I wrote about my country’s inexplicable and depressing hostility to Israel for Spiked Online: give ’em a click here: https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/16/how-dare-official-ireland-bask-in-the-glory-of-bloomsday/ This is a longer version of the piece, which was cut for length etc.
Today (Monday) is Bloomsday: the annual fandango when Official Ireland gathers to pat itself on the back, as if anyone like them could ever make the slightest contribution to creating immortal art such as James Joyce’s Ulysses.
There they’ll be anyway, politicians and artists and sundry other “public figures”: smugly self-congratulatory, vicariously basking in the glory of this classic novel (and pretending to have read it in the first place). They’ll wear boater hats and eat pigs’ innards, and someone will surely read aloud.
Joyce, you feel, would have laughed at all this, found it absurd. He was a proper artist, citizen of the world and the word, and never struck me as an Official Ireland type. He famously left the place at a young age, writing Ulysses in exile. His contempt for the 1930s Establishment sings off the pages; it’s eay to imagine the same response today. The Establishment never really changes in character.
For that alone, these gurning philistines should have the good grace to cancel Bloomsday. If they had the slightest shame or self-awareness, they would. But there’s a better reason: Ireland’s unremitting hostility to Israel.
Ulysses centres on one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, who is half-Jewish. From my recollection of reading, his ethnicity isn’t the most important element of Ulysses, or Bloom himself – Joyce was too good a writer, too interested in the complexities and mysteries of humanity, to be so didactic and reductive – but is significant enough.
So here we have Jewish Leopold being celebrated and honoured by the kinds of people who have spent decades waging metaphorical war on the only Jewish state on the planet: a tiny scrap of desert surrounded by dozens of Muslim Arab countries – their great historical enemy – and within those, scores of millions of people who want them dead.
Not all Muslim Arabs feel this way; not all Muslim Arab nations are bent on the destruction of Israel. (Bizarrely, the likes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia are now less hostile to Israel than Ireland is. We’ve truly gone through the looking-glass.) But enough do and are.
Oh, but “anti-Zionism” does not equate to antisemitism, Official Ireland will argue. Except it does, by definition, if the only country you ever protest about is the only Jewish country that has ever existed. If you not only ignore, but seem entirely unaware of, the far worse “crimes”, far higher death-tolls, of non-Jewish nations.
If the one kid in the schoolyard you pick on is Jewish, then you’re anti-Jewish.
Ireland is now globally notorious for its surreal levels of hyper-antagonism to Israel. It’s been so for as long as I can remember, though not quite this hysterical. We don’t even have an Israeli embassy anymore, putting us in the vaunted company of such renowned defenders of human rights and democracy as Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Qatar and Venezuela.
Irish people as a whole are blackened with this reputation, and I’m undecided as to how much we deserve it. On one hand, the public voted Israel second in Eurovision this year and last, which suggests some support, or at least lack of enmity. On the other, you rarely hear anyone expressing sympathy for Israelis, even after the off-the-scale horrors of October 7th.
Then again, you don’t hear Irish people supporting racist psychopaths like Hamas either. Every “river to the sea” protest is still a tiny fraction of the population. Ultimately, despite foreign preconceptions and Irish media’s Israel fixation, most people probably don’t think about it that much, or take sides either way.
But Official Ireland – politicians and artists, unions and media, academics and NGOs, the whole rancid cabal – certainly does. The shameful nadir was reached in January when that contemptible weasel, President Michael D Higgins – hot on the heels of making friendly with whatever extremist lunatic had taken power in Iran – insisted on wedging in Gaza whataboutery at a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony. This despite being asked not to, by actual Jewish people.
So we had the mindboggling sight of a Jewish woman, silently protesting Higgins’ nauseating grandstanding, being forcibly removed by security. From a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony!
That was the pits, but only one instance in a long, depressing tale. Virtually all Irish politicians concur on the veracity of “Israeli genocide” – as opposed to “this is war, it’s brutal and awful, but not genocide” – and immaculate rightness of the Palestinian cause. They call Israelis warmongers, Nazis and psychopaths and nobody bats an eyelid.
Very few bothered to condemn the mass rape, torture, murder and desecration of bodies on October 7th. Some cheered it on. One – a woman – called it “beautiful”. Which part was more beautiful: the rape, torture, murder or desecration?
Our government made Ireland one of very few countries to recognise Palestinian statehood in the aftermath of October 7th: how’s that for punishing mass terrorism? And, with a sophistry so brazen you’d nearly admire it, they pushed for the definition of genocide to be broadened, so Israel’s actions would qualify. Make the evidence fit the suspect – an inversion of all principles of justice.
