The matter I wish to raise on the Adjournment is the attendance of senior Irish diplomats, including the Irish Ambassador, at a reception on 25 June in the Vatican for President Waldheim of Austria. I attempted to raise this matter under Standing Order 29 on the morning of 25 June when there was a possibility that some intervention might take place by the Minister for Foreign Affairs requiring the ambassador not to attend, as happened in a number of other countries. You, a Chathaoirligh ruled that this was out of order, quite properly. I would like to express my gratitude to you for your courtesy in that ruling and for your assistance to me in finding a proper method of introducing this matter which I consider very important for discussion before the House so that the Minister, in this case the Minister, of State to whom I am very grateful for attending this evening, would have the opportunity to respond.
At the outset I wish to say I have no intention whatever of attempting to criticise the Pope as a spiritual leader. He is one of the world's great spiritual leaders and it would be an impertinence for me to criticise him in any sense in that role. It would also be deeply offensive to the vast majority of Irish people. I should like it to be noted at the outset that there is no intention whatever on my part to deliver this kind of insult. However, the Pope is also a Head of State. He has a political role. He acts as a political figure and in this case there is no doubt whatever that his initiative or his reaction to proposals that emerged from Vienna was seen by the Austrian Government as a very direct and very clear political situation and it was responded to by the representatives of this country as a political situation. It is only with that dimension that I intend to deal.
Had Dr. Waldheim intended merely to visit the Vatican on a pastoral quest, it would have caused no concern whatever that Pope John Paul II should hear his confession, but this was a different matter. This is a matter which clearly caused concern. I have here a scrapbook compiled, 14 pages long, every single page filled with reports in the Irish newspapers, first, heralding this proposed visit, giving quite clearly the reasons of the Austrian Government for so anxiously negotiating and seeking it, and then the reaction throughout the world to the advance publicity of that visit, the visit itself and the aftermath. It is very instructive, indeed, to look at this process.
I note that shortly before the Waldheim visit was announced in a report in the Sunday Independent of 14 June 1987, it was stated that there was no intention that this country should invite President Waldheim to visit. I welcome that unofficial assurance and I trust that this evening the Minister will be able to copperfasten that assurance and reassure the Irish people that there will be no intention of inviting Dr. Waldheim to visit. There is no doubt that he is a highly controversial figure and that the invitation from the Vatican to visit Rome for an audience with the Pope effectively broke what has been referred to in every single newspaper in this country, and most of the newspapers throughout the world, as a blockade, an isolation of the Austrian President.
It is not for me in this House to abuse the privileges of such an occasion by appearing to sit in judgment upon Dr. Waldheim, but it is worth reading into the record of the House the reasons why so many countries, including the European countries and the United States of America, felt it necessary either not to attend this reception at all or to instruct a junior diplomat to attend in place of the Ambassador. The reason is that while Dr. Waldheim has not as yet been found guilty, sufficient doubt has been raised so that the United States Justice Department has reason to believe that sufficient evidence exists that Dr. Waldheim may have assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of persons because of race, religion, national origin or political opinion. Although a Head of State, he has been placed on a watch list of undesirable aliens whose entry into the United States of America shall be prohibited. The United States of America is not the only country which is clearly sensitive to this issue.
I have before me also a report of the attitude of the Italian Government who were very clearly upset and dismayed by this invitation. The Italian Government made clear, in the days surrounding the Waldheim visit, their disapproval of the occasion by specifically not according to President Waldheim the courtesy of a call on their foreign ministry which is, as the Minister I am sure knows, a traditional conclusion of visits by foreign Heads of State to the Vatican. The Italian Government very clearly and very deliberately snubbed Dr. Waldheim and this, despite the fact that the Austrian Foreign Minister, Mr. Alois Mock announced to the press that the invitation of Dr. Waldheim was an exceptional gesture of the Holy Father to the President. It was, indeed, an exceptional gesture and I believe a most unfortunate one.
If you look at the response immediately on the announcement — the headlines were: "Waldheim's Papal Trip Angers Jews,""Inquiry on Waldheim"— even the Austrian Government felt impelled by the international outcry, the outrage which is echoed here in page after page, to establish an inquiry into the bona fides, the standing of their own President under the chairmanship of a distinguished Swiss military historian, Hans Rudolf Kurtz. As the days built up, increasing doubts grew as to the suitability of the attendance by Irish diplomats at this particular reception for Dr. Waldheim. In a human way, it is very moving to read reports in the newspapers of the reaction of some of those who were most intimately concerned with this tragic period of European history. I quote from The Evening Press of 25 June, the evening after this audience, which said:
The atmosphere was tense and one man whose parents spent time in a concentration camp yelled, "It is useless for the Pope to go to Auschwitz to cry for our dead and then receive this Nazi."
