On February 23rd 1939 The Irish Times printed in full a manifesto from an Irish anti-Semite AJ Browne spokesperson for the racist The Irish Ireland Research Society. The article under the headline “New Enemy: The Jew” was a lengthy tirade against Jews in Ireland and world wide repeating conspiracies of blood libel and supposed Jewish Attempts to control the world. The Irish Times did not in anyway comment on or question the article.

While Browne was nothing more than a crank the fact the Irish Times gave him a platform raised a few eyebrows. Indeed this did not go unnoticed in Nazi Germany. On February 26th 1939 the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter reporting on a rise of Anti-semitism in Ireland stated with a hopeful tone “It is noteworthy however the Irish Times, a paper which is generally outspokenly friendly to England, gave the manifesto an unusually large space in its columns printed without comment”.

Source: NAI DFA/202/105