The inflammatory allegations are made in an article on the website of Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (Fair). The site also includes a photograph of the Irish tricolour and the Nazi flag, sideby-side, over the caption "One and the same cause". The article says that it is "fitting if we remember the allegiances between the citizens and government of what was the Irish Free State, including their most radical front . . . Sinn Fein/IRA . . . and anti-semitism/National Socialism".

Referring to controversy caused by McAleese when she compared the hatred of Catholics in the North to the hatred of Jews in Germany, the article says: "These comments were hardly surprising coming from someone whose republican terrorist sympathies have been no great secret." It is important to stress that the president has never expressed any sympathies with Republican terrorists.

The piece continues: "The reality of Irish treatment of Jews and their conduct during World War II should cause Mrs McAleese to hang her head in shame rather than pontificate to others."

And it then goes on to deal with de Valera and his infamous decision to sign the book of condolences at the German embassy in Dublin on Hitler's death. The article accuses de Valera of failing "even to be discreet in his support of Nazism". De Valera "saw fit to sign a petition of condolence at the German legation in Dublin to express his grief on the death of Hitler. Furthermore, he went to personally commiserate with the Nazi representative in Eire, Dr Eduard Hempel, on the death of their beloved Fuhrer."

The article says this event took place a full three months after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and two weeks after British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen.

"There could be no possibility that de Valera and the Dail were unaware of the Nazi treatment of Jews, and yet the leader of supposedly neutral Ireland still wished to pay his respects to one of the most evil men in the history of the world."

While historians widely agree that the government led by de Valera was benevolently neutral, in favour of Britain, the Fair website alleges that "de Valera was sympathetic to the Nazi slaughter of Jews, and still willing to be open about it when it was clear that there would be no comeback for Nazi Germany and no united Ireland on the back of an axis victory and the bayonets of the SS".

Again, there is no historical basis for this, with Joe Lee describing de Valera as "fundamentally anglophile" during the war in his seminal work Ireland 1912-1985 Politics and Society, noting that he publicly denounced the German invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands in May, 1940.

The Fair article claims that anti-semitism in Ireland continues "to this day with recent condemnation by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for not including a specific reference to anti-semitism in a new UN resolution on religious intolerance it submitted in October 2003 to the UN General Assembly Third Committee.

A further act of Irish Jewhate in the withdrawal of the UN anti-semitism statement was interpreted by the Wiesenthal Centre as an Irish attempt to 'delegitimise the Jewish people'."

A statue of the controversial Russell, who died on a German U-Boat during the second world war, was decapitated in a park in Dublin last year, prompting calls from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris for it to be left unrestored as an "enduring symbol of Ireland's shame".

The Fair website says that "the Irish government over which Mary McAleese presides has committed itself to rebuilding this revolting statue to the glories of the Third Reich and to a monster who would be reviled for the fascist and traitor he was if he had lived in any other country".

In conclusion, the article said that the "role of the Irish Republic and the IRA in relation to Nazism has been shameful and humiliating.

Mary McAleese should be ashamed. If she wants to look for Nazis maybe she should look closer to home. This is an example of why, as law-abiding innocent victims of fascist terrorism, we do not trust Sinn Fein/IRA, nor the Irish government."