In Kerry, they are planning a £400,000 memorial to him, secure in the knowledge that he was a hero who saved the lives of an estimated 4,000 Allied prisoners of war and Jews from the Germans in Rome in 194344.
At the same time, a somewhat garbled CIA claim that he was a German spy has been highlighted by sections of the British media. The man in question is Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, known as the "Scarlet Pimpernel" of the Vatican. He was also an uncle of the former Supreme Court judge Mr Hugh O'Flaherty, who was embroiled in controversy following his nomination by the Government to the European Investment Bank.
The CIA claim has angered those behind the project to erect a bronze statue to this remarkable priest in Killarney - and, indeed, almost all who have studied his life and times. All the evidence suggests that, far from being a Nazi spy, he was held in contempt by the Germans, who threatened his life.
Grove of trees
Mgr O'Flaherty is already commemorated by a grove of trees of Italian origin in Killarney National Park. A plaque carries the wording: "To honour Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty (1898-1963). In Rome during World War II, he heroically served the cause of humanity."
Brendan Kennelly composed a short poem for the 1994 treeplanting ceremony, which read:
There is a tree called freedom and it grows
somewhere in the hearts of men.
Rain falls, ice freezes, wind blows,
the tree shivers, steadies itself again,
steadies itself like Hugh O'Flaherty's hand.
Mgr O'Flaherty's wartime exploits have been chronicled by a close associate, Lieut-Col Sam Deery, in his book The Rome Escape Line, and in a three-hour television film, The Scarlet and the Black, with Gregory Peck in the central role. The priest was also the subject of a This is Your Life BBC television programme in 1963.
Born in Lisrobin, Kiskeam, Co Cork, he grew up in Mangerton View, Killarney, where he was educated at the Presentation Brothers and St Brendan's College before studying to be a teacher at the De La Salle Brothers training college in Waterford. He studied for the South African missions with the Jesuits in Mungret, Limerick, before moving to Rome, where he was ordained, in 1925, after securing doctorates in divinity, canon law and philosophy. He was appointed to the Vatican diplomatic service, serving in Egypt, Haiti, San Domingo and Czechoslovakia, before returning to Rome in 1938. He spent the next 25 years there, working in the Holy Office, later known as the Office of the Propagation of the Faith.
Lieut-Col Derry first came to know Mgr O'Flaherty when he was a British army major captured by Rommel and held in Italy for 15 months. The priest whom he described many years later, in an article in Reader's Digest, bore no relation to a Nazi spy. Smuggled into Rome
Deery recalled jumping off a POW train in October, 1943, and encountering a partisan farmer, 15 miles from Rome. Since several Allied envoys were based inside the neutral Vatican, a village priest agreed to take a note there for "anybody English". Back came money and a summons to Rome.
Dressed as a labourer and smuggled into Rome under a cartload of cabbages, he was met by Mgr O'Flaherty, who took him to a building known as Collegio Teutonico (the German College) which was outside the Vatican, but still on neutral ground. Escorting him into a small bedroom/study, the priest said: "Make yourself at home! Me name is O'Flaherty, and I live here." Mgr O'Flaherty believed that a British conspirator should be safe in a place filled with German clergy.
Lieut-Col Deery continued: "At dusk, both clad in cassocks, we bluffed our way past the Swiss Guards and the jackbooted Germans to the Vatican's nearby Ospizio di Santa Marta, home of the refugee British legation."
From then on, he helped the monsignor with his undercover work. "As chief-of-staff of this artful dodger, I ordered all our escapers to stay undercover lest they compromise the Italian padroni who courted death by harbouring them," he wrote.
"Yet the gravest security problems were posed by the monsignor himself. He delighted in flirting with danger. After we'd long kept a British general cooped up in a secret room, O'Flaherty took that star boarder out to a Papal reception, garbed in Donegal tweeds, and introduced him as an Irish doctor to the German ambassador!"
Jailed for life
The Nazi net tightened, and Mgr O'Flaherty was told by the ambassador that he had been denounced to Lieut-Col Herbert Kappler, the Gestapo chief in Rome, as the escape line's leader. He was warned that if he stepped outside the Vatican he would arrested. Kappler made a failed attempt to lure him to see an injured POW in a village 30 miles from Rome. After the war, Mgr O'Flaherty regularly visited Kappler, who had been jailed for life, baptising him when he converted to Catholicism in 1959. Kappler wrote from his cell that his one-time enemy had become a "fatherly figure".
Mgr O'Flaherty was awarded a CBE, the US Medal of Freedom and other decorations from Canada and Australia. He declined the offer of a pension for life from Italy's post-war government.
He was appointed Notary of the Holy Office and remained in the Vatican until he suffered a stroke in 1960, when he returned to live with his sister, Mrs Bride Sheehan, in Caherciveen, Co Kerry. He died there three years later, aged 65, and is buried in the grounds of the local church.