HET VLAKKE LAND

Albert Folens in class

I have been thinking a lot about Albert Folens lately.

He was my first French teacher in Coláiste Mhuire in the 1950s

I didn't know then that he was actually Flemish and had worked for the Germans during WWII. Mind you, it didn't freak me out in the least when I found out. There is an honourable tradition in this country of seeking the aid of England's enemies in the national cause, Roger Casement being the most prominent example which springs to mind in this decade of commemorations. Folens's actions were undertaken in the interest of his native Flanders.

Folens was badly treated by the Belgian state, which was on an orgy of revenge after the war.

He had the good luck to be taken in by the Christian Brothers here and he taught me French. He was an excellent French teacher.

He was also very entrepreneurial and set up his own publishing company which brought us many precious school texts and filled some of the disgraceful gaps in the provision of these texts.

After his death (2003) he was traduced, in an RTÉ series Hidden Nazis (2007), and he would have been all the more so but for the intervention of the courts. This was a shameful episode in the history of the national broadcaster which today is sadly forgotten.

We are often treated to counterfactuals in history - the what if? For example, what if the Third Reich had occupied Britain. Would nobody have collaborated with the invaders? How would we remember that period today in the pantheon of empire?

Well, we actually have a good example, Jersey in the Channel Islands. On Britain's doorstep, a crown dependency directly subject to the English monarch, it was occupied from 1940 until the liberation in 1945.

The islanders were left to their own devices by the British and had to live as best they could under Nazi rule. That is a long, and in parts a deeply shameful, story but it is not for today.

One of the most controversial aspects of collaboration was the authorities drawing up a list of Jewish residents for the Germans, resulting in deportations to concentration camps and deaths.

So, after the war, did the British have their own mini-Nuremberg to deal with this? Not a bit of it, they knighted the island's bailiff, Alexander Coutanche, and tried desperately to forget the whole thing.

Ireland was nominally neutral during the WWII. There was a strong element of pro-German feeling among the population but we were never put to the ultimate test.

Anyway, I was just thinking of how unjustly Albert Folens had been treated and that there are likely no memorials or tributes anywhere to this Flemish patriot.

And here we are, trying to come to terms with one of the most difficult decades in our history, to the point even of commemorating the enemy.

Just sayin'.

You can check out my 2007 post on the RTÉ saga here.