Charles Bewley

Raised in a famous Dublin Quaker business family, he embraced Irish Republicanism and Roman Catholicism.

His mother was Elizabeth Eveleen Pim, whose family owned a large department store in George's Street, Dublin.

That honour was withdrawn when he declared in a debate that "England is not a musical nation" and ridiculed the anthem "God save the King".

He rejected his Anglo-Irish heritage and embraced Celtic mythology[citation needed] of the kind popularised by W. B. Yeats.

[citation needed] In July 1933, the British Foreign Office became annoyed when the Pope of Rome, Pius XI, knighted Bewley into the Order of the Grand Cross of St Gregory the Great, because the King's agreement had not been sought.

He gave interviews to German papers which were anti-British, and annoyed the British embassy in Berlin, ignoring the Silver Jubilee of George V in 1935.

With the ending of the Anglo-Irish Trade War and the return of the treaty ports, good relations were established between Ireland and Britain.

[6] In March 1922, George Gavan Duffy wrote to Ernest Blythe opposing Bewley's appointment as an Irish envoy to Germany: "...there is a great objection to appointing him to such a post in Germany, because his semitic [sic] convictions are so pronounced that it would be very difficult for him to deal properly with all the persons and questions within the scope of an Envoy to Berlin, where the Jewish element is very strong."

[7] It is believed Bewley's hatred of Jews was partly influenced by the controversial teachings of Irish Catholic priest Denis Fahey.

While he was serving as an envoy to Berlin, Bewley once referred to Fahey's pamphlet The Rulers of Russia when being interviewed by the permanent secretary of the Irish Ministry for External Affairs Joseph Walshe.

Reading his reports to Dublin during the 1930s gives the impression that German Jews were not threatened, and that they were involved in pornography, abortion and "the international white slave traffic".

His explanation of the Nuremberg Laws was: "As the Chancellor pointed out, it amounts to the making of the Jews into a national minority; and as they themselves claim to be a separate race, they should have nothing to complain of."

Joseph Walshe, Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, and Sir John Maffey, the British diplomatic representative in independent Ireland, decided on a solution that would undermine Bewley's ego.

In his final years, he and Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, "the Vatican Pimpernel", who had rescued thousands of Jews and escaped POWs from the Nazis, became great friends.