Ireland’s hypocritical treatment of Israel is bleak and bizarre

Unfortunately, the extremes do not end here. Although RTE, Ireland’s state broadcaster, has a contractual obligation to show both matches, it will forgo any studio presentation or punditry for the second game, while commentary will be taken from the global feed. There will be no adverts or sponsorship banners, with electronic billboards limited to displaying Uefa’s standard “Respect” messaging. But even this minimalist treatment will struggle to calm a febrile mood on the Emerald Isle, where Israeli involvement in any sporting contest, or indeed in the supposedly harmless froth of Eurovision – boycotted by Ireland both this year and next – is perceived as beyond the pale.

Across the last three years of war in Gaza, triggered by the October 7 massacre, 17 different European countries have played Israel on home turf. The only exceptions are Ireland and Belgium, with Belgian anxieties in 2024 arising from the murder of two Swedish fans by an Islamist terrorist in Brussels one year earlier. In Ireland, the rationale is more unsettling: a raw, unvarnished hostility towards Israel itself, with Taoiseach Micheál Martin accusing the state of committing genocide in Gaza and several politicians urging total diplomatic isolation. The situation is so toxic that David Courell, chief executive of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), recently asked Uefa to keep the two countries apart in all future competitions. Uefa rejected the request, on the grounds that the nations were not in direct conflict.

But you would struggle to tell from the rhetoric around this incendiary double-header, which begins in Debrecen and ends a week later in Backa Topola, a two-hour drive from Belgrade. The reason for choosing this Balkan backwater for a home tie, rather than Dublin’s Aviva Stadium? “Operational challenges,” said the FAI. In other words, the prospect of serious unrest was so high that the preferred solution was a neutral venue in the most remote location it could muster. Still this is not enough to placate the absolutists, with former Ireland midfielder Kevin Kilbane arguing that unless the FAI pulls out altogether, “it will forever be mentioned alongside Ed Sheeran and his cowardly refusal to stand with a friend and fellow artist who used his platform to say, ‘Free Palestine’.”

This school of thought, highly popular given Ireland’s recognition of Palestinian statehood since 2024, depicts the choice before its footballers in the language of a moral crusade. There is frequent reference to “being on the right side of history”. Except such posturing exposes the country to accusations of selective outrage at best, and downright hypocrisy at worst. This is the same Ireland, after all, that had no qualms about playing a friendly in May against Qatar, which has allowed Hamas to base its political leadership in Doha. It is also the same Ireland whose men’s cricket team played five matches this summer against Afghanistan, run by Taliban fanatics mandating the medieval enslavement of women.

So why does Ireland, seemingly more than anywhere else in Europe, have such an overwhelming animus towards Israel? Even in their Nations League qualifying group, it stands apart through the ferocity of its condemnation. Kosovo, a nation whose population is 93 per cent Muslim, will play Israel at home in November, and so far there is little expectation of rioting on the streets of Pristina. In Dublin, the revulsion at confronting Israel in any sporting context is so all-enveloping that Sinn Féin is now turning on the Irish women’s wheelchair basketball team for daring to compete against a “genocidal regime”.

One explanation is that the Irish naturally feel common cause with the Palestinians, in light of a shared experience of subjugation by an occupying state. “We see our history in their eyes,” said Leo Varadkar, who resigned as Taoiseach in 2024, of the long shadow of British imperial rule. “A story of displacement, of dispossession, national identity questioned or denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger.” In a recent Irish poll, 53 per cent of respondents expressed greater sympathy with the Palestinian side of the conflict in Gaza, compared to just 11 per cent with Israel. But perhaps this is hardly surprising, given that the October 7 pogrom, in which 1,200 were murdered and 251 abducted in the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, rarely warrants acknowledgement amid Ireland’s constant allegations of “genocide”. This begs the far more uncomfortable question of whether Ireland’s grievances lie not so much with Israel, but with Jewish people.

It is a debate that has raged for generations. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the ultimate literary depiction of Ireland, headmaster Mr Deasy declares: “Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews – and do you know why? She never let them in.” That characterisation was rooted in reality: Ireland would admit pitifully few Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, with the number estimated in the low hundreds. It adopted a policy of neutrality throughout the Second World War, which proved popular with the public but so outraged Winston Churchill that he wrote a minute suggesting that Éamon de Valera, Taoiseach at the time, could “stew in his own juice”. In May 1945, with the unimaginable horrors of Bergen-Belsen beginning to emerge after the camp’s liberation by the Allies, De Valera even visited the German representative in Dublin to offer condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler.

Today, Ireland’s Jewish community is tiny, comprising no more than 2,700 people in a nation of 5.5 million. But since October 7, 2023, anti-Semitic incidents in Ireland have multiplied. An Israeli-born woman received an apology from a Dublin maternity hospital after a doctor bombarded her with inappropriate political comments before an emergency Caesarean section. An American Jewish student in the city was beaten up in a nightclub for wearing a Star of David necklace.

This is the poisonous environment from which the hysteria over two football matches has sprung. It seems barely to register that four Israeli clubs have already contested 20 games in European competitions this season, with not a single opponent refusing to play or even to relinquish home advantage. Still the cry goes up that Ireland should hold itself to a higher standard, however that is defined. Over 160 figures in Irish sport have signed an open letter imploring their footballers to “act collectively with conscience” by declining to engage with Israel.

Not all players feel the same, though. Kenny Cunningham, the former Ireland captain, has said that cancelling the matches would not help the Palestinian people one jot. Arguing that the match next weekend should have been kept in Dublin, with the Israeli anthem respected, he explained: “That would resonate more for me than throwing things at the Israelis, or spraying paint on walls in hotels that the Israeli team would have stayed in.” It is a refreshingly measured perspective, although it is drowned out by such glib soundbites as that offered by Hallgrimsson, who said: “We’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide.” He later conceded his words were “maybe not clever”.

That is the level to which this most loaded of debates has sunk. What Ireland imagines as a soaring display of integrity comes across more as an unhealthy fixation with one war, one nation, and one faith.

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