Later than expected on Saturday night, November 25, Hamas released its second group of hostages, 13 Israelis and four foreign nationals.
The Israelis included nine-year-old Emily Hand, an Israeli/Irish citizen whose ninth birthday occurred while she was being held captive. Emily was initially believed murdered among the over 100 slaughtered in Kibbutz Be’eri, but more than three weeks after the October 7 pogrom her Dublin-born father Thomas was informed that she was a hostage in Gaza.
Ireland’s Taoiseach (Irish term for prime minister) Leo Varadkar and Foreign Minister Micheal Martin were slower than many of their European colleagues to react to the October 7 attack but both, when doing so, unequivocally condemned it and ultimately acknowledged Israel’s right to self-defense.
After a few days, however, concern started to be expressed that Israel would “ go too far” in its attacks on Gaza, and there were calls for Israeli restraint and a “ proportionate” response.
This presented to many as saying, “We acknowledge Israel’s right of self-defense but we will criticize Israel if it exercises it.” The Dublin government totally failed to absorb and publicly fully depict the enormity of the October 7 atrocities, including 3,000 rockets fired at Israel and over 240 hostages abducted that day – their historic resonance and traumatic impact on not only Israelis but Jewish communities globally.
The focus of the Irish media
The major Irish media and political focus in the days that followed rapidly became the carnage in Gaza and presented Israel as the aggressor in a war initiated by Hamas.
In the Irish Parliament all contributions by opposition politicians promoted a narrative demonizing Israel with limited government pushback. Throughout the early weeks of the conflict rarely was any reference made to Hamas’s continuous rocket attacks, to the hostages, nor to Hamas being embedded with civilians and using them as human shields.
Irish mainstream media resisted reporting the existence of tunnels with terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, in particular under or adjacent to schools and hospitals, as it undermined the preferred anti-Israeli narrative and did not acknowledge a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket as responsible for a fire in the car park of a Gaza City hospital (where deaths were first reported by Hamas as 500 and then turned out to be 50 or less).
While in Ireland, Israeli briefings, even those verified by other intelligence agencies, videos, and photos, were frequently disregarded, Hamas statements were too easily given Irish media and political credibility.
IN EARLY November, Thomas Hand visited Dublin to highlight the plight of his daughter Emily to Varadkar, Martin, Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins, and others, and from then on she was sympathetically referenced and her release and that of other hostages demanded.
From day one, the Irish government called for a permanent ceasefire and end to hostilities but never acknowledged that such a ceasefire would continue Hamas’s brutal governance of Gaza; guarantee future Hamas-initiated conflicts; ensure the future reality of Hamas’s promised attempts to repeat the October 7 pogrom; as well as allow Hamas’s continuing malign obstruction of any permanent peace process.
Shortly before the agreed pause, and as Israel continued to be targeted by Hamas rockets, Varadkar accused Israel of being engaged in collective punishment and something approaching revenge – and his minister for higher education criticized Israel for conducting “ a war on children”.
Irish politicians like to be associated in the public mind with good news as do politicians elsewhere. Twitter/X is perceived as an essential political communication platform and is regularly used by both Martin and Varadkar.
A short time after Emily’s late Saturday night release Martin, who visited the Middle East and lobbied for her release, posted a statement expressing delight, acknowledged the role of “the US, Qatar, Egypt and others” in securing it, and called for the immediate unconditional release of all other hostages.
Ireland’s Sunday morning media reported Martin’s statement along with one of Varadkar’s. However, Varadkar had neither posted his statement on X nor was it initially available on his department’s website.
Varadkar late Saturday night had tweeted the following:
“This is a day of enormous joy and relief for Emily Hand and her family. An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned and we breathe a massive sigh of relief. Our prayers have been answered.”
My initial reaction to the tweet, like that of many in Israel, was incredulity and outrage. To those frustrated by the Irish government’s repetitive unbalanced criticism of Israel, it’s inability to publicly acknowledge that Israel was forced to defend itself from rockets fired daily by Hamas and threats by the terrorist organization to repeat its atrocities of October 7, the tweet was an egregious fiction.
Within hours it carried the Twitter/X health warning:
“Emily was not ‘lost,’ she was ‘kidnapped,’ taken as a hostage by Hamas. Kidnapping is against the law, being lost is not.”
Varadkar’s more detailed statement was finally posted by him on Twitter sometime late Sunday or Monday. It emerged that the tweet was merely its first paragraph and that he had depicted Emily as “snatched from her home and held captive for 7 weeks” which he described as “ a slow and cruel torture” of her family, whose “courage and determination” that she be freed he praised. He also hoped for the release of all other hostages and committed to work for “a permanent ceasefire and a just and lasting peace.”
Had Varadkar simply posted his full statement Saturday night on X instead of its first paragraph, now explained as deriving from a Christian parable, much controversy and upset could have been avoided.
Defending Varadkar's satement
Both the Irish media and politicians from all parties, defending Varadkar, presented as bemused by the Israeli reaction, adopted the common default position of criticizing Israeli overreaction and all promoted the fiction that his full statement was known at the time of his tweet. Instead of apologizing, Varadkar deflected. Of course, far more important than this storm in a teacup is that all hostages are rapidly released.
The controversy highlights the Irish government’s and Irish media’s incapacity to understand Israeli and Jewish trauma, cultural and religious differences, the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the importance of fact, truth, and precision of language. Parable or not, referencing Emily as “lost” and “found” was, in the circumstances, extraordinarily insensitive and beyond ludicrous.
Other issues ignored in the furor were the failure of both Varadkar and Martin in their statements to acknowledge the role of Israel in securing Emily’s release and to criticize Hamas for continuing to imprison hostages. As stated by President Isaac Herzog, when aggressively interviewed on Irish television a week ago, the Irish government has yet to “admit the truth” about the conflict in Gaza. But should it do so, Israel will still continue to have an Irish problem.
The tweet deployed by Varadkar resonated with that of a former Irish taoiseach and foreign minister, Liam Cosgrave, who after the Suez Crisis in 1956 at the UN urged Israel and Egypt to resolve their differences “in a spirit of Christian charity.”
In a world in which for the Jewish people history too often repeats itself, on the Monday following Emily’s release Ireland’s Limerick City Council voted to boycott Israel, almost 120 years after a Redemptorist Catholic priest incited a boycott of that city’s small emigrant Jewish community and drove out all of Limericks Jewish population.
The previous week, the Dublin City Council, demonizing Israel and disinterested in the fate of hostages, refused a requested meeting by Dana Ehrlich, Israel’s ambassador to Ireland with Dublin’s Lord Mayor Daithi de Roiste.
On Monday the same council unanimously voted to immediately start flying the Palestinian flag in Dublin for a week.
The writer is a former Irish minister for justice, equality and defense, a former chairperson of the Irish Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and a fellow of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations.