Apart from the fact he was a Nazi collaborator
In Dublin, there is a place called Fairview Park, and in that park there is a statue of a man who died of a perforated ulcer in a German submarine. This is the kind of thing that happens in Ireland, a country where the dead are never really dead, and the history is always arriving late like a bus or a train. The statue is of a man called Seán Russell, once chief of staff of the IRA, who in 1940 spent a summer in a villa in the leafy Berlin suburb of Grunewald, being flattered by the attentions of the Nazi Reich. He was there to solicit German help for his war on Britain. The Germans, who were then occupied with other forms of barbaric enthusiasm, were happy to make the right noises and let him ask.
In the Irish Parliament this week, Micheál Martin rose to inform the leader of the opposition that the government would not be taking any “lectures” from Sinn Féin on foreign policy or neutrality. This is a time-honoured tradition of parliamentary declamation, in which one party says something the other party has been waiting all week to be offended by.
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