This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Early in January, before his ill-judged remarks at the annual Holocaust Memorial Day in Dublin introduced Gaza into the day’s mourning, the president of the Irish Republic welcomed young Irish scientists to an exhibition in Dublin by subjecting them to his political grievances. Michael Higgins referred to “the recent appalling comments from NATO calling for ever more armaments expenditure to be achieved” and rounded on NATO chief, Mark Rutte.
That the officially neutral republic is not a member of NATO may give Higgins theoretical licence to snipe from the sidelines, but in the absence of any mention of the actual or potential threat to Europe posed by Russia, China, Iran or of Hamas and assorted jihadis, this was hypocritical partisanship. For Ireland is utterly dependent on others for its defence.
The former president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, objected to this sanctimonious outburst. “Do these people have any sense of self-awareness, their privileged geography or the appropriateness of even commenting as the beneficiary of implicit NATO security?” Yes, they do, actually, but the people in question regard being protected as an entitlement without responsibility, resting on their special status as a formerly oppressed people.
There is immense benefit in resting secure under NATO’s steel umbrella. That dependence, unacknowledged by the Irish, allows them to dodge a debate on the ethics or wisdom of Ireland’s neutrality. Such a debate would reveal serious hidden fractures, not just on national security but also on foreign policy and everyday Irish attitudes to England, Northern Ireland and the rest of the world — and on Irish society itself in the wake of mass immigration behind which looms the problems of the world, including the Middle East.
But serious debate, like dissent, is conspicuously discouraged in Ireland in order to keep the state unified.
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So the Irish national hypocrisy at the highest level is twofold. Threefold, if you count the still unsated Anglophobia Higgins shares with those who rule the country, which he indulged in his 2021 lectures on what for him are the still lingering evils of the British Empire. In his address to the National Famine Commemoration in 2023, he said the ramifications of the terrible 1840s “still play out today” and that the Irish suffered “betrayal and exploitation as part of a powerful empire”. Tony Blair for the British government apologised for its role in the Great Hunger, but Higgins prefers the memories of British culpability not to recede. His audience must have left with a renewed resentment about what befell their ancestors.
Resting secure under NATO’s steel umbrella lets Ireland dodge a debate about the wisdom of neutrality
That was then, a truly appalling time. But today? His charge in 2021 that British historians and journalists refuse to face the dark side of Empire is preposterous and derives from the fervent nationalist “indifference to reality” that Orwell identified in Notes on Nationalism (1945). Indifference to irony, we might add, for as Ian Paisley Jr wrote in the News Letter (Belfast) in 2023: “RAF aircraft are called upon to help defend Irish airspace in an emergency. An Irish government-appointed Commission on the Defence Forces [2022] said the Republic of Ireland ‘has no air defence capability of any significance’.”
The recent Policy Exchange report by Hendriks and Halem, Closing the Back Door: Rediscovering Northern Ireland’s Role in British National Security (2024), claims the Republic has been a security freeloader, dependent on the UK and NATO in the event of threatened invasion. Moreover, it has been instrumental in discouraging a British defence presence in Northern Ireland, weakening military vigilance in the Western Approaches.
In this matter, the Republic has conducted itself not as a sovereign nation but as a security dependency while enjoying the unearned moral virtue of neutrality — which it has recently exploited by lecturing the world. In his Notes, Orwell had denied that Ireland “could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection”.
President Higgins’s abrasive certainties are in inverted proportion to Ireland’s political clout. I sense the same bluster in the now Taoiseach, (but then foreign affairs minister) Micheál Martin who in January boasted that in the crisis of Israel and Gaza “Ireland took a strong leadership position”.
The Republic has strayed from the EU’s more cautious attitude to the current Middle-East horror — diverging from a supranationalism it otherwise obediently supports for its material largesse. But as so often with Ireland, it gets a chit from matron; possibly in this case because the Republic was so useful to the EU in making life so difficult for Britain’s negotiating position over Brexit.
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Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War has been much hashed over and judged to be anything from anti-British, pro-German sympathy to discreet support for the Allies. Ralph Keefer in Grounded in Eire (2001) recounts his Canadian father’s experience as a RAF pilot interned in the Curragh in Kildare next door to German prisoners of war.