That is the degree of feeling there was in Europe, in Rome, on that afternoon. That is the kind of feeling unleashed by this visit. I will quote again, this time from The Evening Press:
Italian former concentration camp victims yelling shame, and waving posters bearing the names of Nazi death camps waited at the Vatican for Dr. Waldheim's arrival. Many of the protestors had concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms.
This is important because, alas, we cannot afford to forget the history of Europe, the tragic history of Europe, in which Austria played a particularly undistinguished role. It is because of the role of Austria as a country that I feel it particularly important that we should be sensitive to receptions for a President of Austria whose credibility has been so seriously called into question.
I refer to a number of surveys that were carried out. For example, a survey of interviews conducted by the allied occupying forces between 1946 and February 1948 shows that only 42.6 per cent of respondents thought national socialism was a bad idea, and 38.1 per cent of Austrians, between 1946 and 1948, thought that national socialism was actually a good idea. There are even more worrying statistics, because I want to place the position of President Waldheim in a context in terms of his own country and its responsibilities. In 1973 another survey was conducted which asked Austrians if they should feel a special degree of responsibility towards the Jews: 67 per cent said no. In 1976, 83 per cent asked for an end to war crime trials. One wonders why they wished this process of justice to end. Perhaps the explanation comes with the infinitely worrying statistics. In 1982, 77 per cent of Austrians agreed either completely or partly with the statement that the Jews were to a certain degree themselves responsible for mass exterminations. I regret very much to have to tell the Minister that by 1986 this figure had actually gone up, not down. Sympathy for these appalling ideologies is not dying out; it is reawakening. In 1986, 43 per cent of a representative sample said Jews were not Austrians, and a staggering 79 per cent thought the Jews had been at least partly responsible for their own fate.
It seems that there was occasion for us to be at least cautious in appearing to give approval to a Head of State who could be construed as representing this kind of unfortunate trend in European thought which I had hoped we might have put behind us at this stage. I again draw a distinction here between Dr. Waldheim as a man and Dr. Waldheim as a Head of State, because I noted with interest that Vatican officials drew this distinction and said they were not welcoming him as a man, they were welcoming him instead as a functionary of an institution or a State. I am attempting to close off that argument as well by saying that, until these doubts are resolved, a question mark still exists.
I do not wish to pillory the Austrian people, their nation or their Government because I believe that we are all guilty in this. I remind the Minister that under the Constitution Ireland is defined as a Christian and democratic State. I sometimes wonder, when I hear this phrase so glibly trotted out on all sides in debate, what does it mean, that we are a Christian and democratic State? I speak as somebody who attempts to live as a Christian and to believe as a Christian. Does Christianity, as a result of this clause in the Constitution, inform the conduct of our daily affairs? Does it inform our foreign policy, for example, or are we, like so many other countries, merely mercenary, merely self seeking?
Is there any international standard of morality at all? I sometimes wonder particularly in a case like the question of the audience of President Waldheim, what the Christian response would be in these circumstances, certainly to forgive the individual but not, I am sure, to appear even to condone the kinds of activities of which Dr. Waldheim has been accused. While, there is no secure proof of guilt, there is at least an acknowledgment that at the very minimum he falsified events in his own biography and did not tell the full truth about events that took place during the war.
Lest I should be seen in what I have already said and what I intend to say further to be merely sensitive to the question of the Jewish problem, I should like to remind the House that the activities of which Dr. Waldheim stands accused and whose substance has been attested to by the activities and the response of the United States Justice Department were not only against the Jews but also against Yugoslavian and Greek patriots and partisans, so that any insult towards the Jewish people is also an insult towards the Yugoslavian and Greek Governments. We also must be aware of and sensitive to this problem. We are not isolated from it. We are not cut off. I noted the reply of the Minister, Deputy Lenihan, when questioned about the appropriateness of this. He replied with easy affableness that there was no problem, a phrase with which I understand his name is associated in the popular view——
