Jèrriworld

Philip Bailhache

This is the man who runs Jersey, Philip Bailhache, with a little help from a few others including the current Data Protection Commissioner, Emma Martins.

Emma Martins

The Channel Islands were the only part of the "British Isles" to be occupied by the Nazis and some would say that the occupation in Jersey never ended, as the island is still governed by a small feudal clique. Emma's father, John Nettles (Bergerac), has just written a book on the occupation, which I hope to get my hands on soon. Meanwhile you might like to check out my review of an earlier book which attempted an objective look at that period of the island's history (1940-1945).

In case you have already got sort of smitten with the lovely uniform you can order the whole kit here.

Back to more pressing matters, namely the small matter of the Resistance. Currently this is being conducted by a group of brave bloggers, who are not only seeking more democratic and open government, but are also attempting to blow the top off the forty year cover-up of horrendous child sexual abuse on the island. The bloggers are on their own, as the mainstream media on the island are as complicit in the cover-up as the governing authorities themselves.

Putting your head above the blogging parapet in Jersey is a bit reminiscent of WWI trench warfare. You stand a good chance of getting it blown off.

Notches on the authorities big guns so far include: (i) sacking the Health Minister, Stuart Syvret, when he got too curious about the deficiencies in the the island's child protection services and official inaction in the face of abuse victim's/survivors' complaints; (ii) sacking the Police Chief, who refused to become involved in various political conspiracies; (iii) smearing the Chief Investigating Officer in charge of the major abuse enquiry, and subsequently closing down the inquiry (though there is supposed to be another one being set up at the moment); (iv) official harassment and imprisonment of the sacked Health Minister, including with the cooperation of the Data Protection Commissioner; (v) while we're talking about the Commissioner, she is alleged to have been involved in instigating and coordinating a recent perverse data protection prosecution of Stuart Syvret, involving some undesirable types and a supergag order; (vi) attempting to bankrupt an awkward parliamentarian/blogger by insulting him and his parliamentarian wife and then ensuring he lost the ensuing libel case and ended up in financial difficulties.

The recent data protection case is of historically mammoth proportions, not only for Jersey itself, but for the UK as a whole. Data protection legislation is designed to protect a person's personal data from release by a "data controller" to whom it is given in the course of official business. It is not designed to protect data in the public domain nor does it have any place in providing redress for people who are libelled. Data, by definition, is true. Libel deals with accusations which are held to be false. The trick here seems to have been that had those people, against whom Stuart Syvret made accusations on his blog, taken a libel action, they would have had to finance it themselves. If it could be construed as a data protection issue (which is a load of cobblers) then the State could finance the prosecution. And this is what happened. My feeling is that the Jersey authorities are now in deep shit as a result of this little stragem of theirs.

Anyway, back to the occupation. I worked in Jersey over the Summer of 1961 and saw many remaining signs of the occupation. There was a military hospital which has now been turned into a museum, and there are a number of concrete watchtowers around the coast.

The people with whom I stayed, in St. John, had been evacuated just before the occupation, but clearly had returned to Jersey after the war. I had a feeling that there was a certain resentment against such people, even still at the time I was there.

Just incidentally, one person who refused evacuation was Mauyen Keane, and Irish nurse who had come to Jersey not long before the outbreak of WWII. She stayed on and, in the course of the occupation, fell in love with a German soldier/doctor. She followed him to Germany and married him. When Germany was defeated, she shared in the deprivations of the ordinary German people and eventually made it back to Ireland where she wrote a book about her experiences. She is the mother of the well known Irish poet, Gabriel Rosenstock, and the aunt of Dermot Keane, with whom I worked in the Irish Finance Ministry.

Equally incidentally, Emma Martin's father, John Nettles was filming the TV series Bergerac, located at the now controversial children's centre, Haut de la Garenne, while there were still children on the premises. I was brought up short by a photo in a recent Daily Mail article on Nettle's book, taken from the centre and showing the port of Gorey and Mont Orgueil Castle in the background.

Below is a night shot of the castle which I took during my stay in 1961,

The castle has been a museum since 1929. In the period following the French Revolution the castle was the headquarters of Philippe d'Auvergne who was in charge of a network of Royalists bent on invading France and restoring the Monarchy. One of these was French Major La Chaussée who had surveyed Killiney Bay, south of Dublin city, in 1797 as part of the British defensive operations against an expected Napoleonic invation of Dublin. The major's work was subsumed in the construction of the Martello Towers in the bay in 1804.

I mention the castle as, for me, it is a conflicted symbol. It was originally built to defend Jersey but is part of the view from Haut de la Garenne, which institution is a monument to the betrayal of trust of huge proportions.

The Bloggers' Resistance: Stuart Syvret, Neil McMurray, Rico Sorda, Trevor Pitman, Bob Hill, Sam Mézec, and many others.

