There was a certain inevitability to the draw for the UEFA Nations League when it was made on 12 February this year. Observers of Irish culture might have offered a wry chuckle when the fixtures were confirmed: in the group stage, due to be played this autumn, Ireland would be pitted against the country’s self-chosen international nemesis: Israel.
The depths of Irish loathing for Israel – and its imagined but not particularly real reciprocity – can barely be accurately described in print. Already this year, the country’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, flatly refused to partake in the Eurovision Song Contest because the other participating nations refused to exclude the Israelis. Yet RTÉ went even further: not only did the broadcaster refuse to take part, but it also refused to even show the contest on Irish television lest innocent Gaelic eyes be corrupted by the specter of a singing Israeli.
A Political Obsession
Politicians, meanwhile, have made the anti-Israeli crusade one of their top priorities. The Department of Foreign Affairs issues near-weekly statements condemning the Israelis for this or that offense – some real and some imagined. The national parliament continues to progress, albeit at a glacial pace for legal reasons, legislation that would ban the import of goods produced by Jews in the so-called occupied territories. It would remain legal to import goods produced by Palestinians. That this legislation is potentially at odds with EU trade laws is a complication which has prevented an even more restrictive trade embargo.
The country’s response to the 7 October attacks, meanwhile, was to recognize the State of Palestine – albeit with the caveat that Ireland does not formally have a position on who the legitimate government of that supposed state is. Dublin City Council, for its part, responded to the conflict by proposing to rename Herzog Park, the only public space named after a Jew in the Irish state, on the grounds that doing so would censure Israel. The park is located in the only part of Ireland where Jews live in any appreciable numbers, and the plan was withdrawn amid howls of protest from left-wing activists only after international attention and criticism that the renaming was openly antisemitic became too much to bear.
Unfortunate videos have gone viral, too: last year footage circulated of a drunken – but otherwise impeccably middle-class – Dubliner denouncing a Jewish man on public transport, rounding on him for his Jewishness. Another video depicted two well-spoken young woman turning into near hysterics in a Dublin bar once they realized that two of their fellow guests were Israeli. And now, the entire political establishment is vastly concerned with the prospect of Ireland playing Israel in football.
That the games should not take place is the unified position of every left-wing party in the country. The government, for its part, refuses to say that the games should go ahead, instead insisting that it is a matter for the football authorities. Those authorities, for their part, are very keen for everybody to know that they really do not wish to play the games, but are compelled to by UEFA rules. It is now widely expected that Ireland’s home game in the series – which involves two matches, home and away – will not be played in Ireland at all. The unspoken reason is that the Irish authorities simply cannot guarantee the safety of Israeli players and supporters in Dublin.
The Irish Exception
While anti-Israeli sentiment has risen in almost every Western country since the outbreak of the Gaza war after the 7 October atrocity, Ireland is an exception by almost any measure. In most democracies, anti-Israeli politics has a partisan tinge. In Spain, for example, the government’s obsessive pro-Palestinian policy is opposed by the opposition People’s Party, and in the United States the sentiment is strongly associated with the Democratic Party. In Ireland, by contrast, there is no political party which dissents from the view that Israel is a unique villain on the international stage and that Ireland has some kind of historic responsibility to confront the Jewish state.
On paper, this should not be so: both countries share much in common. Both emerged, for example, from the ashes of the British Empire, and both did so at gunpoint after a long campaign for independence. Both are small, English-speaking democracies whose economies are heavily built around a dependency on American investment and tech innovation. Further, the two countries have historic ties: the aforementioned Herzog Park is named after Chaim Herzog, Israel’s president from 1983 to 1993, who was born in Belfast and grew up in Dublin during a time when the Jewish community thrived. Indeed, Ireland’s seminal piece of national literature, Ulysses by James Joyce, is built around the story of an Irish Jew.
Yet Ireland has another identity that undergirds its hostility to Israel: it identifies as – and may well be – the only postcolonial Western country. Unlike New Zealand, Canada or Australia, where the white population largely originated from the British Isles or otherwise arrived as colonizers themselves, in Ireland the country’s history is one of oppression and territorial deprivation by the English and, to a lesser extent, the Scots. This has allowed a national mythology to develop which tells the story of how the Irish resisted oppression by a white colonial empire for eight centuries, and makes the dubious Palestinian narrative resonate in Ireland in a way it simply does not elsewhere.
Through Irish eyes, then, the Israeli Jew is an illegitimate interloper in the mold of a Scottish Protestant planter of the variety that occupied its northern province in the 1600s. And in the Irish emotional range, hostility to Israel permits a continued enmity towards “the invader” that is largely defunct in its own modern existence, given that peace between the UK and Ireland is more than a century old.
Moral Consistency? Just Not Cricket
However, that this historic sympathy for Palestinians is one thing – that it should dominate Irish politics the way it does is quite another. Consider, for example, that this autumn the Irish cricket team are due to play five one-day international matches against the representatives of the Taliban when Afghanistan comes to town. Yet there have been no protests, nor expressions of political concern about Ireland’s legitimizing a regime that systematically oppresses women and children in ways that are almost comedic in their barbarity.
It is also notable that Ireland – which is an extraordinary outlier in terms of this sentiment in the Western world – basks in a sense of moral superiority which this situation is perceived to confer on it. Ask an Irish activist why games against Israel, which has also played Georgia and Albania without incident in 2026 and is scheduled to play Austria and Kosovo without protest, are not controversial in other countries, and you will get some version of a snide remark about how other countries simply do not care about human rights or are under the influence of Zionists.
In the grand scheme of things, very few people outside Ireland care about who its national football team, ranked a lowly 61st in the world, plays or does not play. Yet inside the country the issue has taken on a quasi-religious significance. It is discussed weekly by almost every national news program and will dominate the opposition's parliamentary time again this week. All the while, the national newspapers fulminate against claims from overseas that Ireland has a problem with antisemitism.
That, many activists say, is another perfidious Zionist smear campaign. After all, there is nothing they would not do to damage Ireland, those Jews.