Ireland has fallen to the cult of Israelophobia

If the polls are to be believed, Ireland is about to get a president who is more extremist on Gaza than the Palestinian Authority. Where the knackered old PA at least says Hamas should ‘have no role to play’ in post-war Gaza, this lady who looks set to be Ireland’s next head of state thinks that’s poppycock. Hamas is ‘part of the fabric of the Palestinian people’, she croons. Israel and its Western allies should not have ‘any say about Hamas’, she insists. Hamas should not be ruled out from a government role, she said. Yeah, so what if a Jew-hating caliphate rules the rubble of Gaza? No biggie.

Her name is Catherine Connolly. She’s standing as an independent. She’s a former mayor of Galway and has been TD (member of parliament) for Galway West since 2016. She’s one of those wooden old socialists who wishes it was still 1973: think Jeremy Corbyn in a pantsuit. And according to pretty much every poll, she’s a dead cert to take over from the Western world’s smuggest pipsqueak of a politician, Michael D Higgins, in the presidential election later this week. One Israelophobe leaves, another even madder one enters.

No one better embodies the stratospheric aloofness of the Irish ruling class than Catherine Connolly. She has guzzled every flavour of woke Kool-Aid. Naturally she thinks you can have a pair of bollocks and be a woman. She says she has an ‘absolute’ belief that there are more than two genders. When asked how many more, she said: ‘I think that’s up to the person deciding.’ Forget 72 genders – Connolly thinks there are infinite genders. Science be damned, let a million faux sexes flourish! Though I bet if the ‘person deciding’ said there are only two genders, Connolly’s wet-wipe relativism that she dolls up as tolerance would swiftly evaporate.

She was recently asked if ‘trans athletes’ who’ve been through male puberty – ie, blokes – should be allowed to compete against women. She said it’s complicated – the slippery reply of every hack of a politician who is chill about the trashing of women’s sporting glory to appease the hulking tossers in leotards who want to nick their medals. How remarkable, said Brenda Power in the The Times (Ireland), that Connolly is ‘very clear’ that ‘medieval Hamas’ is part of ‘the fabric of the Palestinian people’, but she ‘does not know whether males should compete in female sports’.

Listen – if you are firmer in your belief that a neo-fascist militia should not be ruled out from ruling Gaza than you are about the fact that a person with a schlong is a fella, then you have well and truly fled the realm of reason. Can we pause to reflect on how flat-out mad it is that this once great republic looks set to get a president who thinks Hamas is a democratic organisation and the man tucking his ballbag between his legs before punching the hell out of females in a boxing ring is possibly a woman? It’s morally consistent, I guess. Hamas is virulently misogynistic, and so is the idea that men can become women.

Connolly is high-status opinion made flesh. She wangs on about the ‘existential threat posed by climate change’. She slams the ‘disturbing and unacceptable’ language used by Irish campaigners against uncontrolled immigration, seemingly blissfully unaware of what a burning topic this is among ordinary Irish people.

Like Corbyn, she has even sacrificed her one principled position – her old leftish Euroscepticism – in order to get the keys to Áras an Uachtaráin. There recently emerged a nine-year-old clip where she praises us Brexit voters for ‘exposing the EU’ and having ‘stood up to’ the Remainer elites. Her opponents damned her old words as ‘horrifying’. Horrifying?! What a testament to the obsequious kowtowing of Ireland’s elites to the new empire of Brussels that they think it’s ‘horrifying’ to praise a democratic vote across the Irish Sea. Connolly is backtracking. ‘I wasn’t pro-Brexit’, she said, in tones not heard since those girls of Salem swore they had not consorted with the devil. You can make sympathetic noises about Hamas in Irish politics, but Brexit? Don’t even think about it.

But it’s her Gaza obsession that really marks her out as the queen of correct-think. She has become the patron saint of Ireland’s cult of Palestinianism. Don’t be fooled by her grandmotherly demeanour and soft Galway lilt – she’s an Israel-hater of the highest order. Imagine your nan locked in a windowless room for 12 months with Novara Media podcasts playing on a loop – that’s Catherine Connolly.

She says Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023 was ‘absolutely wrong’ – generous of her – but it was not ‘genocidal’. Israel’s response, though – that’s definitely a ‘genocide’, she says. She’s fond of saying ‘History did not start on 7 October’ and reminding people of the ‘many, many atrocities committed by the Israeli government through their army’. To some, this sounds like a roundabout way of saying Israel had it coming on 7 October. Even Taoiseach Micheál Martin – no friend of Israel – says Connolly’s constant harking back to pre-7 October events comes off as a sly effort to justify ‘what Hamas did’.

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Ireland has been consumed by the religious fervour of Israelophobia. The Palestine flag flies everywhere. You won’t go two blocks in Dublin without passing a smug arse in a keffiyeh. Connolly herself is frequently surrounded by fawning cultists from the keffiyeh classes – the nuns of this new religion, in their culturally appropriated shrouds, whose brainless chants of ‘Free Palestine!’ are basically a modern equivalent of when Ireland’s priests of old would bark at the masses to bow down to God.

The Dublin elites are fixated on Gaza to a demented degree. They yap about it constantly in the Dáil. They are hell-bent on seeing that dastardly Jewish nation be arraigned for ‘genocide’ – so much so that the Irish government proposed that the International Court of Justice ‘broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of a genocide’ in order that Israel might finally be found guilty of that crime. This is an Orwellian crusade of imperious demonisation where everything – truth, decency, even the basic meaning of words – is gleefully flung on the bonfire of convicting the Jewish State of evil. No wonder Israel closed its embassy in Dublin.

Israel has become a Satan substitute for post-Catholic Ireland – the new devil against which godless moralists measure their decency. And if Connolly wins, this fervour will be all but institutionalised: Israelophobia as the new state religion. Of course the gurning theatre kids of Kneecap who once hollered ‘Up Hamas’ have given her their Guardianista blessing. A president who doesn’t understand biology, doesn’t care about working-class concerns over immigration and doesn’t seem to know that no amount of ‘history’ can excuse the rape and murder of Jews – good luck, Ireland.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy