THE Irish Republic has been forced to confront the legacy of its neutrality during the Second World War after anti-fascists attacked a memorial to a pro-Nazi IRA leader.

A statue to Sean Russell, who died on board a German U-boat in 1940, was left headless after an attack by youths in Fairview Park in Dublin.

As the group that looks after the statue admitted that it is almost certainly beyond repair, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris called for it to be left unrestored as an enduring symbol of Ireland’s “shame”.

Shimon Samuels, director for international affairs at the centre, the world’s largest Jewish human rights organisation, told The Times: “It’s a blot on the history of Ireland, but blots have to see the public light.”

He described the statue’s desecration as “an opportunity for Ireland to confront its past”. He said: “We’re not iconoclasts but I think the destruction of something like this has a meaning, and we would ask for it to be left there as a lesson of what Irish neutrality was all about.”

Ever since his death in 1940, the issue of Russell’s collaboration with the Nazis has been a divisive subject in Ireland. Republicans claim that he was merely following in the footsteps of some of the country’s most celebrated rebel leaders by enlisting foreign assistance at a time of British vulnerability, but others are repelled that Russell was plotting with Germany when Hitler was publicly promising that Jews across Europe would be eliminated.

Trained in sabotage techniques near Berlin, Russell’s mission was to foster a coup in the Irish Republic and to attack British military installations in Northern Ireland. The only thing that stopped him was his death from a perforated ulcer 100 miles off the coast of Co Galway, on August 14, 1940.

Admitting responsibility for breaking the head and right hand off the statue on December 30, the anti-fascists said that they could “no longer tolerate the shameful presence of a memorial to the Nazi collaborator . . . Russell sought to overthrow the Government of Éamon de Valera by fomenting terror and sabotage in the shipyards and munitions factories in Northern Ireland. In Belfast, IRA volunteers were ordered to help the Luftwaffe to bomb their own city at the cost of nearly 2,000 dead and thousands made homeless.”

The Irish National Graves Association, which tends the graves of dead republicans across Ireland, said that the damage was almost certainly too extensive for the statue to be repaired.

However, Matt Doyle, the association’s secretary, said that it would replace it with a new monument, probably a bronze bust. A new statue would cost up to €10,000 (£7,000), but will require planning permission from Dublin Corporation.

Mr Doyle said that the association had received letters and telephone calls from people expressing their outrage at the desecration. “The monument is not to any Nazi or member of the Third Reich. It is to Sean Russell for what he did in the cause of Irish freedom,” he said.

But Kevin Myers, the veteran columnist, wrote in The Irish Times: “He contacted German intelligence in February 1939, days after Hitler had publicly promised that in the event of the war the Jews of Europe would be exterminated. It is too shaming for words.”

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• A doctor, a daughter and a man called Johnny
• Mona Lisa's smile may belie ill health
• ‘Parasite economy’ lies behind Greek tragedy