David Patrikarakos: Modern Ireland Has Become Sanctimonious and Angry

Guinness. Easy warmth. “The craic.” A country of poets and storytellers—irreverent, certainly, but at heart decent.

A nation whose main contribution to international affairs, at least in the gentlest stereotype, is occasionally persuading gullible Americans that their great-grandmother came from Cork—and then collecting the money.

That is the familiar image of the Irish: affectionate, humorous and fundamentally good-natured.

Yet modern Ireland is increasingly portrayed in very different terms: sanctimonious, furious, consumed by historical grievance and eager to lecture the rest of the world about its conduct.

On Sunday night, Ireland’s football team faced Israel in a Nations League fixture in Hungary. Before the match, the Irish players wore black armbands and lowered their heads during Israel’s national anthem. The usual pre-match handshakes between the two teams did not take place.

Ireland captain Dara O’Shea shook hands with the match officials, but not with his Israeli counterpart. Reserve goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu went further, withdrawing from the squad rather than taking part.

It is perfectly reasonable to argue that everyone is entitled to act according to their principles.

But only six weeks earlier, Ireland’s cricketers had hosted Afghanistan’s men’s team. Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban, whose government has systematically excluded women from public life. The Afghan players, however, were welcomed without apparent reservation—and went on to defeat Ireland 4-0 in the series.

Then came Eurovision. Ireland declined to participate this year because Israel was allowed to compete. The national broadcaster, RTE, described Ireland’s involvement as “unconscionable.”

This is, after all, the Eurovision Song Contest: a famously camp spectacle, often celebrated for performances of questionable musical quality, whose historic entry requirement has sometimes seemed to be little more than owning a television transmitter. RTE, however, treated the contest with the gravity of the Congress of Vienna. Even so, the position carried its own contradiction.

Azerbaijan continued to compete in Eurovision during and after its military takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, followed by the ethnic cleansing of almost the entire Armenian population there. Ireland continued singing along.

Ireland has come to see itself as the world’s moral prefect—a country habitually issuing verdicts on the conduct of others, especially Israel and Britain, while showing less interest in scrutinising its own history.

So it is worth undertaking that examination.

During the defining moral and military confrontation of the 20th century—the struggle against Hitler—Ireland remained neutral. There were complex historical explanations for that decision, and Ireland did provide the Allies with important assistance behind the scenes.

Even so, Irish leader Eamon de Valera denied Britain access to Irish ports, despite their strategic importance to the Battle of the Atlantic. That refusal contributed to the deaths of many British sailors.

Nor should it be forgotten that on May 2, 1945—after Hitler’s death, as concentration camps were being liberated and the crimes of the Nazi regime were becoming undeniable—de Valera visited the German representative to express condolences over the Führer’s death. It is difficult to imagine anything less “unconscionable.”

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Ireland’s post-war treatment of Jewish refugees and immigrants also complicates its current moral posture. Minutes from an Irish interdepartmental meeting in September 1945 recorded: “It is the policy of the Department of Justice to restrict the immigration of Jews.”

Officials expressed concern about Jewish “wealth and influence” and claimed that Jews did not assimilate in the same way as other immigrants. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the headmaster Mr Deasy observes: “Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews… Because she never let them in.” Modern Irish citizens are not responsible for de Valera’s record. But when a nation’s politics repeatedly revisit history to reinforce its own victimhood—and, by extension, its supposed moral authority—it cannot object when others conduct an equally searching review.

You’d think all this might instil some sort of humility when it came to lecturing the Jewish state, the need for which was so indelibly proven by the Nazi gas chambers.

But self-righteousness does not yield to reality. So instead, we get endless Irish celebrities sounding off about Palestine.

The dreadful author Sally Rooney pledged her BBC royalties to the proscribed terror group Palestine Action: ‘If this makes me a “supporter of terror”… so be it,’ she said.

Then there’s terminally dim actor Liam Cunningham, who made his name playing a one-handed smuggler in a show about dragons, but feels qualified to incessantly critique the military operations of a country he has never even been to (though he did once get close, as a passenger on Greta Thunberg’s absurd and attention-seeking flotilla).

Perhaps most egregious, though, is Michael D. Higgins, who was Ireland’s president for 14 years. Before that, Higgins was a lecturer in political science and sociology (because of course he was) and was often photographed with his large dog, looking elderly and herbivorous.

But whenever he opened his mouth poison issued forth. In 2024 Ireland’s Chief Rabbi, Yoni Wieder, went to see Higgins with other Jewish representatives to discuss the growing anxiety among Irish Jews about anti-Semitism.

According to Wieder, Higgins’ response was to lecture them about Israeli atrocities. Think about that for a moment. Your Jewish citizens tell you they are frightened, and your response is to explain the evils of Israel to them. Higgins has now been replaced by Catherine Connolly, who says she ‘learned her socialism’ through ‘volunteering’, which gives a sense of how intolerable she must be.

Before becoming president, her deft analysis was to call Israel a ‘rogue’ and ‘terrorist’ state. Voters apparently decided that one intensely partisan, geopolitically ignorant and endlessly tedious occupant of its ceremonial presidency was one too few.

Why? Because, like so many others, Ireland has discovered the wonderful advantages of permanent victimhood. Its own history of British rule is projected on to practically every conflict on earth. Hence Belfast murals effortlessly transpose Ireland on to Palestine and the Irish famine on to Gaza; Irish hunger strikers become Palestinian prisoners; the famine becomes Gaza; history becomes a morality play with roles already allocated.

It’s the same historical analogy repeated interminably. Ireland was colonised by Britain. The Palestinians are colonised by Israel. So the Palestinians are the Irish and the Israelis are the British.

In this world, both Palestine and Ireland are eternally the oppressed and possess a sort of transferable certificate of righteousness in which victimhood is hereditary.

This has the advantage of allowing Ireland to present itself permanently as the little guy, even while becoming one of the richest countries in Europe with an economic model attractive to avaricious American tech giants.

When the European Commission ruled that Ireland had given Apple billions in unlawful tax advantages, you might have expected the principled little republic to seize the money. In fact, it fought the Commission’s decision. It did its best to reject cash that it could use to build schools and hospitals. In 2024, the EU’s highest court ultimately ruled against Ireland and Apple, and forced Ireland to take the cash.

I know many Irish people who are kind, moral, and sincere in their beliefs. But there is no doubt that a politics built around grievance and hypocrisy has gripped their nation, to considerably deleterious effect.