Ireland’s Antisemitic Blindspot ‘Wearing the Green Jersey’

Ireland’s Antisemitic Blindspot

“Wearing the Green Jersey”

With the grim stories of alleged Israeli abuse of the Irish Flotilla activists relayed on Irish television and radio in the rearview mirror – although no doubt those stories will be recounted by some for a generation- Ireland seems doomed to entangle itself in Holocaust metaphors to criticize Israel.

Margaret Connolly, the sister of the Irish President, described her few days’ detention as the “horror of a concentration camp”. The language not only risks belittling the Jewish experience of concentration camps, but also ironically diminishes the experience of Palestinians living in tented encampments under the risk of bombardment for more than two years.

Invoking the language of the Holocaust to attack Israel is not new. Invoking the Holocaust to rebut antisemitism is altogether a trickier sort of argument. Yet very recently, we saw just that in the Irish Times.

Justine McCarthy, a veteran columnist, wrote a piece titled “Ireland and its people stand accused of being antisemitic… it is a vile accusation; the guilting of Ireland is in full throat.”

Uncharacteristic hyperbole for the Irish Times. Perhaps a case of “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

The argument opened with a graphic account of lice infestation in Auschwitz, drawn from the book The Postcard. We are then told: “Even as Irish booksellers restock their shelves to satisfy customers’ requests for The Postcard, Ireland’s people stand accused by some prominent commentators of being antisemitic.”

The inference is that because some Irish readers engage with Holocaust literature, Ireland either doesn’t have or can’t have a serious antisemitic problem.

It is a curious and, no doubt, comforting argument for the author and some of her audience.

It is, however, akin to arguing that because some Irish people watched Angels in America or Roots, Ireland could not have homophobic or racist issues. Few non-LGBTQ or white Irish people would dare write that.

Many Irish Jewish readers may reasonably read the argument as dismissive of concerns about antisemitism. Others might view it as peculiar form of childlike myopia.

Any argument that invokes the horrors of the Holocaust to dismiss claims of contemporary antisemitism is as misguided as it is ignorant of what antisemitism is.

Maurice Cohen of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI) expressed his despair.

“There is an exhausting and deeply ingrained problem in Ireland regarding antisemitism: unless it resembles something, people recognize from the Holocaust, it is too often dismissed as not being antisemitism at all.”

Just days before, independent Dublin City Councillor Philip Sutcliffe shared a WhatsApp video containing references to a “real Final Solution” and describing Jews as “satanic.” The post was subsequently deleted.

While the story was covered in the Irish media, no leader of any major political party in Ireland has, as of this week, publicly addressed Councillor Sutcliffe’s post directly, and no formal, publicly issued statement from Dublin City Council has yet been published condemning its content in specific terms.

It is now three months since the publication of the damming JRCI report in March, which outlined over a hundred antisemitic incidents in Ireland in a short few months, and still the publication has prompted no public response from the Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister), and, most notably, the President, Catherine Connolly.

Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee did issue a statement at the time, expressing concern about the report’s findings and acknowledging the “undeniable picture of the difficult situation currently experienced by Ireland’s Jewish communities.”

But the fact that the most senior minister to respond publicly was the Foreign Minister spoke volumes — and raised eyebrows within the Irish Jewish community.

Three months later, the report’s co-authors are blunt about the response.

No leader of any major political party appears to have issued a dedicated public statement about the report. According to the JRCI, schools and universities have not invited the co-authors to present their findings or advise on ways to combat antisemitism. Nor, according to the JRCI, have representatives of the Department of Education or the Catholic hierarchy engaged. The exceptions were the Gardai (police) and the Justice Department.

Ireland clearly has a problem confronting antisemitism.

Orli Degani, co-author of the report, says it is not as if the report had gone unnoticed.

“We had a big increase in online antisemitic hate after we published. Check the comments section in any Irish-established media.”

Degani is particularly disappointed that the Department of Education had not reached out. She had, prior to the publication, attended a UNESCO-OSCE-organized conference on addressing antisemitism in Helsinki, where representatives of Ireland’s Department of Education were also present.

Degani alleges that during the conference she encountered what she regarded as disturbing responses from some individuals she understood to be Department representatives.

“Ireland can’t be antisemitic because Daniel O’Connell was friendly to the Jews” was one public response from the podium when challenged.

When she spoke of an incident in an Irish school, when a teacher was reported to have said, “Hitler was the way he was because he was bullied at school by a Jew,” She said a Department representative replied,

“She probably had an incident of bullying in school and wanted a way to relate it”.

Degani says this remark was made during informal discussions at the conference.

Antisemitic hate, ignorance, or denial is not unique to Ireland, but what may be distinctive is an Irish establishment reluctance — or difficulty — to acknowledge it.

Too many in Ireland conflate criticism of its handling of antisemitism with an attack on Ireland itself and its newfound identity as the moral conscience of the world.

Arguably, Ireland’s difficulty in confronting antisemitism has less to do with attitudes toward Jews and more to do with a strained collective instinct to resist anything that disrupts or challenges the new gospel of Ireland Inc., namely, the best little nation in the world.

In many ways, perhaps Ireland may simply be coming full circle. Having shed the Catholic yoke, it has instead returned to a form of national exceptionalism, albeit now dressed in middle-class sensibilities.

Wearing the green jersey, it appears, is for some, the first point of call— regardless of the ethics of looking away.