He distils humour from the fact that the Allied prisoners were given day parole if they signed an agreement to return, while it was understood on both sides that back in camp the internees had a patriotic duty to try to escape. The Flann O’Brienesque nature of the arrangement exemplified cordial informal relations between English and Irish, one that still holds on a personal level, but one that official, public Ireland discourages.
Those of us from Northern Ireland are still warmed by the thought of fire engines racing from Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Drogheda and Dundalk to help douse fires in the heavy Blitz on Belfast in April 1941 that killed over a thousand people. Yet the engines were hurrying towards what the 1937 Irish Constitution had declared to be a part, not of the United Kingdom, but of “the national territory”.
The neutrality embraced by the Irish Free State in 1922 reflected the need for respite if the new country was to develop. But it was also a discarding of another English connection by virtue of — as Ireland has often done since — moving in the opposite direction from London and hopefully scoring some Parthian shots while doing so.
At the time, militant Irish separatists were in charge who had long been anything but politically neutral, having as Irish Volunteers arranged German collaboration against Britain from 1914 and in the run-up to the 1916 rebellion.
German help was also sought later, a strand of continuity embodied by Sean Russell, the IRA chief of staff who fought in the 1916 insurrection and remained a diehard physical-force republican. He planned a bombing campaign in Britain in 1936 and unleashed it in 1939. He received months of explosives training in Nazi Germany in 1940 before departing on a U-boat to Ireland primed for a sabotage campaign in England. (He died on the journey.)
A militant republican maverick is one thing, but it surely smacked of more than the obligations of neutrality when the Irish government maintained cordial relations with Nazi Germany even after news of the Holocaust broke and the Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, followed the next day by President Douglas Hyde, visited the German envoy Eduard Hempel at his home in Dun Laoghaire to offer condolences on the death of Hitler.
In the early maelstrom of anti-colonial resistance, the search for allies among Britain’s enemies is understandable. Indeed, it goes back at least as far as Irish revolutionaries’ collaboration with France in the lead-up to the 1798 Irish rebellion and the later slogan: “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”.
But testament to the long nationalist memory that dictates policy, this deeply partisan principle resurfaced during Brexit in the politer form of one-sided journalistic zeal when Irish commentators became agitated about the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. Even if Brexit threatened the Irish economy (which apparently it didn’t), the hostility so overshot that threat that one suspected what was really felt (but not claimed) to be at stake was the essential social, cultural and economic intimacy between England and Ireland that could never be officially or publicly acknowledged without loss of nationalist face. This was regrettable because acknowledging the modern English-Irish intimacy would be a form of Irish emancipation, liberating policy from collective memory and healing old wounds.
That intimacy is enacted by the hundreds of thousands of Southern Irish, a sixth of the island-born population, who live in (and routinely visit or commute to) Britain courtesy of the Common Travel Area (which must never be made an occasion for gratitude), who can work, vote, avail themselves of the NHS and in all respects be treated as British citizens. Britain is home to the cream of Irish talent; aside from all those impressive writers and actors, four Irish citizens (three professors and a senior lecturer) led the English quest for a Covid vaccine, three in Oxford, one in London. Indeed, London is Ireland’s metropolis.
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During Brexit, when the “England’s difficulty” principle took the form of ungloved diplomacy, Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney were happy to be Europe’s cat’s paws to prevent, or sabotage, the UK leaving the EU. When that animus became superannuated by January 2020, they seized on Brexit as actually a grand thing when it dawned on them it might just help complete the 1916 and 1937 projects (1937 Constitution: “Pending the re-integration of the national territory …”).
Now the EU was their cat’s paw (as France was to be in 1798) in renewed pursuit of the Republic’s national goal — a united Ireland that would see the UK shrunk to a single island. Since then, this has been one of their destabilising works in progress with their own all-island Belt & Road Initiative. Before Ireland’s election two months ago, Varadkar insisted that Irish unification become “an objective” and not just “an aspiration”.
