Madam, - While Diarmaid Ferriter (Opinion, January 29th) argues that apologies for the past are not the answer, Colin Armstrong (February 7th) still demands that President McAleese should apologise for her long-deceased predecessor. It was on the very occasion of his death on August 29th, 1975 that I myself publicly condemned de Valera for his expression of condolences to the German minister 30 years previously.
However, my intervention was not at all welcomed by the Irish Jewish community.
Too young to have lived through either the 1930s or the War years, I was viewed as having failed to appreciate the overriding significance of the fact that Ireland's 1937 Constitution had so pointedly swum against the tide of European anti-Semitism sweeping westwards from Poland through Germany, that de Valera had insisted on it giving expressed recognition to the Jewish community as an integral part of Irish society.
There was no hint of apology-seeking in the special synagogue service which that community held in honour of the former Taoiseach and President's memory on September 2nd, 1975. But this was not due to any timidity or diplomatic reluctance to speak ill of such a statesman within a week of his death. For de Valera's wartime policy had not at all been passed over in silence. It had in fact been explicitly exonerated.
Having praised de Valera's lifelong friendship with the Jewish community, the Chief Rabbi of Ireland, the Very Rev Dr Isaac Cohen, referred to the inevitability of a policy that had been "restrained and restricted during the War, owing essentially to historic developments which were part of the long bitterness of the Irish struggle".
The logic of the present spate of calls for apologies to be made for de Valera would be to further demand that the Jewish Representative Council should offer me an apology for the late Rabbi Cohen's failure to endorse my condemnation of the former Taoiseach's wartime actions. What utter nonsense!
Having had a good 30 years to reflect on the matter, I have come to the conclusion that Dr Cohen had indeed been quite correct, and that I myself had been very much mistaken in further condemning the late Chief Rabbi for such a forthright defence of de Valera's wartime neutrality. - Yours, etc.,
MANUS O'RIORDAN, Finglas Road, Dublin 11.