Nearly 30 per cent of young Irish adults believe Holocaust is a 'myth' or 'greatly exaggerated'

Nearly 30 per cent of young Irish people between the ages of 18 and 29 either believe the Holocaust is a "myth" or that it happened, but that its scale has been "greatly exaggerated", according to a survey.

Commissioned by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the online survey involved 1,000 participants aged 18 years and over selected from a database of Irish people who have agreed to take part in surveys.

Almost one in 10 Irish people aged between 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust is a “myth”.

19 per cent believe it happened but its scale has been “greatly exaggerated”, according to the survey.

Half of the overall Irish adult population does not know that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, the survey found.

More than a quarter of the 18- to 29-year-olds surveyed believed that fewer than two million were killed, and half had encountered Holocaust denial or distortion online.

The Irish Times reported that the survey has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 per cent, meaning a finding of 50 per cent can be confidently assumed to be correct within the 46.9 per cent to 53.1 per cent range.

Eight per cent of all adults surveyed said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, while 18 per cent said they believed the number killed was greatly exaggerated.

12 per cent of all respondents said they had never heard of or were not sure if they had ever heard of the Holocaust, with the proportion rising to 15 per cent among the younger age cohort, the survey found.