MARY McALEESE, the Irish President, provoked a furore yesterday after likening the plight of Catholics in Northern Ireland to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis.

The comments, made during ceremonies to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland, drew a stinging backlash from Unionists, one of whose leaders accused her of “spewing out hatred”.

Mrs McAleese said that anti-Semitism had existed for decades before Hitler and the Nazis. “They gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred of Catholics, in the same way that people give to their children an outrageous and irrational hatred of those who are of different colour and all of those things,” she said.

Her controversial remarks were the more surprising because Mrs McAleese had made strengthening cross- community relations the key aim of her presidency. During her first term as Ireland’s head of state she was criticised after taking communion at Dublin’s Anglican Cathedral.

Although her background is working-class Catholic, she has held talks with Ulster Defence Association representatives in some of Belfast’s most staunchly Protestant districts.Ian Paisley Jr, a Democratic Unionist Assembly member, said: “So much for bridge-building, Mary. Her comments are completely irrational and are designed to insult the integrity of the Protestant community.

“Her mask as a healer of divided peoples has slipped. She is spewing out hatred of the Protestant community, whilst accusing those same people of hating Catholics.”

Michael McGimpsey, a former Ulster Unionist culture minister, accused her of downgrading the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust. “She has shown a clear lack of understanding and sympathy for the Jewish experience under the Nazis,” he said. “To compare the Holocaust, where six million Jews were exterminated, with Northern Ireland shows a total lack of understanding and sympathy.”

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