There was a line in this morning’s statement from An Taoiseach on the matter of Herzog Park that almost made me laugh out loud.
Emphasis added:
“The proposal”, Micheál Martin wrote, “is a denial of our history and will without doubt be seen as antisemitic”.
That is a fascinating formulation: The rest of the world will see what Dublin City Council is doing as antisemitic. Micheál Martin is not taking a position either way, you understand – he is just letting you know what the rest of the world will think. He is offering no opinion about whether the proposal to de-name Herzog Park actually is antisemitic.
He simply wants the country and the city council to know that many hundreds of millions of people around the world, many of them people whose good opinion of Ireland is of diplomatic importance, will see it as antisemitic.
It is said that a fish does not know that it is wet. When you swim in water all day, that is simply your natural state of being. The alternative to being wet, for a fish, is being dead. A similar observation might be made about very many Irish people when it comes to antisemitism. Our Taoiseach can never tell us that a thing is antisemitic. This would be the equivalent of explaining to a salmon that it is immersed in water.
He can only tell us that the rest of the world might see it that way. This allows us, as a people, the comfort of imagining that the rest of the world is simply incapable of understanding the subtleties and compassions of the Irish mind.
It is worth noting the pleading from the Jewish community in Dublin in recent days. Not Israeli Jews or American diplomats. Not Irish corporate interests worried about perception, or Irish diplomats nervous of what “people might think”. Just the words of Irish Jews.
The Chief Rabbi, for example:
“Chief Rabbi Wieder said Herzog Park was “more than a name on a sign. For those who live nearby, and especially for the neighbouring Jewish families and schools, it’s a place filled with memory, and an important reminder that our community has deep roots in Dublin”.
Naming the park in honour of Chaim Herzog was “a recognition not just of one man, but a chapter of shared Irish-Jewish history. That history has not changed, and it cannot be undone by motions or votes. The Jewish story in Ireland deserves to be preserved, not whitewashed or erased.”
Chaim Herzog was “a local boy” who never lost his connection to Ireland and was received with “great warmth” when he visited as president of Israel, Rabbi Wieder said. “The country took great pride in the fact that he was the only visiting head of state who spoke fluent Irish.”
His father had “embodied the bond between Irish and Jewish identity. A close friend of Éamon de Valera and a passionate supporter of Irish nationalism, he was affectionately known as the ‘Sinn Féin Rabbi’.”
Dublin City Council’s logic appears to me to be as follows: Because of the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza, some kind of protest must be made. Ideally, that protest should be seen and heard internationally, so that the world knows that Dublin City is upset by events in Gaza.
Coupled with that is the consideration that, if it were not for the fact that de-naming Herzog Park, a tiny enclave in the middle of one of the few remaining places in Ireland where Jews live in any numbers, was an act that really upset the local Jewish community, nobody would notice and the protest wouldn’t register.
It is the very annoyance and upset of Irish Jews that is making this an internationally notable protest. If they did something else – like, for example, putting a plaque up somewhere commemorating the Palestinian dead – nobody would care and very few would notice.
A ”protest” is not a protest, after all, unless it gets noticed. That is why extinction rebellion blockade motorways, or why black lives matter rioters set things on fire. At the extreme end of the spectrum on this island it is why loyalist goons take great joy in burning tricolours on bonfires, and why nationalists hold parties in Belfast when a British Monarch dies.
In this case, the only thing that is making Dublin City Council’s little act of protest over Gaza newsworthy at all is the pain and suffering it is causing Ireland’s tiny little Jewish community, which had and has nothing to do with Gaza in any way.
Remember also, dear reader, that the original proposal was to take the park – which as I say is smack bang in the middle of one of Ireland’s few remaining slightly Jewish areas – and name it after a Palestinian. This would be the equivalent of Belfast City Council deciding to re-name the Falls Road “The King William the Third Parkway”. Even the most ardent loyalist wouldn’t be so petty.
This coming, by the way, from a City Council that is entirely useless when it comes to solving actual problems afflicting Dublin. This is the second newsworthy thing that Dublin City Council has done in recent weeks. The first was to decide that Dublin no longer has Christmas lights, but Winter lights.
It is notable to consider these two proposals alongside each other. The idea of de-linking the “winter celebration” from Christmas is, presumably, to protect the feelings of those minority of Irish people who find the very notion of Christmas offensive. In that case, so important are the sensitivities of a small minority of Dubliners that the rest of us must be compelled to give up any public acknowledgment that Christmas even exists.
Compare the City Council’s explicit sensitivity for the feelings of the Christmas-haters to its explicit insensitivity to the feelings of Irish Jewish people over the significantly more permanent matter of the naming of a City Park. This is a council that is perfectly capable of taking the feelings of minorities into account – even at the expense of the rest of us – when it wishes to.
And of course, this is all in substitution for any real work. A City Council that presides over record homelessness and drug addiction and record levels of petty crime. A City Council that presides over dereliction and commercial flight from the City Centre. A City Council that just this month raised taxes and rents on the people of Dublin to raise more money, presumably to pay for more winter lights.
I am very reliably informed by someone in Iveagh House that Irish diplomats are feeding back “very grave concerns” over “how this is being perceived”.
In the days to come there will be much chatter about how this – as the Taoiseach says – might be “seen” as antisemitic.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that Ireland is, increasingly, an antisemitic country. But then, if you are a fish, you do not know that you are wet.