How dare Official Ireland bask in the glory of Bloomsday?

Today is Bloomsday. It’s meant to be a day to celebrate the life and work of Irish novelist James Joyce. But it has instead turned into an annual fandango when Official Ireland gathers to pat itself on the back – as if any of them could make a contribution to art as significant as Joyce’s great novel, Ulysses, published in 1922. ‘Bloomsday’ is a nod to the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, and the date – 16 June – on which the entire book famously centres on.

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. He was a proper artist, a citizen of the world and the word, and has never struck me as an Official Ireland type. He famously left the place at a young age, writing Ulysses in Paris. Indeed, his contempt for the Irish establishment of the 1930s sings off the pages.

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 an even better reason why Ireland’s elites are unfit to celebrate Bloomsday: their unremitting hostility to Israel, which frequently crosses the line into outright anti-Semitism.

A fact that few of the Irish tend to touch on now is that Leopold Bloom is half-Jewish. From my recollection of reading it, 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 it 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 nations and militias that want them dead.

It goes without saying that not all Muslim Arabs feel this way, and 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.

Oh, but ‘anti-Zionism’ does not equate to anti-Semitism, Official Ireland will argue. Except it does if the only country you ever protest against is the only Jewish country that has ever existed. If the one kid in the schoolyard you pick on is Jewish, then I dare say you’re probably anti-Jewish.

Ireland is now globally notorious for its surreal levels of antagonism to Israel. 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 strongly for Israel 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 7 October 2023.

Then again, you don’t hear ordinary 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 the 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 take sides. The shameful nadir was reached in January, when 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’s nauseating grandstanding, being forcibly removed by security. From a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony!

That was only one instance in a long, depressing tale. Virtually all Irish politicians agree that Israel is carrying out a ‘genocide’ – as opposed to waging a brutal, awful war. They all believe in the immaculate rightness of the Palestinian cause. And they call Israelis warmongers, Nazis and psychopaths and nobody bats an eyelid.

Ireland was one of very few countries to recognise Palestinian statehood in the aftermath of 7 October – how’s that for punishing mass terrorism? And, with a sophistry so brazen you’d nearly admire it, our leaders pushed for the definition of genocide to be broadened, so Israel’s actions would qualify. Make the crime fit the suspect – an inversion of all principles of justice.

Lobby groups and NGOs want sanctions on Israeli goods. An Israeli woman was dropped 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 the media.

Speaking of which, our media is obsessed with Israel. TV and radio cover it almost as much as Irish events. Newspapers hive off whole sections for it. Most, though in fairness not all, commentators cleave to the ‘genocidal Israel / blameless Palestinians’ line. The National Union of Journalists even demanded a young Israeli singer be kicked out of Eurovision – horrifically, this woman was a survivor of Hamas’s pogrom. She escaped certain death by lying under her friends’ dead bodies for eight hours at the Nova music festival. Never has the term ‘tone-deaf’ been more sickeningly appropriate.

It isn’t just the media – Irish artists and celebrities constantly stick their beak in, too. Sally Rooney wouldn’t allow her novels to be translated into Hebrew, 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 ‘Freedom Flotilla’ publicity stunt. As far back as 2023, more than 1,500 Irish artists 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. I don’t think it’s some bone-deep, Hitler-esque hatred of Jews. Maybe it’s class and cultural conformity, a risk-free ‘stick it to The Man’ rebellion. Maybe it’s the misguided belief that Irish nationalism and the Palestinian cause are the same – a view, ironically, that patronises both.

In any event, who cares why? What matters are the consequences. There are absolutely none for the ‘Paddystinians’ themselves, of course – that’s part of the attraction. But their Israel-loathing makes 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.

The IRA, for all the bombs and shootings, never raped and tortured hundreds of women and children. Neither, on the opposing side, did the Ulster Volunteer Force or the Ulster Defence Association. 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.

Of course, they would say that they just want peace and justice, an end to the carnage and no more dead children. Admirable sentiments – who wants more dead children? – but not the full story. These people were decrying Israel long before the Israel Defence Forces started heavily bombing Gaza. Some were out on Irish streets, right after 7 October, 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 eight-year-old Irish-Israeli Emily Hand 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 it if Higgins, Taoiseach Micheál Martin or anyone from Official Ireland read that part aloud for Bloomsday. Just to see if they have a red line of any sort.

Official Ireland is unworthy of Ulysses, or James Joyce. Having them honour 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.

Darragh McManus is an author and journalist. Visit his website here