As befits someone so often called a “Jew-lover”, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jews in Ireland since Israel announced the closure of its embassy in Dublin.
Published: 19 December 2024
“Ireland’s antisemitic actions and rhetoric against Israel are rooted in delegitimization and demonisation of the Jewish state and reflect clear double standards,” said Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar.
And how!
Once more, I’m thanking fate for giving me parents of a sceptical disposition who were instinctively suspicious of the kind of group-think that has nationalist Ireland succumbing to Jew-hatred.
My parents loathed sectarianism and instinctively sympathised with underdogs: neither had any time for the view that only nationalists were Irish and that Catholicism was the one true faith.
My father, a University College Dublin professor, spent his professional life combating narrow nationalist propaganda by spreading the message that the history of Ireland was that of all the Irish.
They both were utterly horrified by the Holocaust, but though they would have loved to be free of my father’s widowed mother, they believed in free speech and endured having her upstairs spouting extreme republican propaganda.
I shared a room with grandmother, who had a photograph of Hitler at the bottom of her bed. I was removed from her when I was four when I proudly showed off to my parents the Hitler salute she had just taught me.
My mother, a school teacher, discreetly challenged prejudices. It was she, who during the war as a mature student at UCD, persuaded a friend to volunteer with her to study Sanscrit so its teacher — an impoverished Jewish refugee — would be paid a fee.
That friend was my godmother, Máirín Ó Dálaigh, whose husband, Cearbhall, a lawyer and a principled republican, became President of Ireland in 1974, and resigned less than two years later after a row with the Fine Gael government with whom he was at loggerheads over emergency legislation, “to protect the dignity and independence of the presidency as an institution”.
How unlike his successor, President Higgins, who disgraces his office with his personal prejudices and would have to be removed from office with a wrench.
Ó Dálaigh died a couple of years after resigning in Sneem, County Kerry, which he loved.
So good a friend he had been for years to the Irish Jewish community, that the Israeli President, Chaim Herzog — the son of the Irish-speaking Chief Rabbi, who had been born in Belfast and raised in Dublin and fought in the Haganah Jewish paramilitary group during the Arab revolt of 1936-9 — came to Sneem in 1985 to unveil a statue he had donated in Ó Dálaigh’s honour, depicting a steel tree to symbolise links between Israel and Ireland.
It was vandalised last July by pro-Hamas supporters.
My parents didn’t share the republican politics of their old friends, but they didn’t fall out. I have no doubt that they would have been in complete accord in revulsion at the atrocities of October 7th.
And they would have been disgusted at how the anti-semitism of Irish republicanism had infected almost the entire Irish establishment, symbolised by the failure to emulate most European countries by flying Israeli flags on public buildings in solidarity with the October victims.
When I look at maps of the Middle East, I see one tiny little democratic nation in the midst of its often-barbaric enemies battling heroically for survival.
And I abhor quite as much as ‘Ooo ah, up the ‘Ra’, Christy Moore’s ’Palestine’, a grotesque travesty that ignores the centuries of persecution of Jews — as republicans ignore their own massacres of Protestant neighbours — in favour of a preposterous rewriting of history with Jews in jackboots.
We are usually adept at ignoring what might be unintended consequences of thoughtless actions, but now, with President Trump, whom the Irish establishment wrote off, they are facing consequences with a vengeance.
Anti-semitism is out in the open. And Ireland is rightly shamed.
Trump is very pro-Israel, and will note that Ireland prefers the tyrannical Iranian regime to that of Israel.
‘Tis the season to be reckoning.
Happy Christmas, all people of good will.
