On this week’s podcast – and thanks to all of you pushing it towards being one of our biggest yet – Sarah and I discussed something that we both feel and have felt for a while: That talking about Ireland, Israel, and Palestine in this country is just not worth it.
This is now, after all, a country where the President’s own sister can be quoted on CNN saying that the White House should be “flattened” - an explicit call for violence - and not one Irish politician or media outlet can even dare comment on the propriety of it, for fear of the backlash they would get.
There is no room for reasoned discussion. It does not exist. Express dissent from the RTE/Irish Times/Siptu/Simon Harris view of the world, and you will not, I promise, get a reasoned argument as to why the Palestinian leadership repeatedly failed to turn the extraordinary concessions on offer during the Clinton peace process into a lasting settlement; or a convincing explanation of why Israel would be safer if it just tore down the border and let the Palestinians wander around Israel proper, at will.
What you will get is roared at. If it’s online, you’ll get a hundred tweets from the same, endless anonymous accounts, calling you a Zionist or a bootlicker or, in some of the more honest cases, a Jew-lover. If it’s in person, you’ll get the horrified how-could-you-think-that, replete with the performative gasp, that is not actually a question at all, but an indictment. (They rarely want, it turns out, to hear how, or why, you could think that).
Paddystinianism (worth remembering, that was a term invented by “Paddystinians” themselves, not a term of abuse) is not a set of political beliefs. It is an identity. It cannot be reasoned with. It does not want to discuss, or debate, or persuade. What it wants to do, like all identities, is to express itself, endlessly, and at any cost.
It has become intertwined with something that has always been a feature of Irish identity since independence – a desire to express moral superiority over the rest of the world, but particularly over the British, Americans, and Europeans. And it shares much with the former expression of that instinct; the 1950s and 60s uber-Catholicism of John Charles McQuaid’s Ireland, which loved to ban books and films, denounce pornography and communism, and make sure that RTE never showed anything of which it disapproved.
Ironically enough, the last time there were widespread calls for the Irish national team not to play a game, it was in 1955, when McQuaid demanded that the FAI withdraw from a match against Yugoslavia over its communism and hostility to the Church.
That match, like the Israel games, went ahead anyway – because the FAI, to its considerable credit, refused to submit to the pressure.
McQuaid urged Catholics to boycott the game. Radio Éireann did not broadcast it. The Army band stayed away. The state withheld official representation. Players were pressured not to take part. FAI secretary Joe Wickham was reportedly denounced from the pulpit in his own parish as “a Judas who had sold Christ the King for a mere game of football.” (Lots of things change in Ireland, but some little undertones always remain.)
And 22,000 supporters attended the game anyway, in Dalymount Park, defying McQuaid.
In today’s Ireland, by contrast, the FAI cannot stage its nominal home game against Israel in Dublin. Whatever euphemisms are employed about “operational challenges”, the authorities clearly do not believe this fixture can safely and normally be staged in the capital.
Another thing has happened: The Irish media have given up any pretence, whatever, of objectivity or fairness or impartiality. Here’s the Journal’s sports department, this morning, plaintively begging their readers not to punish them for covering a sports match:
RTE, for its part, cannot cover the matches fully because of an impending staff revolt. An Irish Independent report this morning quoted an RTE Union representative saying that “There is no middle ground on this. Silence is treachery”.
Consider that statement: “Silence is treachery”. That is the view of a great many of the Paddystinian cult – not that you are permitted to go about your business, keeping your views to yourself, but that you are treasonous if you do not affirm their views loudly, and publicly.
Nor are these empty threats. They will, in fact, go after you, regardless of how big you are. Witness what happened to Ed Sheeran this week, when a national newspaper published an article by one of its own senior editors saying that he should never be welcomed in Ireland again. In that context, read this tweet by luvvie and actor and general pain in the arse Liam Cunningham:
This has moved well beyond the stage of these people simply being loud, annoying, and rather pointless. We’re now at the stage where they are openly attempting to rule the country by fear of consequence, should you differ from them.
The great irony of all of this is that none of it – not one iota of it – does a single solitary thing to help the Palestinian cause.
Hamas played its cards on October 7th, and the result was a crushing and soul-destroying military defeat, and what appears to be the permanent loss of yet more land, as customarily happens in war (look at a map of Germany in 1913, and the same map today, if you don’t believe me).
It is all the culmination, in many ways, of decades of Palestinian political failure. Their leaders have repeatedly chosen maximalism over settlements that might have produced a Palestinian state, and the consequences have repeatedly been borne by ordinary Palestinians.
Nothing that Ireland does or can do will change that.
What is happening, however, is that Irish people are now being subjected to a campaign of coercion, repression, and tolerated abuse by supporters of that cause, which goes entirely unchallenged in the public domain.
And across the country, in offices, schools, workplaces, and in the public domain, a lot of Irish people have internalised the lesson: You do not challenge the Paddystinians. The price is too high. The cost is too great. It’s not worth it.
When you hear people “speaking out” on this, you may well be hearing sincere conviction. But increasingly, you’re just hearing people who don’t want to be the next Ed Sheeran, as Liam Cunningham charmingly put it.
Say the line. Put your head down. Hope they leave you alone.
Of course, they won’t.
Why would they?
It’s working.