Lobby groups and NGOs want sanctions on Israeli goods. An Israeli woman was banned from running in local elections by one, performatively “progressive”, party. There was no outrage, no pushback, against this blatant discrimination, from anyone in public life, including media. Speaking of which…
As mentioned, our media is obsessed with Israel. TV and radio cover it almost as much as Irish events. Newspapers hive off whole sections. Most, though in fairness not all, commentators cleave to the “genocidal Israel/blameless Palestinians” line.
Meanwhile the National Union of Journalists demanded a young Israeli singer be kicked out of Eurovision – horrifically, this woman was a survivor of October 7th, having lain under her friends’ dead bodies for eight hours. Never was the term “tone-deaf” more sickeningly appropriate.
Irish artists and celebrities constantly stick their beak in. Sally Rooney wouldn’t allow translation in Israel, but had no problem selling the rights to China, Russia, Iran: a virtual rogues’ gallery. Actor Liam Cunningham was involved with Greta Thunberg’s recent publicity stunt. Kneecap have banners declaring “Fuck Israel”, because they’re cool rebels who swear.
Over 1500 Irish artists have signed a “Pledge to Boycott Israel”, something the organisers declare is “the first such nationally organised cultural boycott of Israel.” Makes the heart swell with patriotic pride, for sure.
Why are these people like this? I have no idea. Maybe it’s some bone-deep Hitler-esque hatred of Jews, though I doubt that’s the case for most. Maybe it’s class and cultural conformity, risk-free “stick it to The Man” rebellion, “guerrilla chic” cosplay and larks (the Thunberg ship certainly seemed that). Maybe it’s the misguided belief that Irish and Arab nationalism are the same – a view, ironically, that patronises both.
In any event, who cares why? All that matters are consequences. Absolutely none for the “Paddystinians” themselves, of course – that’s part of the attraction – but they give succour to fascist zealots around the world, and make things that bit harder for a tiny ethnic group in an existential fight against far bigger enemies.
Many anti-Israelites would have been Republican during the Troubles. Some would have supported the IRA. Ironically, it’s impossible to imagine them continuing that support had Irish guerrillas ever carried out the tsunami of horror wrought by Hamas in 2023.
They didn’t, either: the IRA, for all the bombs and shootings, never raped and tortured hundreds of women and children. Neither, on the opposing side, did the UVF or UDA. That would have been a red line, even for those violent, ruthless men – and their supporters.
Yet it seems, when it comes to Israel, some Irish have no red line at all. Nothing is too much. Anything is justified. Some, you suspect, feel the victims brought it on themselves.
Leopold Bloom would probably be cancelled today, if he was unfortunate enough to live in 2025 Ireland. (Although what are the chances? We have a tiny Jewish population, always did. The main reason there was never a pogrom is because there were hardly any Jews.)
“We’re not anti-Leopold,” they’d say. “We’re anti-Zionism! Anti-genocide!” With the unspoken appendix: “But they’re all kind of to blame, aren’t they? All the same, all to blame.”
Or “We just want peace and justice, an end to the carnage, no more dead children”. Admirable sentiments – who wants more dead children? – but not the full story. These people were decrying Israel long before the IDF started heavily bombing Gaza. Some were out on Irish streets, right after October 7th, before war began in earnest, waving Palestinian flags.
These ghouls didn’t even halt their gallop or question their allegiances when Irish-Israeli Kim Damti was murdered and Irish-Israeli Emily Hand – eight years old – was kidnapped for 50 days. If you can’t or won’t stand by your own, what use are you to anyone?
There’s a scene in Ulysses where The Citizen, a bigoted blowhard, is attacking Bloom in the pub. The Jews killed Christ, blah blah blah. I’d love if Higgins, Taoiseach Micheál Martin or anyone from Official Ireland read that part aloud for Bloomsday. Just to see if they could keep a straight face, if there is any level of hypocrisy and shamelessness these people cannot meet – if they have a red line of any sort.
Official Ireland is unworthy of Ulysses, or James Joyce. Them honouring a book about probably the most famous Jew in Irish literary history feels like a sick joke. Indeed, like something Joyce would have satirised in Ulysses itself.
There’s an old maxim about how everyone imagines themselves as the family who hid Anne Frank, whereas most are closer to the sneaks who sold her out. Official Ireland imagines itself as cosmopolitan, broadminded, generous-hearted Bloom. In reality they’re more like the narrowminded, vicious, bigoted Citizen.
Darragh McManus, author and journalist 