Ireland Won a Game of Football 3-0. It Lost Everything Else

Ireland beat Israel 3–0 on Sunday night. Three goals, three points, a result to celebrate, but if the victory feels like vindication for what happened around the match, Ireland has lost by a greater score than it realises. Ireland can keep the three points; it must also own the ugliness it brought into the “Beautiful Game.” Victory did not excuse the conduct, it exposed how comfortable Irish society has become with demonising Israelis and calling it conscience.

This was not one player making an ill-judged gesture. It began with the manager, continued through the Football Association of Ireland, played out across the team and found an ugly echo among fans online. It was nearly three years of Irish hostility towards Israel compressed into ninety minutes, a country so certain of its own moral authority that it could no longer see the people standing in front of it.

Before the game, Ireland manager Heimir Hallgrímsson declared: “We’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide.”

In talking about a football match against Israelis, he took the name of the greatest crime in human history and attached it to the players his team was about to face. He did so knowing what that word means to Jews, and knowing that less than three years ago they were murdered, raped and taken hostage in the deadliest attack on our people since the Holocaust.

Hallgrímsson made a fool of himself. Worse, he gave his players and the Irish fans a moral script. Israel was not an opponent to be beaten but an evil to be confronted, a statement that has led to the justification of violence and even the murder of Jews here in the UK and across the world.

As Israel’s national anthem played, Irish players bowed their heads, Hallgrímsson stood with his back to the pitch, the teams did not shake hands, Irish captain Dara O’Shea did not exchange pennants with Israel captain Manor Solomon. Ireland then played the match, took the points and celebrated the win. They found the strength of character to share a football pitch with Israelis when victory was at stake, but could not bring themselves to acknowledge them as fellow footballers, even, it would appear, as fellow human beings.

Then came the black armbands. FAI chief executive David Courell said they were worn “in recognition of all lives lost in the Gaza conflict”. Set against the manager’s words and the team’s conduct, this was not mourning for the Jews murdered on 7 October or for Israelis killed since. It was a political statement directed at Israel while its players stood on the other side of the pitch.

After scoring Ireland’s third goal, Jack Moylan removed his armband, kissed it, raised it and kissed the Ireland badge. A symbol supposedly recognising all lives lost had become a prop in a celebration against Israel. Moylan’s gesture confirmed what the FAI’s carefully worded statement had always hoped it would say to the world.

The treatment of Finn Azaz makes the whole affair even more painful. Azaz chose to represent Ireland, his mother and grandparents are Israeli, and he has spoken proudly of his Irish and Israeli heritage. Amid online hostility over those roots, Irish reporting says the FAI believes he may end his international career after this window. That his departure is even being discussed should shame Irish football. What kind of national team makes one of its own wonder whether his family is acceptable to the country he represents?

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) identifies a double standard applied to Israel, demanding of the Jewish state conduct not demanded of other democratic nations, as a clear example of antisemitism. Ireland has made the test even starker. Its sporting bodies have shown ordinary courtesy to teams from countries ruled by the Taliban and by Qatar, yet when the opponent was Israel, courtesy itself became unacceptable. If Ireland wants to insist this is principle rather than prejudice, it must explain that difference. They say this is about human rights, Ireland’s choices would suggest that human rights are not all that high up on their list of concerns, or at the very least they only become so when the subjects of their ire are Jews.

In August, Ireland’s men’s cricket team hosted Afghanistan for five one-day internationals. Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban, a movement whose forces massacred Hazara civilians, including thousands in Mazar-i Sharif in 1998. Amnesty International has documented acts including collective punishment, extrajudicial executions, torture and hostage-taking, and says its systematic persecution of women and girls amount to a crime against humanity. Under Taliban rule, girls have been shut out of secondary education, women driven from work and public life, dissenters imprisoned or disappeared, and female athletes forced into exile.

England, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand refuse bilateral cricket fixtures with Afghanistan over the exclusion of women from the sport. Ireland arranged a five-match series and played it. No Irish sporting establishment decided that facing Afghan players meant “playing against” the Taliban’s crimes.

In May, Ireland’s football team played Qatar. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented migrant workers subjected to exploitation, wage theft and dangerous conditions, thousands of sudden and unexplained worker deaths that Qatar has failed to investigate or explain; women constrained by male guardianship rules; and LGBT people facing criminalisation, arbitrary arrest and abuse in detention. Qatar also hosted and funded Hamas’s political leadership, giving senior figures in the organisation responsible for the 7 October massacre a home in Doha.

There were protests during that match, but not against the abhorrent crimes of the Qatari regime. They were for Palestine and against Ireland’s forthcoming fixtures with Israel. Qatar’s record was not the object of a national-team protest, Hallgrímsson did not declare that playing Qatar meant playing against migrant worker exploitation or the persecution of LGBT people. The country that housed Hamas leaders was received as a footballing guest, the Jewish state was treated as a moral contaminant.

There is your moral compass. The Taliban can erase women from sport and Ireland will host its men’s team. Qatar can play at the Aviva Stadium while protesters use the fixture to demand a boycott of Israel, but Israelis are deemed unworthy of a handshake.

There is also a historical image Irish football cannot wish away. In May 1939, Ireland’s national team lined up in Bremen and gave the Nazi salute before playing Germany. The gesture honoured the anthem and symbols of a regime already persecuting Jews and soon to carry out their industrial murder. Eighty-seven years later, Irish footballers bowed their heads for the anthem of the Jewish state, while their manager accused that state of the crime born of Europe’s destruction of the Jews.

Respect for the anthem of Nazi Germany, contempt for the anthem of Israel. Ireland might find that comparison uncomfortable, it should, because it is.

Sunday night did not come from nowhere. The FAI did not invent Ireland’s attitude towards Israel, it absorbed it. Its actions were the sporting expression of a broader culture that has spent nearly three years treating hostility to the Jewish state as evidence of moral clarity.

Ireland’s government has made Israel the object of extraordinary condemnation. Its football association sought to drive Israel out of European competition. By the time its team took the field, the refusal to treat Israeli opponents with ordinary respect was presented as an act of national conscience.

Ireland knows what sectarianism does to a society. During last year’s presidential election, Heather Humphreys, a Presbyterian from Monaghan, said she and her family endured “toxic, targeted sectarian abuse” over her faith and traditions. She asked what message that sent to Protestants and unionists about their place in Ireland. It was a question the country needed to hear and now Irish Jews are asking their own version of it. The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland recorded 143 serious antisemitic incidents in six months, involving threats, intimidation and violence towards Jewish people. In a community of roughly 2,200, those figures should have shaken the country. Instead, an Irish footballer’s Israeli heritage became a liability and contempt for Jewish opponents became a public performance.

What has Ireland learned from its own history if it can recognise sectarian hatred in one setting and cheer it in another? A conflict whose present war began with Hamas’s massacre on October 7th has become, in much of Irish public life, an opportunity to cast the Jewish state as the singular evil of our age. That judgment is applied with a zeal conspicuously absent when Ireland faces countries responsible for other appalling abuses.

The scoreboard will record Israel 0, Ireland 3. It cannot record the cost of a government, sporting establishment and public culture that have allowed hatred of Israel to masquerade as virtue.

The armbands claimed to mourn “all lives”, the conduct around them told Jews that ours were excluded. An Irish player’s family was treated as a stain on his shirt. Israeli athletes were made to stand for a crime their manager had assigned to an entire nation. These were the consequences of a country repeatedly applauding itself for a hostility it ought to recognise.

Ireland won the match 3–0. In choosing to try to humiliate Jews and call it virtue, it showed the world how much of its moral compass it has lost and humiliated only itself.