A strange insanity is sweeping across Europe, with state after state seemingly dedicated to destroying both its own credibility and very existence. The terrible fate befalling Germany, France and Britain has already been touched on. Now it is Ireland’s turn to commit hara-kiri, though with that bombastic and proudful swagger that marks out the Irish whenever they are most faithful to their own worst caricature. The issue is one at which the Irish are most vulnerable: their unmitigated hostility towards the aspirations and identity of the Jewish people.
The entire Irish political spectrum has in the past year effectively aligned itself with the foulest foes of Israel – Iran, Hamas and South Africa. It has done so with a preposterous boastfulness, as if all the sensors of both decency and restraint had been cauterised, though the sacrifice of a state’s defining urge – self-interest – is clearly the most perplexing. Together, the Irish President, the Irish political classes, the polyglot mandarins of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and the Irish media have been infused with a sanctimonious hubris that blinds them to the irrefutable realities of the new world that was born with the re-election of Donald Trump.
The message from the US is clear: do not mess with Trump as his incoming administration prepares to deal ruthlessly with the axis of evil linking Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah. And what has Ireland done, but aligned itself with that axis, even as it denies having done so. This is more than stupid. It is suicidal. For Trump has made it clear that he will go after US companies that engage in global tax-evasion through off-shore financial finagling, and the EU country most guilty of this is Ireland. One-fifth of Ireland’s GDP comes from Apple alone and foreign firms pay 80 per cent of Irish corporation tax, much of it through creative accounting. God help Ireland when Trump’s team arrives in office and starts looking at the books.
Ireland’s bizarre behaviour properly deserves a psychiatric rather than a journalistic analysis, but here goes. On October 7, 2023, the world’s greatest massacre of defenceless Jews since 1945 occurred in Israel, as over 1,200 kibbutzniks and festival revellers were slaughtered. Two days later, the Irish police, the Gardai, struggled to control a ferocious anti-Israel crowd outside the Israeli Embassy in Dublin. The conjunction of those two events was bad enough: what followed was far worse, for much of Ireland spiritually aligned itself with Hamas in a ceaseless chorus of Israel-bating-and-hating. This ultimately led to the recent closure of the Israeli embassy in Dublin, and to Ireland’s greatest foreign affairs crisis since the end of the Second World War. This had been caused when the Irish Taoiseach Eamon de Valera offered his personal condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler in May 1945 as the world was reeling at the news- footage of dead and dying Jews in Belsen and Dachau, though he had made no such gesture on Roosevelt’s death the previous month. So, Ireland clearly has form in this regard.
Since the Gaza war began, virtually all Irish commentary on it has been preceded by a briefly ritualistic condemnation of the October 7 attack. This has served rather like a perfunctory pre-banquet grace by ravenous agnostics, before they set about several long and hearty courses. Likewise, a fleeting condemnation of Hamas in Ireland is invariably followed by a prolonged session of Israel-bashing. This is not just stupid. It is profoundly ill-informed, making Ireland a mere shill for that abominable axis linking the Cape of Good Hope with the Cape of No Hope At All, namely Iran, the sponsor of both Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s wars against Israel. Not coincidentally, during the summer Ireland’s President Higgins sent a welcoming telegram to the incoming Iranian President, declaring: “…my very best wishes for your endeavours, your hopes and all the challenges we face at this difficult time when we struggle for peace.”
Iran is not struggling for peace, but for the Final Solution, as most grown-ups realise. Several days after the October 7 Einsatzkommando massacre, the deeply anti-Israel South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor had a telephone conversation with the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (later killed in Iran) during which Pandor pledged her support to the Palestinian cause and, according to Hamas, praised the October 7 attacks. This was followed in early December by the arrival in South Africa of a high-level Hamas delegation. On December 29, South Africa announced that it was beginning a legal case against Israel before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide. That same month, it was revealed that South Africa’s ruling African National Congress’s debts amounted to $27.7 million. On January 12, 2024, the ANC – which strangely enough, does not stand for Addicts Needing Cash – announced a crowd-funding initiative, though all South Africa knew that the criminals of the ANC could never persuade a single intelligent soul to part with a solitary sou. Nonetheless, sufficient funds mysteriously arrived to enable the party to clear its more pressing debts.
