From time to time, I get asked by readers why it is, exactly, that I spend so much time writing about official Ireland’s attitudes towards Israel.
There’s a personal answer to that question (I’ve been to Israel, have friends there, find it to be a wonderful and welcoming country where people live cheerfully even in the knowledge that there are constant plots to kill them) and there’s an substantially more important political answer: That Irish attitudes to Israel are a marker for so much else that’s wrong about the country.
The first thing I’d say is that no issue more clearly sums up the entirely performative nature of Irish politics, in which our dear leaders prance about on the stage playing at being the “goodie” in a pantomime. For example: How many times this week have we heard, solemnly, from our leaders that Ireland is committed to international law and human rights?
And how many times, dear reader, have you heard that lie – and it is a blatant lie – challenged by the Irish media?
This is, of course, the very same Ireland that literally rolled out the red-carpet last year for the visit of the Chinese Premier, while that Government perpetrates what actually is an internationally recognised genocide against the Uigher people.
It’s the same country that sends Ministers every Saint Patrick’s day to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, where women are routinely whipped for alleged adultery, which includes being raped by a man other than their husbands. It’s the same country where the party of the official opposition used to import guns from then Libyan dictator Muamar Gaddaffi in order to murder British (and Irish) civilians.
Indeed, the President who took to his rostrum yesterday to spew more invective against the Israeli Government, and to criticise the alleged extra-territorial ambitions of Israel, is called Michael D. Higgins. He bears, not coincidentally, the same name as the Irish President who just some months ago wished his very best in their endeavours to an Iranian regime that has infringed on the sovereignty of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq in recent years, and which openly exports arms to terror groups right across the Middle East.
He’s the same Michael D. Higgins also who extolled in the most poetic terms the late and apparently missed Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro. That’s the fellow spluttering barely coherent outrage about the apparent fact that the Israelis might think we were unfairly singling them out for criticism.
This rank performative nonsense – which is what it is – is not confined to the international arena.
Our Taoiseach is an actor. He acts, and poses, as a man of great activity and ambition.
He stands before us, tears in his eyes like a melodramatic republican-era Roman stageman of yore, telling us five years ago that he would solve the crisis of children unable to access Scoliosis surgery. He signs contracts for a children’s hospital, then pretends to be blameless for their contents. He talks a great game about leading the fight against climate change but knows full well his country can do nothing about it. It is all a performance; a man play-acting at power and influence who neither has it nor would know how to wield it if he had.
My favourite story this week has been, by some distance, the repeated expressions of concern and activity by Irish ministers over the closure of Holyhead Port. This disaster is likely to affect thousands of Irish people and businesses. Our politicians, if they are honest, can do absolutely nothing about it. Holyhead is in Wales. Even an Irish politician at full bark cannot repair a port faster than the weather and supplies will allow.
Nevertheless, my inbox has been full of statements. Our politicians are performing. A Minister is having meetings. The Government is consulting. Events are being monitored. It is the actor class in full swing, pretending to power and influence where they have none.
There is a scene in the second season of the HBO series Game of Thrones in which two of the characters discuss where power resides. Their conclusion? Power resides where men believe it resides. Almost the entirety of Irish politics, foreign and domestic, is about convincing you that real power resides in Government buildings in Dublin.
The truth of course is the opposite: Irish principles on international law and human rights are as flexible as they are because only an utter fool of an Irish leader would presume to lecture the Chinese Premier in Dublin about the plight of the Uighers.
This, above all, explains the hostility to Israel: They believed it was an issue on which they could pontificate, without cost.
Israel is a small country on the other side of Europe with which Ireland has negligible trade. Thus, its bombings of its neighbours can be condemned utterly and without hesitation, while American bombs falling – on the very same day – in Syria cannot be condemned because the USA is a large country with which we have considerable trade.
The moral difference for the very serious Irish politician between Israeli bombs in Lebanon and American bombs in Syria is about 250 miles and €54billion in net trade.
This deficiency in meaningful power is, of course, what makes Irish politicians such bullies. Every child in the schoolyard learns, early days, that bullies are at their core cowards who always pick on those with less power – usually because of a crippling insecurity in themselves. Thus the Irish politician delights in being the pettiest of petty tyrants in those areas where he actually gains some power. This is a big reason that we live in the land of the ultimate nanny state, where politicians seeking to make some teeny mark on the world do it by banning e-cigarettes, or proposing laws to regulate speech, or by fiddling around with the leaving cert, or telling local communities that planning laws no longer apply to them.
The same is true of much of our media: In no other country would Fintan O’Toole, for example, be our foremost public intellectual. But by God, when you’re the big fish in the small pond, all the other fish must fall in line.
In the article I wrote on Sunday, I noted the following simple fact: Not one thing that Ireland has said or done has influenced matters in the middle east even one inch. We have not prevented one bomb, nor saved one life, nor influenced the policy of either side to even a fraction of one degree.
Yet, you’ll note, we have expended more energy on this issue than on any other global event in the lifetime of any adult currently alive. While other countries – those with some influence – have been working quietly behind the scenes, Ireland has been performing on the world stage. Playing at politics.
This is why I have taken in recent months to referring to my own country as “Student Union Island”. Because playing politics is what they do, in Students Unions. Students Unions are training grounds for the leaders of tomorrow, in theory – allowing the illusion of competitive and serious politics with precisely no consequences.
The reason for the shellshock of recent days over the Israeli action is because it is perceived by our leaders as deeply unfair. Not because the Israelis don’t have cause, but because they don’t seem to understand that Ireland is entitled, in its own mind, to play-act at politics on the world stage absent any of the consequences. Now that consequences may face us, we are to consider it all terribly unfair.
That is how, all of a sudden, this country has found itself embroiled in what is now effectively a hybrid war with the Israelis. We are like the small dog that delights in barking through the fence at its larger neighbour. Suddenly, the fence has been torn down. And now, faced with reality, all we can do is run, and bark ever louder, hoping that someone will rescue us.