The principle rests on the renewable oppression of the Irish which has turned a bitter (very real) past, of which Britain can’t be proud, into an inherited set of recyclable prejudices. That oppression is a major “function” (to borrow the terminology of Vladimir Propp) in the stirring and seductive Story of Ireland. As in Propp’s folktales, the end of the Story — unification and separation of the whole island from the UK — is compelled by its previous functions.
The Story dictates fundamental policy when applied to many important issues beyond the Irish shore as well as to Northern Ireland. At least as early as Standish O’Grady’s several Iron Age versions of the Story (1878-1917), Ireland is claimed as unique, in part through its oppression, in part because of cultural superiority. Ireland’s sense of its own exceptionality rivals that of the United States, though one is allegedly earned by suffering and ethnic identity, the other by melting pot and triumph.
The distinguished Irish critic Denis Donoghue concluded in his memoir Warrenpoint (1990) that “Ireland without its story is merely a member of the EC [EU], the begging bowl our symbol”. The exceptionality is validated when other jurisdictions accept it, as London does Ireland’s.
Given Ireland’s recent success and wealth, the Story ought to be well past its tell-by date either as news or timeless verity. But it surely helps to account for the extraordinary unanimity the Irish publicly exhibit on what would seem highly contestable issues. On these the political parties converge, the commentariat sing along, the historians provide the historical back-up.
I suspect the Story is narrating itself into the Irish reaction to the Israel-Gaza war. The Irish Republic has come as close to declaring war on Israel as a neutral country can get. Higgins as president has led the charge, risking associative memories of Lilliput, Ruritania and Grand Fenwick.
The Irish Constitution makes clear the President exercises his powers and functions on the advice of the government. Certainly, the government (and the other parties) seem wholly to agree with Higgins’s hostility to Israel. The commentariat echoes the anti-Israel outrage with the notable exceptions of Eoghan Harris, Kevin Myers, Eilis O’Hanlon and Ian O’Doherty, four of Ireland’s few dissenting, and thus brave, commentators.
In 2018, Dublin was the first European capital to endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. In May 2024 the Irish government recognised an independent Palestinian state and in response, Israel recalled its ambassador from Dublin. That October the Irish government drafted an Occupied Territories Bill criminalising trade with the West Bank settlements.
In November the then Taoiseach (now Tánaiste) Simon Harris announced that Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot in the Republic in obeisance to the International Criminal Court arrest warrant President Biden called outrageous. In December, Ireland joined South Africa in petitioning the International Court of Justice to expand the definition of genocide so it could be applied to Israeli actions in Gaza. Israel, blaming Ireland’s “extreme anti-Israel policy”, closed its Irish embassy.
“Ireland’s position is consistent,” the Irish government explained: “We respect human rights, international law and humanitarian concepts.” Agreeing, the Irish Times journalist, Conor Gallagher, sees Ireland as a small nation “very invested in maintaining a rules-based international order”. This will come as a surprise to many of us from Northern Ireland, a fellow small nation which has rarely been the beneficiary of such high principles.
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The government of the Irish Free State tacitly accepted the existence of Northern Ireland by solemnly signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. A few months later, Michael Collins, Head of the Irish Free State Provisional Government, was jointly planning with the IRA a guerrilla war against Northern Ireland. Almost 52 years later, Irish cabinet ministers were involved in a conspiracy to traffic arms north to the IRA.
Throughout the 30-year IRA campaign in Northern Ireland, the Irish government seemed to have little heart for tackling the illegal army despite the revulsion of many ordinary Irish against the IRA and its violence. Extradition of suspected terrorists from the Republic to Northern Ireland was a subject of fraught contention. Nor is the Republic motivated to investigate historic IRA crimes conceived on its own soil. This ambivalence surely springs from the almost unanimous support of Irish government, parties, civilians (allegedly) and police alike, for the goal of the IRA: Irish reunification.
Since the peace, especially since Brexit, Irish politicians from Varadkar onwards have taken to popping up in Northern Ireland without formal invitation as though the international border doesn’t exist, a discourtesy London doesn’t bother to protest, thus doubling it.
By contrast, President Higgins was formally invited to the centenary of Northern Ireland commemoration in a multi-denominational church service in Armagh in 2021 but declined to accept, presumably because that would have meant recognising the status of Northern Ireland inside the United Kingdom. His excuse was a mere technicality, telling the Irish Times the invitation had incorrectly titled him as the “President of the Republic of Ireland” rather than the “President of Ireland”.
But this is no small thing; it is part of the Story. In order to see the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement through, the Republic agreed to amend Article 2 of its Constitution, dropping its claim to the whole of the island. It then smuggled the Article back into practice by renaming itself “Ireland” rather than “Republic of Ireland”. So much for the Republic’s cherishing of international law and the rules-based international order.
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The other explanation offered for Ireland’s pro-Palestine fervour is rather more atavistic. To call it “received wisdom”, as Conor Gallagher does, that Ireland sees its own struggle for independence reflected in the Palestinian experience is to question an external view. But President Higgins himself is quoted as saying that “the Irish psyche understands concepts such as dispossession and occupation, due to our history”.
Palestine, then, is a replay by proxy of the Irish experience of struggle and victimhood commemorated in the Story, with Israel cast in the role of England. This might explain why in the post-war period Ireland was pro-Zionist; sympathy that was later transferred to Gaza and to Israel’s enemies.
Another disturbing explanation has been bruited: anti-Semitism. An early twentieth-century locus of this was Limerick, where in 1904 a pogrom was triggered by a priest’s anti-Jewish sermon. In the aftermath, the priest recommended a boycott of Jewish wares and Arthur Griffith, soon to co-found Sinn Féin, agreed.
Another locus was the Irish legation in Berlin to which Charles Bewley, Dublin Quaker-turned-Roman Catholic (he became Irish ambassador to the Vatican) and Oxford graduate-turned-Irish republican activist, was appointed in 1933. His communications from Germany were pro-Hitler, anti-British and increasingly anti-Jew. His 13-page report after Kristallnacht was so anti-Semitic it was displayed in 2013 in an exhibition of diplomatic dispatches on the 1938 pogrom.
Ireland was happy to be Europe’s cat’s paw in order to prevent, or sabotage, the UK leaving the EU
To its credit, the Irish government of the day turned against Bewley, who died in Rome in 1969. It is the opinion of Alan Shatter, Jewish former Irish Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence from 2011 to 2014, that anti-Semitism in Ireland renewed itself during the Troubles partly because of the close relationship between the IRA and the Palestine Liberation Organization, with pro-Palestinian sentiment displayed in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. Shatter sees anti-Israel postures as rife in the Republic’s political parties (especially Sinn Féin), universities and the media. Ian O’Doherty reports that many of Dublin’s remaining Jews are planning to leave Ireland.
It is perfectly legitimate to criticise Israel’s foreign policy and behaviour, but David Collier’s 2021 report on anti-Semitism in Ireland provided numerous examples of politicians as well as members of the public retweeting social media posts containing anti-Zionist conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.
Collier believes that animosity towards Israel is “top-down” but he also links it more pervasively to anti-colonialism (obviously rooted in England-Ireland relations) and to the anti-Semitism of the Catholic and other Christian churches — from which Collier rightly exempted Northern Irish Protestants from his indictment because they are pro-Israel.
Although the Catholic church, for centuries a mainstay of putative Irish nationhood alongside a strong strain of anti-Semitism, startlingly collapsed in authority around the 1990s, political nationalism, freed from the constrictions of a republican coalition, has strengthened, as it did in Quebec when after the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s the Church receded.
And as in the UK, a political elite has governed in Ireland in a top-down manner with new hate-speech laws replacing church and old-style state censorship. The recent riots by Flann O’Brien’s “plain people of Ireland” against the housing and asylum policies of the government took the elite by utter surprise.
As a result, it is hard to gauge the truest feelings of the Irish populace on Israel, Jews, Britain (where countless Irish have relatives and friends), Northern Ireland or a united Ireland. In any case, autonomously or not, they still cleave to the Story of victimhood, exceptionality and entitlement — or are encouraged strongly to appear as if they do.
