new book charting the history of racism in Ireland reveals fresh evidence of widespread anti-Semitism in the Free State before, during and after the Holocaust.

The book's author, Dr Bryan Fanning, has also found that Sean South, a republican icon killed during the IRA raid at Brookeborough police barracks on New Year's Eve 1957, belonged to the radical anti-Semitic religious group, Maria Duce.

Fanning has unearthed a memo from the Department of Justice in Dublin dated 23 February 1953, which argues that vetting refugees should be on a similar basis to that 'adopted for the admission of non-Ayran refugees' in 1938 and 1939. In his Racism and social change in the Republic of Ireland , Fanning says the definitions in the late 1930s were based on the Nazi racial laws in the Nuremberg decrees. The same act on which the exclusion of Jews was based is still in operation to keep out asylum-seekers today.

The 1953 memorandum makes a distinction between 'refugees of good character of Catholic and Christian religions' and Jewish refugees.

The civil servant who wrote the note concerning 10 applications from Jewish refugees for asylum depicted the eastern European Jews as a danger to the State.

'There is strong anti-Jewish feeling in this State which is particularly evident to the Alien Section of the Department of Justice,' the civil servant wrote. 'Sympathy for the Jews has not been particularly excited at the recent news that some thousands are fleeing westwards because of the recent round-up of communist Jews who had been prominent in Government and in government service in eastern European countries.'

Even a year after war, with the memory of the concentration camps fresh in the Irish public's consciousness, the Department of Justice was still vehemently opposed to Jews entering Ireland. In August 1946, Fanning says, the Minister of Justice refused to admit 100 Jewish orphans found at the Bergen-Belsen death camp.

One Irish historical figure comes out unscathed from charges of anti-Semitism - Eamon de Valera. It was de Valera's intervention that overturned the decision to block the orphans' entry. De Valera's 1936 Constitution guaranteed Jewish freedom of worship in Ireland.

But Jewish refugees still had to be admitted by stealth to protect de Valera from confrontations with anti-Semitic politicians such as the Independent TD Oliver J. Flanagan. In a speech to the Dail after the 1943 general election, Flanagan said: 'There is one thing that Germany did, and that was to rout the Jews out of their country. Until we rout the Jews out of this country it does not matter a hair's breadth what orders you make.' These views were far from unrepresentative, Fanning says.

Fanning rejects previous historians' assertions that Ireland's attitude to the Jews, particularly during the Second World War, was liberal. From the 1904 Limerick pogrom of Jews there was deep anti-Semitism, not only among politicians and clergy but also large sections of the public, he says.

'Prevailing anti-Semitism led to the Jews being identified as enemies of faith and fatherland. Discrimination against the Jews was perceived to be in the public interest. What is surprising is that the same racialist criteria were applied to Jewish refugees long after the Nazis were defeated and everyone in the world knew about the Holocaust,' Fanning says.

'Racism and social change in the Republic of Ireland' by Bryan Fanning is published by Manchester University Press.