In a disagreeable letter to this newspaper last week, a Mr Art O Laoghaire complained about Irish Times columnists "criticising all and sundry in this country for not doing more to accommodate Jews wishing to enter here before the war". He claimed that when the Chief Rabbi was seeking permits for six or seven Jewish doctors in October 1938, the same number of Irish doctors were leaving each day - which suggests that Ireland was over-producing medical graduates at a rate of 2,500 per year. Unlikely, somehow.
To be sure, the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, could not at the time have foreseen the Holocaust, and there might indeed have been grounds for his refusal of the permits There are none for what he did in 1945, when, as his censors were preventing Irish newspapers reporting what he and the rest of the world were discovering about the death camps, he offered his condolences on the death of Hitler. If we in this newspaper feel a particular unease about the conduct of the Irish government over the Holocaust, de Valera's contemptible deed provides an explanation.
Precedent
Yet it has to be said that Ireland's effective refusal to accept any Jewish refugees before the war was merely an extreme version of what was happening elsewhere. All countries limited the numbers of Jews they would accept, and understandably at the time. Would it not set a terrible precedent to states containing despised minorities if other countries willingly and automatically gave those minorities homes? Would not virtually every country in Africa today settle for that solution to its tribal problems?
However, that theoretical fear of setting a precedent must be set against the stark reality of Nazi deeds. In October 1938, with 150,000 Jews already having already fled the Third Reich, another 18,000 were summarily expelled from the newly annexed Sudetenland. On November 9th, Krystallnacht, nearly 100 Jews were murdered, and 30,000 were thrown into concentration camps, where a thousand of them were to die. Three days later, by public promulgation, German Jewry was fined 1,000 million marks. Three days later again, all Jewish children were expelled from German schools.
On January 30th 1939, Hitler announced that, in the eventuality of war, the Jews of Europe would be exterminated. Not merely was this promise broadcast live on radio in Germany, but it was reported across Europe. This newspaper, on January 31st, reproduced the speech over two pages, beneath a subordinate headline: "Annihilation of Whole Jewish Race In Europe."
Real question
So the "We didn't have a clue" excuse won't wash. The real question about the Irish response to the plight of the Jews is: Given what the government of the time knew, and given the economic contraints upon it, did it do enough? Since we did nothing, the answer is clearly no. But, relatively speaking, this is true for countries everywhere, all of which feared that an open-door policy would enable the Nazis to solve their "Jewish problem" the cheap way.
Indeed, Hitler said as much in his speech of 1939: "It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people, but remains hard-hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them, which is surely, in view of its attitude, an obvious duty."
Hitler's sarcasm aside, clearly no country felt that duty. And what country, faced with a comparable moral dilemma today, would behave differently? If we were told that the Hutus of Rwanda would be murdered unless we in Ireland gave them all refuge, and we believed whatever madman running that country was capable of genocide, who in authority would seriously propose that we take in the entire population under threat? No one. So what proportion should we take in? And what moral responsibility would we have for the fate of those who were murdered because we refused them sanctuary?
This is why things like Holocaust Day, H-Day, now officially recognised in Britain and Sweden, make me deeply uncomfortable. Such a day enables the publicly sanctimonious to say, "Never again". But we all know such words are meaningless. Though the Holocaust was unique in the organised and sustained evil which made it possible, in terms of mass butchery or genocide it was by no means unprecedented or unrepeated.
There have been many human exterminations down the centuries. The original Caribs, Tasmanians and Prussians are extinct, largely murdered. Massacres, many forgotten, occurred throughout the last century, beginning with the German extermination of the Herero population in South West Africa. Similarly forgotten is the slaughter of some 200,000 defenceless Ottoman Muslims by invading Armenian armies between 1914 and 1917. But the deaths by murder and starvation in 1915 of 600,000 Armenians - often by Kurds, though Turks are invariably blamed - are remembered.
Khmer Rouge
Stalin murdered more people than died in the Holocaust. Mao murdered more than Hitler and Stalin combined. More recently, the Khmer Rouge murdered millions without anyone stopping them. Comparable massacres have bedecked Africa for the past 50 years. Perhaps 1 million Japanese and half-a-million Germans were killed by the RAF and USAAF, and 1 million North Koreans and 1 million Vietnamese civilians were killed by the USAF. So a Holocaust-Day determination never to allow another Holocaust is meaningless, simply because such a holocaust is simply unrepeatable. But states or tribes will almost certainly engage in fresh forms of mass murder sufficiently different in detail from their predecessors to enable the world to find a small-print excuse for not intervening. H-Day could too easily stand for Humbug Day.