Maurice Black@mauricejblack
On Tuesday, for the eleventh time in recent years, antisemitic graffiti was scrawled across a road in the Louth-Meath area. The word "Jew." The word "rats." Stars of David. Another word that the media censored. Painted in broad strokes on the L5600 at Bigstown, two hundred metres from a school.
The eleventh time.
I want to sit with that number for a moment. Because at some point between the first time and the eleventh time, something happened that is worse than the graffiti itself: it became routine. A councillor makes a call. The council sends a crew. The graffiti is removed. And then, weeks or months later, someone drives out under cover of darkness and does it again. And we absorb it. We metabolise it. We move on.
Councillor Paddy Meade, who has been almost entirely alone in raising the alarm on these incidents, put it plainly after the ninth occurrence: "Does anyone mind?" He noted that CCTV footage had previously been passed on to the Gardaí. He asked whether we should even bother investigating this anymore. The question wasn't rhetorical. It was exhausted.
This is what Ireland has become. Not overnight, and not because of any single moment, but by slow accretion, by the steady compounding of things left unsaid, undone, unconfronted.
Several weeks ago, the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland published its first ever Antisemitic Incident Report. It documented 143 incidents in just six months, affecting a tiny community of around 2,300 people. Verbal abuse. Vandalism. Threats. Exclusion and discrimination. People afraid to wear a Star of David to work. A young person in school receiving images of swastikas and told that "the classroom will turn into a modern-day gas chamber." A pub with a sign reading "All Zionists Are Barred." Thirty percent of the incidents were triggered simply by cues of Jewish identity, an accent, a symbol, a few words of Hebrew.
And here is the detail that should haunt every person who cares about this country: Ireland has no official mechanism for recording antisemitic incidents. None. The JRCI had to build the reporting system and compile the statistics themselves. The same Irish state that has made the Palestinian cause a defining feature of its international identity has not troubled itself to count the ways an Irish minority group is being systematically harassed, threatened, and dehumanised at home.
Holocaust Awareness Ireland called the graffiti a "bellwether of national sentiment." That phrase should chill us. The graffiti is not an aberration. It is a crude expression of something that has been permitted to take root in our culture more broadly. The comparison of Jews to vermin was, as HAI noted, a cornerstone of Goebbels' own propaganda apparatus, the rhetorical precondition for extermination. The German word for the murder of Jews and the German word for pest control were, by design, the same: vernichten. And now Jews are compared to rats on a country road in Meath, a few hundred metres from where children go to school, and the dominant national response is a procedural shrug.
I keep returning to something Maurice Cohen, chair of the JRCI, said when asked whether the incidents were merely a response to events in Gaza: "Framing hostility against Irish Jews as an understandable consequence of events elsewhere is victim blaming." He's right. And the fact that the question was even posed (by a journalist, in the pages of the Irish Times) tells you everything about how deeply the rationalisation has embedded itself. There is always a reason. There is always a context. There is always some geopolitical frame that renders the suffering of Irish Jews comprehensible, and therefore tolerable, and therefore ignorable.
Yoni Wieder, the Chief Rabbi of Ireland, put it with a gentleness that I find almost unbearable, saying that antisemitism in Ireland "surfaces often enough, and in ordinary enough settings, that it cannot be dismissed as rare or confined to the margins of society. This means that for many, Jewish belonging in Ireland feels more fragile than it should."
"More fragile than it should." What a careful, aching phrase to describe the experience of looking at the country in which you live and wondering whether it still wants you.
Nine percent of Irish adults believe the Holocaust is a myth. Another seventeen percent believe the number of deaths has been greatly exaggerated. Half of all Irish adults do not know that six million Jews were killed. This is not ignorance at the margins. This is a catastrophic failure of education, of memory, of conscience.
And yet Ireland routinely presents itself to the world as a moral authority on questions of oppression and justice. We speak with great passion about colonialism, about solidarity, about the universality of human rights. We have built an entire diplomatic identity around the idea that Ireland, having suffered, understands the suffering of others. But suffering has not made us empathetic. It has made us selective. We have learned to see certain kinds of pain with clarity but to look through others as though they were not there.
The eleventh time. Someone will scrub the road clean again. By today, the paint may already be gone. And then, in a few more weeks or months, it will happen again, for the twelfth time, and we will perform the same rituals of procedural condemnation and bureaucratic cleanup. But nothing will change, because the problem is not the paint.
The problem is us.
The problem is a country that has allowed antisemitism to become ambient and has decided, collectively and by default, that this is acceptable. That this is just how things are now. That this is us being on the "right side of history."
Councillor Meade asked the right question. Does anyone mind?
I mind. But I am starting to wonder whether that matters.
