Some background regarding the anti Catholic, anti Irish Alan Shatter.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/shatter-they-still-tell-me-to-go-back-where-i-came-from-so-do-they-mean-rathgar-26816089.html28 JANUARY 2012
Damian Corless
Shatter: They still tell me to go back where I came from. So do they mean Rathgar?
This week Justice Minister Alan Shatter took time out from grappling with the current emergency to reflect on the 'Emergency' -- known to the rest of the world as World War Two.
Opening a h0Ɩ0cαųst exhibition, he called on the Irish nation to examine its conscience on this State's shameful treatment of Jєωs fleeing nαzι genocide.
Ireland shut its doors to "German Jєωs trying to escape persecution and death", he said, citing the view of Ireland's ambassador to Berlin who said such refugees would be "a contamination".
His speech brought predictable texts to radio shows that Shatter "should go back to where he came from" -- meaning Israel.
It's a taunt he's heard so many times in his long political career that he can laugh it off, saying: "Do they mean Rathgar or Rathfarnham where I was born and raised? I don't know if they'd have me back."
Census records reveal that in 1911 there were no Shatters in Ireland. Around that time, Alan's grandparents arrived in England from Eastern Europe, most probably Poland.
They brought with them their son Jack, and settled in London's East End, where Alan's father Reuben was born in 1915.
Many new arrivals were dismayed to find England's cities filthy, poor and overcrowded, and Jack was one of many who moved on to Ireland seeking greener pastures.
Jack married Gertie Samuels of an old Irish Jєωιѕн clan who ran Samuels Bazaar, just down from the GPO which provided every entertainment from stand-up comedians to slot machines.
Gertie was rescued from the Bazaar as the first shots of the Easter Rising were fired, returning to find a year's stock (already paid for) had been looted before the building was razed to the ground.
When her grandfather died that same week his hearse was stopped by state troops and his coffin prised open to search for rebel guns.
In 1947 Reuben arrived in Dublin to visit Jack. There, he ran into Elaine. She was also over from England to visit relatives in Carlow. They fell in love, married and settled in Dublin, where Alan was born in 1951.
Although there is endless evidence of rampant anti-semitism at the time, the self-sufficient Shatters were largely insulated.
Alan recalls: "We had no bad experiences. Jack was a wholesale Jєωeller, while my father opened a kids' clothes shop called Junior Wear on Nassau Street. They weren't employees, or Polish, and weren't seen as refugees."
The fact the Shatters were their own bosses spared them the common slur directed at Jєωs that they were over here stealing our scarce jobs.
With the Jєωs regarded as interlopers and outsiders by many in Catholic Ireland, did Alan feel driven to prove himself, as he did in sport, legal studies and later politics?
"No. My motivation in life came from my family. My father was an inveterate reader and he passed that down. By the age of 10 I'd read The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich cover to cover. The dinner table was a forum for debate on every subject."
But if the family's faith never overwhelmed those discussions, there were times it was brought home to him out of the blue.
He says: "It's funny the things that stick in your mind. I was aged 10 sitting on a bus on O'Connell St reading the Evening Herald. The front-page story was about the (1961) trial of the nαzι war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
"A man leaned over and said he couldn't understand why they were putting him on trial for war crimes that happened so long ago! I ended the conversation, shocked at how anyone could have such a mindset."
From his earliest college days he campaigned for social reforms and a more liberal, pluralist society, in parallel with highlighting the persecution of Soviet Jєωs.
In 1985 he visited the USSR where, dodging his KGB shadows, he held secret talks with Jєωιѕн 'refuseniks' there who opposed the Soviet state but were denied emigration visas.
For decades his dumber political enemies have responded with anti-semitic abuse.
In one 1980s Dáil debate, journalists recorded a Fianna Fáil TD taunting: "Is it any wonder there is trouble in the country (meaning Israel) where Deputy Shatter originated from."
In the official Dáil record, this became: "Is it any wonder there is trouble when Deputy Shatter originates that sort of thing."
"Sanitised," he chuckles, before adding that the one insult which really shocked and hurt him was when Sinn Féin's Aengus Ó Snodaigh compared both him and Ireland's Israeli Ambassador to Goebbels in a 2009 outburst.
He says: "He hasn't apologised. It's appalling someone can be so ignorant of recent history."
Topic: Face the Nation (Read 701 times)