It is right that at last Ireland should commemorate the Holocaust. In a moving ceremony in City Hall in Dublin on Sunday night, representatives of Ireland's Jewish community led others representing communities who also faced Nazi genocide - the disabled, gays, national minorities like the Roma, Slavs and blacks, and the many thousands who died for holding other political or religious views - in marking yesterday's 58th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
In its factories of death, the age of industrial mass production became its own antithesis. Man played God now that, for the first time, he really could, in the conviction that all means were justified by an objective conceived in a deranged ideology which raised racial prejudice to the level of science. That so many were willing to do Hitler's bidding, or sit idly by, complicit while it was done, tells a story about human weakness we need constantly to be reminded of.
François Mauriac wrote of watching with horror in the Gare d'Austerlitz the dispatch of children to their deaths in Auschwitz, and seeing in it the death of the Western age of enlightenment: "I believe on that day I touched upon the mystery of iniquity whose revelation was to mark the end of one era and beginning of another."
In truth the Holocaust was more than a Jewish tragedy. It was a tragedy for Europe and the whole of humankind. Its legacy of hate reverberated down the years and its lessons relating to tolerance, co-existence and interdependence have yet to be absorbed.
Ireland was also complicit. On Sunday the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, solemnly and properly apologised for the failure of the State "by act or omission" to uphold the constitutional guarantees to the Jewish community that it would be cherished equally with all others. It had failed "whether by tolerating social discrimination, failing to heed the message of the persecuted, failing to offer refuge to those who sought it, or failing to confront those who, openly or covertly, offered justification for the prejudice and race hatred which led to the Shoah."
The commemoration was organised by an ad hoc group although Ireland, as a signatory with 44 other states to the Stockholm declaration on the Holocaust in January 2000, is committed to marking the anniversary annually. The Government should now open discussions with interested parties about how that can be done. Never again must these events be forgotten. Their lessons must be continually relearned.