Update 10 April 2016
There have been a number of developments on the blogging front since the above was posted.

Stuart Syvret's blog was shut down by Blogger/Google at the request of the Jersey authorities. After a bit of cyber-travelling his original blog has been restored and newer posts can be read here. Stuart claims not to have any direct control over the current blog and, other than being a source for his earlier blog, where he posted extensively on devlopments in Jersey, he only submits the odd post on the new blog. But he does comment from time to time on Neil's blog.

Trevor Pitman's blog, linked above, is no longer active. Trevor was bankrupted by the Jersey authorities, which meant he was no longer qualified to sit in the States (Jersey parliament) and, as far as I know, his is no longer living on the island.

Bob Hill has recently had a massive stroke and is no longer blogging, but his blog remains up. Both Bob, just before his stroke, and Trevor gave evidence to the current Jersey Abuse Inquiry.

So, of the above blogs, only Neil, Rico and Sam are currently blogging consistently.
Just for the record, both Neil and Rico have also given evidence to the Inquiry.

In defence of Froggy

In more recent times (2023) information has surfaced which gives increased depth to this story and effectively turns Folens from a simple collaborator, albeit justifying his collaboration as motivated by the prospect of independence for Flanders, into a fully fledged patriotic Flemish hero. Instead of being incarcerated he should have been given a medal.

For the full update on this new evidence and on the new book written by his daughter Leentje and just published, see this blog post.

The book itself reveals that far from simply collaborating with the Germans in Brussels, Folens was working undercover for the Flemish Resistance. It also shows that his participation in the Flemish Legion was not by choice but by accident.

These new developments make a certain amount of the material below, and that referenced in some other of my blog posts on Folens obsolete. So if you are reading this blog post or any of the others, please remember that he has emerged in an even more favourable light than originally portrayed.

Also I have set up a totally new blog specifically linked to the book where individual posts expand on aspects of the story including for the post 1958 period which is not covered in the book: https://albertandjuliette.blogspot.com/
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As of June 2007, I am republishing this post with some additions, as follows:

• the first section is the original post unamended;
• the second section is my own follow up comment posted after the transmission of the programme; and
• the third section contains some new comments on subsequent material relating to the programme appearing in the periodical History Ireland

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The Original Post posted 12 January 2007, before the broadcast There is a report in the Irish Times (12/1/2007) which says that Albert Folens's widow secured a temporary (ex parte) High Court injunction preventing RTÉ from using a 1987 interview with her husband in a TV programme titled Ireland's Nazis, scheduled to be aired next week as part of the Hidden Ireland series.

Mr. Senan Molony, who was then working for the Sunday Tribune had taped the interview with Mr. Folens. Mr Rogers, counsel for Mrs. Folens, said that a representative of the newspaper, Mr Molony and Mr Folens had signed an agreement allowing Mr Folens to see any article before it was published and also giving him the right of reply.

His client was seeking the injunction restraining the defendants from using, broadcasting and publishing the subject matter of that interview, otherwise than in accordance with the terms of the agreement in 1987. Report was also carried in Irish Independent.

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Albert was my French teacher in school. He was a very good teacher. He taught French through French. He was supposed to be teaching it through Irish but he didn't have the Irish.

He published a series of textbooks for learning French through Irish which we used in class. Donncha Ó Céileachair did the Irish end of these. Folens also started publishing cog notes for exams which were first class, even if they were totally subversive of the supposed aims of the education system. This activity progressed to publishing actual text books, particularly on new subjects like civics, and the business eventually expanded into a high class, and very worthy, publishing empire.

We called him Froggy, which must have been the ultimate irony for a militant Fleming. We didn't know his background then but it was fairly wide knowledge in Dublin that he had fled Belgium because of support for the Germans during WWII. It would have been understood here, though, that any such support was bound up with the struggle for Flemish independence. The Germans had promised both the Flemish and Bretons greater independence under Germany than they then enjoyed under Belgium and France respectively. A number of Bretons also got sanctuary in Ireland after WWII and some became actively involved in the Irish language movement.

Albert wrote a book which set out his position quite clearly. He published it himself in 1958. It is called "Aiséirí Flóndrais" (Flanders Rising). It was published in Irish, translated from the English by Donncha Ó Céileachair. It shows that he was a true Flemish nationalist and abhorred the extremes perpetrated by the Nazis, some of which extremes, he says, were also mirrored by the then Belgian authorities. Along with tens of thousands of Flemings he supported the Germans as a means of achieving some measure of rights and ultimate independence for Flanders. Most of these were ultimately disillusioned by the later stages of the war by which time they were faced with Hobson's choice.

