Irish anger over the war in Gaza may spoil Biden’s St Patrick’s Day party
Ireland celebrates its national holiday St Patrick’s Day this weekend. Tens of thousands of tourists will descend upon Dublin for the annual parade. Meanwhile, many members of the Irish government will be overseas, engaging with the Irish diaspora and in high-level diplomacy in capitals around the world, from Paris to Singapore to Buenos Aires.
The Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, will be in Washington and attend a meeting with the most powerful Irish American: US President Joe Biden. But with Israel continuing its war in Gaza with US backing, resulting in the deaths of more than 31,300 Palestinians so far, according to local health authorities, there have been calls from Irish citizens and opposition politicians for the government to boycott the St Patrick’s Day celebrations in protest.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, Paul Murphy, a leftwing member of Ireland’s parliament, criticised Irish politicians for planning to meet Mr Biden and said: “There should be no shamrocks for the US administration as long as they support this genocide.”
Mary Lou McDonald, Ireland’s leader of the opposition and the head of the political party Sinn Fein (which operates in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the UK), has said that she will attend the celebrations in the White House but that it will be an opportunity to send “a very clear message” to US leaders over the situation in Gaza and the need for a ceasefire.
The mere presence of politicians from Sinn Fein at the White House underscores the different approach that the US has taken to conflict resolution in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in comparison with Northern Ireland.
Sinn Fein, now the largest political party in Northern Ireland and joint largest in the Republic, once served as the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The militant group drew its members from the Catholic community and fought a bloody guerrilla campaign to oust British forces from Northern Ireland that led to the deaths of many civilians (both Catholic and Protestant), as well as soldiers.
The Clinton administration’s controversial decision in the 1990s to invite figures from the Irish republican movement to the US, despite an IRA bombing campaign in the UK, was viewed as an important step in encouraging IRA members away from armed struggle and towards the peace process – that Mr Biden has supported.
Just last year, Mr Biden said he visited Northern Ireland “to make sure the Brits didn’t screw around” with the region’s peace process. However, Mr Biden’s government has put little effort into protecting the minuscule rights Palestinians gained under the Oslo Accords, with settler violence and settlement construction increasing in the occupied West Bank.
Since declaring that Hamas must be eliminated following its October 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, Mr Biden has reiterated the US’s position that the militants must be removed from Gaza and can form no part of a postwar Palestinian government.
Some argue that the popularity of Hamas, classified as a terrorist organisation by the US and EU, may have even risen among Palestinians since the start of the war. As Columbia University’s Prof Page Fortna noted in an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the Israeli belief that Palestinians will blame Hamas for their misery is misguided. According to Prof Fortna’s research on the dynamics of support in conflict “when people are under bombardment and siege, they rally around those fighting for and dying with them. Hamas’s own culpability for provoking the disaster doesn’t matter”.
A governing authority without Hamas involvement could lack legitimacy among many Palestinians and the group’s exclusion could sow the seeds of a future insurgency. This may explain reports that Arab negotiators have mooted the idea of encouraging the incorporation of Hamas’s political wing into the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as part of a peace settlement. This would allow it to be connected with a post-war Palestine even if Hamas does not form part of the initial government.
Joining the PLO would probably require Hamas to renounce any armed struggle that could undermine security for both the new Palestinian governing authority and the Israeli state – although whether Israel would accept a reconfigured and potentially more empowered Palestinian governing authority without pressure from the US remains to be seen.
Elections held in Northern Ireland after the 1998 peace agreement brokered by the US led to Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander, becoming Minister for Education in a power-sharing arrangement with pro-British unionist parties. A fragile peace followed. There have been breakdowns in relations between nationalist and unionist parties while splinter groups from the IRA have launched deadly attacks on civilians and security forces. But last year, for the first time in Northern Ireland, there were no deaths linked to terrorism or sectarian strife – a long-awaited dividend from a peace process that required many politicians to take political risks.
Michelle O’Neill, First Minister for Northern Ireland and Vice President of Sinn Fein, recently said Hamas will eventually be regarded as a partner for peace in the Middle East. The daughter of a former IRA prisoner turned Sinn Fein politician, Ms O’Neill will attend the St Patrick’s Day celebrations at the White House. Her view on the possibility of dialogue with Hamas will no doubt jar with many Irish Americans, who are are viewed as more conservative than the Irish on the island of Ireland.
Pictures of Mr Varadkar handing over a glass bowl of shamrocks to Mr Biden will emerge while the US-backed war in Gaza rages on. This will no doubt attract some criticism, but the presence of Sinn Fein at the White House celebrations may well make more of a statement about what a sustainable path to peace looks like than a boycott.
Biden’s government has put little effort into protecting the few rights Palestinians got under the Oslo Accords