The historian, Liam Kennedy, invented the acronym MOPE, or Most Oppressed People Ever, to sum up nationalist Ireland’s exaggerated sense of victimhood. In his book, Unhappy the Land, he set out the scale of Irish self-pity, but perhaps more impressive is the country’s success in persuading the rest of the world, and even the rest of the British Isles, that its grievances are genuine.

That accomplishment is now under threat, thanks to the Republic’s one-sided view of the war in Gaza.

In December, the Israeli government closed its embassy in Dublin, in protest against Ireland’s “extreme anti-Israel” policies. Some observers linked this development to a long-standing tradition of Irish antisemitism. And to support that argument, they cited Ireland’s less than blameless conduct during the Second World War.

In that conflict, the southern state remained neutral and its prime minister (or Taoiseach), Eamon De Valera, infamously visited the German embassy to extend Ireland’s condolences for Hitler’s death.

This spotlight on inconvenient aspects of Irish history created a furious and sanctimonious response on social media. On X, “author and historian” John Crotty alleged Ireland’s critics were drawing on “80 year old anti-Irish slurs and 20th century thinking”. Another tweeter, Ger Browne, claimed that, whilst the world should thank Ireland for its role in the war, “ignorance, prejudice and poor education” meant it gave back “only insults”. 

The denialists imply the southern Irish state was forced to stay neutral. That view is not shared by eminent historians

These outbursts suggested an undimmed persecution complex, but what else can we tell from Irish neutrality denialism? 

Southern Irish soldiers certainly played a valuable role in the Second World War and their sacrifice should be recognised. The historian, Geoffrey Roberts, estimated that 70,000 citizens of the Irish Free State served in the British armed forces between 1939 and 1945, suffering 5,000 fatalities. The idea that these servicemen were treated with the respect and gratitude they deserved, when they came back home, is less convincing. 

During the war, newspapers in Ireland were prevented from posting death notices for the Irish fallen, or reporting on the emerging facts about the Holocaust, thanks to the government’s policy of “neutralisation”. To protect Dublin’s impartiality, De Valera’s administration censored information about Nazism, so that readers could not draw moral distinctions between the policies of Hitler’s Germany and those of the Allies.

When they returned, men who had deserted the Irish Army to fight for Europe’s freedom in British regiments were not given an amnesty. The journalist, Kevin Myers, wrote that they were subjected instead to the “largest arrest operations since the civil war”. The southern state could not cope with the logistics of prosecuting these servicemen “as they deserved”, to quote Ireland’s then Minister of Defence. So, thousands were denied pensions, public sector jobs and unemployment benefits. They were treated, in Myers’ words, as “non persons”.

The denialists implied that the southern Irish state was forced to stay neutral to defend its fragile independence. By this telling, its government was behind the Allies in spirit but could not compromise its existence or set aside its experiences of British colonialism, for fear of risking invasion. That view is not shared by other, eminent historians.

In Paul Bew’s Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, he suggested that “the self-referential culture of Irish nationalism was ill-equipped to rise to the moral challenges of world war”. In other words, many of the “most oppressed people” were incapable of accepting that Jews in the 1940s were suffering more than them. On 1 July 1943, the Irish Press newspaper wrote that, “There is no kind of oppression visited on any minority in Europe which the six-county nationalists have not also endured”.

When the Sunday Independent covered the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after the war, Eamon de Valera denounced the report as “anti-national propaganda”. Even more damningly, in Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, Henry Patterson cited evidence that senior figures in the Irish government contacted Berlin in 1940, asking for assurances that it supported, “an entirely independent united Irish state”. The Germans believed that Cardinal Macrory, the Archbishop of Armagh and leader of Ireland’s Catholics at the time, favoured an invasion (by Germany), “to end partition”.

There were many Irish republicans, including some in the highest echelons of the southern establishment, who followed the old principle that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity. Their anti-British prejudices often trumped any commitments to Europe’s freedom or concerns about Hitler’s treatment of Jews.

The IRA’s Chief of Staff, Sean Russell, forged an alliance with the German High Command during the late 1930s and his organisation described the Nazis as “friends and liberators of the Irish people”. The historian, Brian Hanley, explained The IRA’s support for Germany as a combination of practicality and desperation. But he also pointed out that revelations about the Nazis’ crimes did not prevent a statue of Russell, which still stands today, from being erected in a Dublin park as late as 1954.

The subtleties of Irish separatist self-obsession and self-pity have changed since the 1940s, but many of the essentials remain the same. In Unhappy the Land, Kennedy devoted two lengthy chapters to debunking claims that the Irish famine of 1845 could be described as “genocide” or compared to the Holocaust. Now, the same libel is levelled repeatedly at Israel’s conduct in Palestine.

Irish nationalists’ obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be explained more by solipsism than empathy. Their hackneyed rhetoric about colonialism and settlers has a different target in mind and it is much closer to home. The British authorities could do with remembering that, the next time they accept self-righteous lectures from Dublin on our own past.