According to Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, the Herbert Park Hotel in Dublin cancelled a booking for 70 delegates to last week’s international conference on combating anti-Semitism.

The conference was held here as part of Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. Some of the delegates are Jewish, some are not – Ireland’s representative, Colm O’Loughlin, is a principal officer at the Department of Justice.

According to Cohen, the hotel manager asked him whether the Israel Defense Forces would be involved. “Nothing I had said had anything whatsoever to do with the Israeli army, yet somehow that was where the conversation had gone.” The booking was subsequently cancelled without explanation.

Whatever the intentions of the hotel (and one suspects that the cancellation was motivated more by a desire to avoid the possibility of protest than by any conscious prejudice), this should be just as upsetting to Irish people as the effective cancellation of Sally Rooney in the UK over her support for Palestine Action.

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