It would be strange indeed for the Irish, of all people, to be critical of his good faith in this venture when Ireland herself sought the help of the French (na Francaigh ag teacht thar sáile!) and the Germans (Banna Strand!) in her own fight against national, cultural, economic, linguistic and religious oppression. Our Head of Government even signed the book of condolences for Hitler after his atrocities were known. The Flemings were a long oppressed race, none the less so by their own cobbled-together and vindictive Belgian state.

I spent time in Flanders in 1967/68 at the height of the "linguistic wars" and I must say my sympathy was entirely with the Flemish. They had been derided, exploited, used for cannon fodder, denied office and forced to bend the knee to a francophile coterie which, thankfully by then, was beginning to resemble the fading remnants of a post colonial ascendancy.

I don't know if RTÉ made any effort to consult with his widow regarding the content of the programme or to give the family a chance to put Albert's view across. It doesn't look like it from the tone of the report in today's Irish Times and Mrs. Folens's statement.

There is a class of supposed exposé journalism, and it is not new, which seems very reluctant to afford the subject of criticism the right of simultaneous reply.

This, after all, is only natural justice and to be all the more expected in a flourishing democracy like ours. It is, unfortunately, usually safe enough to take the lazy way out when the subject is dead! Fortunately there may be a prospect of some legal redress in this particular case. We'll see.

I don't know if Albert's book was ever re-published after 1958 or if the original manuscript in English ever saw the light of day. But, in this age of universal access to the internet, it would be worth publishing both, if only online.

There are even lessons to be learned from it on the linguistic front which might still be relevant to both the Welsh and Irish efforts at language development.

If RTÉ want to exhume Albert let them resurrect the whole man and pay some attention to what he actually has to say rather than setting him up as an easy aunt sally.

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My comment posted following the broadcast

I wondered why the original taped interview had not been used at the time (1987) as the basis for a story, or flogged to RTE as was done recently. It is interesting to see the reasons given at the time by the then editor of the Sunday Tribune, Vincent Browne, for not using the material: " ... we have decided not to publish anything concerning your involvement in the Second World War, at present. This decision was taken on the following basis: that, given the absence of harder information concerning any impropriety it would be wrong to expose you to the turmoil that would inevitably ensue if we published the information which we presently have in our possession." Source The only additional information available since then is the entry in the US/UK Crowcass manual listing Folens as an "interpreter" rather than a "translator" at the Sicherheitspolizei premises in Brussels. However Folens himself said that the part he worked in was "lectorale" which involved translation rather than interpretation. The dropping of a "reconstruction"/fabrication of an interrogation sequence from the transmitted programme speaks volumes in this regard.

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Further Comments posted 2 June 2007

The programme was reviewed in the March/April issue of History Ireland by Eamon O'Flaherty who lectures in history in UCD. He mentions Cathal O'Shannon's annoyance at Irish neutrality and at not being allowed to wear his British uniform when home on leave in Dublin from the RAF during the war.

I can understand why O'Shannon might have resented the welcome given to collaborators after the war when, at the same time, the contribution of Irish people who enlisted in the Allied cause was swept under the carpet. Some of my own family experienced this after WWI.

Regarding the actual programme, O'Flaherty does suggest, however, that in O'Shannon's case "perhaps the journalist's desire to tell a good story won out over the maintenance of proportion in the latter stages of the film". I certainly think that was the case. O'Flaherty himself, however, also asserts that "the controversial nature of the revelations even at this remove was shown by the efforts of the widow of Albert Folens, one of the subjects of the film, to prevent it from being broadcast". I understood that Mrs. Folens's action was an attempt to ensure a right of reply and fairness of treatment in the case of her husband. Her counsel was seeking to have the broadcast of the tape stopped except in accordance with the existing agreement which guaranteed advance knowledge and a right of reply - hardly new concepts in the area of justice.

A further piece in the May/June issue of History Ireland, by Daniel Leach, a scholar and PhD candidate at the School of Historical Studies in the University of Melbourne, takes a broader look at the factors influencing the behaviour of the Irish State during WWII, and, in particular, our covert pro-Allied neutrality. Leach underlines the importance of symbols of sovereignty to a small newly emerging state, particularly where the former colonial master and its major ally do not appear to take such sovereignty seriously.

The piece also refers to the practice of some of the victorious Allies of tarring all collaborators with the war-criminal label as a tactic for suppressing separatist movements. Obvious examples here were France and Belgium.

There are many lessons to be learned from this unfortunate episode, and they need to be learned sooner rather than later in a world that is increasingly making light of the very human rights for which people fought and died in two "World Wars" and many other struggles between and since.

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Some more recent posts

Turkish Delight 17/1/2012

Do you remember Froggy 23//2013

Pro Patria 8/2/2016

Was Roger Casement a Nazi 2/4/2016

Bloomsday 2016 12/6/2016

New Blog

I have set up a totally new blog specifically linked to the book where individual posts expand on aspects of the story including for the post 1958 period which is not covered in the book: https://albertandjuliette.blogspot.com/