Ireland was politically divided in May 1921 subsequently becoming a Republic and a separate entity, Northern Ireland. Both territories have had fleeting experiences of indigenous fascism since the 1920s. My previous piece on archaeologist Adolph Mahr demonstrated how the Irish state (apparently unwittingly) promoted Mahr to the directorship of its National museum in 1934. He was a man who was by any definition, “a Nazi living in plain sight.” This article demonstrates that bizarrely, an anchor of the British state in Northern Ireland, Lord Londonderry, was at the least, grossly misled by Hitler and his cronies. Londonderry’s connections with the Nazi regime were subsequently ignored by historians. However, at the time, his apparent collusion with Fascism did not go unnoticed on his Mountstuart estate, where he contributed to ambiguity in popular attitudes to Germany. Londonderry’s crude interventions about Nazism alarmed Belfast’s Jewish community.

It should be noted, from the outset, that fascism in Northern Ireland had a notable inter-war presence, with groups like Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). They spawned the Ulster Fascists, attracting loyalists with antisemitism and anti-independence messages. The Ulster Fascists were an autonomous wing of Mosley’s BUF who actually opposed partition. Later, the National Front gained  loyalist sympathy, also exploiting territorial flags. Meanwhile, in Southern Ireland, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Blueshirts (Army Comrades Association) and Ailtirí na hAiséirghe (Architects of the Resurrection) adopted fascist policies and even paraded in uniform.  More recently, far-right protests and anti-immigrant actions have been described as having fascist-like characteristics. They invoked fascistic elements (e.g. weaponizing respective flags) on both sides of the border. There was widespread alarm among the small Jewish communities dotted across Ireland.

These events, however, have attracted more scholarly attention than Lord Londonderry’s  communications with the Nazi regime, which led him to be dubbed “Herr Londonderry.”  A British aristocrat and former Air Minister, he certainly had significant, misguided, links with Nazi Germany. His correspondence brims with references to personal friendships with the German leadership at a time of advancing Nazism. It is difficult not to infer that he either did not find them repugnant or he felt there was no other way but to seek to placate them. He famously interacted with the entire Nazi hierarchy. Londonderry strongly backed appeasement, at a time when Cabinet struggled to muster........

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