The IRA provided the Nazis with the military intelligence to carry out bombing raids on Belfast in 1941, a Channel 4 documentary, broadcast last night, claimed.
The programme, Witness: A Great Hatred, charted the IRA's "collaboration" with the Nazis. It was based on the confession of a former IRA member who claimed he gathered information on targets in Belfast ahead of four Luftwaffe raids on the city. The bombing raids in April 1941 killed 1,100 people and another 25,000 people were left homeless.
Mr Sam McAughtry, a former member of the Seanad, who served in the British Royal Air Force during the second World War, discussed the claims of the former IRA member, who did not appear in the programme, saying: "I regard his evidence as perfectly true." The Luftwaffe needed the facts on its Belfast targets for bombing raids and Mr McAughtry said "there is not much doubt about it" that the IRA contact was used as a conduit with the German legation in Dublin to pass military information to the Nazis.
An extract from the confession of the IRA member was read during the programme. He had written: "I am ashamed of being involved in a movement that allied itself with Nazi Germany."
The journalist, Mr Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose Jewish ancestors left Ireland after the Limerick anti-Jewish attacks of 1904, investigated what he described as Sinn Fein's "intolerant culture" from the early part of the century to the present day. The party's "hatred" of "aliens", he said, continued to this day in its sectarian vision of a Gaelic, Catholic 32-county state.
Ms Elizabeth Clissman, a republican sympathiser who worked with the Nazis against the British, said the "very strong conviction" of Irish nationalists at the time was that an alliance with the Nazis was the only means of defeating the British.