The source of this money was almost certainly Iran, and the financial alignment was soon reflected in May, when the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa publicly intoned the genocidal mantra, From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free. Then Ireland, quite ludicrously, attached itself to South Africa’s legal petition against Israel, but now including a redefinition of the word genocide.
“Under the Genocide Convention, the thresholds are too high,” said the then deputy prime minister Micheál Martin, who is soon to be Ireland’s next Taoiseach, that is, prime minister. His government now intends, in his own words, “to invite the court to broaden the criteria by which genocide is determined to include denial of humanitarian corridors, to include denial of facilitation of humanitarian aid going in, and particularly the obligations of the occupying power.”
This is baby-like gibberish, meaning that a denial of both humanitarian corridors and aid will now constitute “genocide”. In other words, virtually every war since the dawn of time has been a genocidal one, and on all sides, which really means that the Holocaust wasn’t so unusual after all. Phew, that’s a relief. As for the obligations of an “occupying power”, at the time of writing, Israel has lost 897 soldiers killed in action in Gaza, with men being killed almost every day, yet Israel has still not defeated Hamas. Gaza is a vast underground battlefield consisting of several hundred kilometres of tunnels, only parts of which are controlled by Israeli forces. Apart from fighting, what have the Israelis been doing? Amongst other things, administering anti-polio vaccines to 95 per cent of the children there, a relatively uncommon companion to genocide. Yet despite this irrefutable truth, Martin alleged that medical assistance, aid, food water and fuel “were all being denied on the spurious grounds of dual use.”
How is that “spurious” when it is a known fact that Hamas is so closely interwoven into Gazan society that it is impossible for Israeli soldiers to attack a Hamas fighter without killing the child he is thoughtfully hiding behind? Naturally, the outgoing Taoiseach Simon Harris uttered comparable cant. ‘I utterly reject that Ireland is anti-Israel’. We’re just ‘pro-peace, pro-human rights and pro-international law.”
This is simpering, deceitful, schoolgirl bilge. The Irish government annually hosts a St Patrick’s Day Party in Saudi Arabia, a country in which a woman thoughtless enough to be raped can be flogged for committing adultery. Ireland’s devotion to human rights is so compelling that it is now effectively China’s operational base in Europe, which probably means that Ireland’s attachment to the human rights of the Uyghur people – now confined to a vast internment camp, with unknown numbers having been executed – is rather less than it is to those of Hamas. There is a difference of course. The oppressors of the Muslim Uyghurs are Chinese communists, so that’s all right: the “oppressors” of the Muslim Gazans are Jews, and we all know what that means.
Yet most Irish people really believe that they are speaking and acting logically and decently, while the novelist Sally Rooney, who refuses to allow her novels to be translated into Hebrew, has essentially become Ireland’s Gretta Thunberg. Few human forces are as potent as prating, emotionally-charged, omniscient ignorance, as attested by the influence of those two silly young women. Furthermore, Ireland’s bizarre conduct complies strangely with the medieval legend of the Children’s Crusade. This set out to recover Jerusalem for Christianity and ended with the young crusaders being sold into slavery by wily merchants. The purpose of this myth is not to extol self-righteous behaviour but to warn against it, and in Ireland’s case, futilely. The wily merchants of Israelophobia are luring Ireland towards a terrible reckoning.
At the end of the third week of January, Trump’s team will arrive in office. One of the first outsiders to feel the lash of the new reality will probably be the Irish Ambassador in Washington, Geraldine Byrne Nason, when the incoming Secretary of State invites her for a (presumably) brief, chilly, coffee-free and even chairless chat. Unfortunately, Trump has already chosen his ambassador to Ireland. My own preference would not have been drawn from the usual cute ethnic-Irish-Catholic-Riverdance variety, but a Hebrew-speaking Zionist monoglot called Goldstein. After all, the disgraceful way it has behaved, Ireland deserves no less.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
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