One of the dominant placards carried in the hundreds of Palestinian solidarity marches held in Ireland in recent weeks reads ‘No Shamrocks for Genocide Joe’, and pictures Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, handing a crystal bowl of shamrocks to President Joe Biden in the Oval Office on St Patrick’s Day.  The message is clear: a ‘business-as-usual’ approach to Irish relations with the American government is unacceptable in the context of US complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and stoking of tensions across the region.  Irish politicians should not travel to Washington on St Patrick’s Day and indulge in traditional ‘shamrockery’ as civilians continue to be industrially slaughtered in Gaza and face chronic disease and starvation following Israel’s four month complete siege of the territory.  A poll carried out in November 2023 by Ireland Thinks showed that 71 percent of the Irish people believe that Palestinians live under a system of apartheid, 61 percent support trade restrictions with Israel’s settlements and 62 percent call for EU sanctions on Israel similar to those imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.  These actions fall well short of the Irish government’s response to the war on Gaza to date.

Although the Dublin government has called for a ceasefire and lifting of Israel’s siege, there have been mounting calls on the opposition benches and in civil society for it to do more.  It has so far resisted a parliamentary motion to join proceedings with South Africa in its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.  It has also refused to bring into law the Occupied Territories Bill, legislation that would impose a complete ban on imports of goods and services into Ireland from Israel’s illegal settlements.  A similar piece of legislation, the Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment Bill (2023), which would support state divestment from companies operating in Israel’s illegal settlements, was delayed by a government amendment ‘to allow for further consideration of the legislation’.  The government also defeated an opposition motion to expel Israel’s ambassador to Dublin which contrasts sharply with countries from the global South that have severed diplomatic links with Israel, the latest being Brazil.

The implacable support of Israel by the Biden administration has shifted the public mood in Ireland toward the American president since his visit ‘home’ in April 2023 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (BGFA) which brought an end to the thirty-year conflict in the north of Ireland.  The dissonance between Biden’s perceived role as a protector of peace and enabler of democracy in the north of Ireland and his administration’s role in undermining democracy elsewhere was rarely examined by the media during his visit to Ireland.  In an editorial, The Irish Times wrote that Biden’s visit cemented a ‘special relationship’; ‘it should be remembered that behind the speeches and potential shamrockery surrounding the visit, is a relationship that really matters’. Liam Kennedy, director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin suggested that ‘over the years President Biden has come to personify a liberal politics of empathy in which his Irish ancestry and Catholicism function as moral touchstones’.  Biden’s visit was mostly personal, focusing on his Irish family ancestry, with the politics reduced to formal set pieces.  In this presidential election year, Biden will no doubt draw upon his Irish roots to appeal for votes from the Irish-American diaspora, representing some 30 million Americans, but his relationship with the ‘old country’ has been fundamentally altered by his carte blanche support to Israel in prosecuting its genocidal war.

The Irish-American ‘special relationship’ runs deeper than the Irish diaspora to close economic ties with the US State Department reporting that in 2021 there were approximately 950 US subsidiaries operating in Ireland employing roughly 209,000 people and indirectly providing work for another 167,000.  The stock of American Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Ireland stood at $557 billion in 2021 with the Irish Central Statistics Office calculating €924bn of the Inward Investment Positions in Ireland to originate in the US, which represents 76 percent of the total.  This overwhelming dependence of Ireland’s open, neoliberal economy on US investment appears to be attended by a deep Irish reluctance to critique US foreign policy, even as Gaza faces what the UN describes ‘as one of the worst humanitarian crises in living memory’.  For example, Simon Coveney, Ireland’s Minister for Enterprise and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, said in February that Israel seems to:

“even be ignoring their closest allies in countries like the United States and the UK, who are clearly calling for restraint, looking for the basis of a ceasefire, or wanting to work with Israel to bring an end to this savagery that is continuing in Gaza”.

This statement appears to be completely at odds with reality.  The Biden administration has just vetoed a third motion in the UN Security Council calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.  It has asked Congress to approve a $14.3 billion aid package to Israel additional to an existing annual subvention of $3.8 billion.  And, Biden has also approved more than 100 air strikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Yemen in support of Israel which seem set to recklessly inflame and widen the war in Gaza across the Middle-East.  By what kind of measure can these actions be considered a form of ‘restraint’?  In reality, Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken’s endless rounds of diplomatic visits to capitals across the Middle-East see him play the simultaneous roles of arsonist and fireman.  He refuses to call for a ceasefire in Gaza even as the death toll approaches 30,000 and continues to provide diplomatic cover for Israel’s egregious crimes while claiming to be brokering a ‘temporary pause’ to the conflict.

All of which is increasing the discomfort of Irish politicians caught between Irish public pressure for more action to end the war on Gaza and a close diplomatic alignment with Washington that has its highest expression in the Oval Office on St. Patrick’s Day.  This discomfort extends to Sinn Féin, the main opposition party which is currently on track to be the largest parliamentary party after the next general election.  Sinn Féin has already stated its intention to travel to Washington on 17 March in ‘pursuit of peace’ despite pressure from its base to boycott the Oval Office.  This comes at a time when Ireland’s president, Michael D. Higgins has accused government ministers of ‘playing with fire’ by opening a debate on the country’s military neutrality and risking the possibility of joining NATO.  Irish activists claim that the country is already in breach of that neutrality by allowing the US military and military contracted aircraft to use Shannon Airport for over two decades to transport troops and weapons.

In a speech to a National Demonstration for Palestine held in Dublin on 13 January 2024, the veteran Irish civil rights campaigner and human rights activist, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey said: ‘Palestine is the litmus test of our activism, the litmus test of our conscience and the litmus test of our politics’.  She went on say that any politician that sets foot in Washington this St. Patrick’s Day does not deserve a single first preference vote in forthcoming Irish elections.  Another great activist from another era, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will’.  The Biden administration will concede nothing to Irish politicians who go meekly to Washington on St Patrick’s Day in the midst of a genocide.  There should be ‘no shamrocks for genocide Joe’.  

 

Stephen McCloskey is an author on international development, global education and the Middle-East.  He is writing in a personal capacity.

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