George Dempsey, a career diplomat, arrived in Dublin in the summer of 1988, eager to start his new role as first secretary for political affairs in the American embassy. It was, he remembers, “akin to a homecoming”.

Like tens of millions of Americans, Dempsey could claim distant Irish heritage, had visited twice previously and been struck by the friendliness of the Irish people. But, after a few weeks, he was more than a little shocked to discover that the prevailing attitude in Ireland towards US foreign policy was “overtly expressed contempt. It was so pervasive that it seemed to emanate from the very lay of the land”.

Fifteen years later Dempsey, who continued to live in Ireland after his career ended, bade farewell, his disillusion with the land of his ancestors even more pronounced after he had endured the Irish reaction to the Gulf war and the invasion of Iraq.

“It was the intensified nasty-mindedness of the anti-Americanism on prideful (in truth, shameful) display during the lead-in to the war in Iraq that had finally convinced me that Americans who, unapologetically, believe in the essential goodness of America were unwelcome in Ireland,” he writes in his new book on US foreign policy.

Dempsey does not describe a blanket anti-Americanism — a phrase with which he is uncomfortable because of the “natural goodwill that characterises the relationships of Americans and Irish both at official level and between our peoples” — rather an attitude driven by the values of an old left that is determined to see evil and conspiracy in everything that American foreign policy touches.

He lines up the usual suspects — Robert Fisk, Vincent Browne, Fintan O’Toole, John Pilger — and cuts through their arguments with a scalpel. His despair, which is palpable, is that so much of the anti-American rhetoric goes unchallenged and worse, is presented as rational insight.

Mavericks like Fisk and Pilger are presented as credible authorities by the Irish print and broadcast media, rather than as dissident voices. Their views deserve to be heard, and can (in Fisk’s case, anyway) be challenging and provocative, but they are just part of the picture. In Ireland, however, they are represented as the mainstream, their opinions accepted as gospel truths.

As Dempsey laments: “Factually erroneous views, or views so judgmentally exaggerated as to lose contact with what governments actually have the power to effect, if allowed to stand uncontested, will pollute at the very source.”

Dempsey’s analysis of Irish attitudes to America, or more precisely the Irish media’s attitude to America, comes at an uncomfortable time. Revelations of horrific abuses of Iraqi prisoners by American and some British soldiers have stripped away the coalition’s moral high ground, but they have not invalidated the reasons for going to war in the first place.

The self-examination under way in America, the very real and apparent abhorrence felt and expressed by US congressmen and women and the determination to root out and punish the wrongdoers is testament to the vitality of its democracy and to the sense of morality that pervades the American people. The actions of abusing soldiers has dishonoured the country: of that, Americans are certain.

Yet listening to shows like Joe Duffy’s Liveline on RTE radio, you would think that America was engaged in a massive cover-up and that every soldier was guilty of war crimes. One American caller who tried to ask for some sense of proportionality in the Irish reaction to the abuse stories was repeatedly dismissed as some sort of lunatic. Perhaps, on the back of the Irish defence forces’ problems in Eritrea, where four soldiers were disciplined for misconduct involving prostitution, he should have accused our country’s army of having a culture that encourages the sexual exploitation of vulnerable people under its protection.

A sense of proportion, however, is rarely present when American foreign policy comes up for discussion. In his book, Dempsey chronicles the unchallenged myths that are repeated as fact in the Irish media, and which contribute to this sense of America as a sinister agent in world affairs. He runs through Vietnam, Cambodia, Latin America, Cuba, Israel, Kuwait and the first Gulf war, providing example after example of commentators being economical with the truth.

It is, without doubt, a peculiar blind spot. Modern Ireland is economically vibrant and culturally diverse. It is a capitalist society that has finally comes to terms with the virtues of entrepreneurship and wealth creation.

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