Sally Rooney could have made things a great deal easier for herself. Last year, when the UK government proscribed the direct-action network Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation – making it a criminal offence to provide financial aid to the group or to express an opinion or belief in support of it – she could have said nothing. It was clear, by then, where she stood on the question of Israel’s campaign of slaughter in Gaza: that it amounted to a genocide; that it was happening with the full support of European and American governments; and that it needed to be named and opposed and brought to an end.

But she did not say nothing. She wrote an article for this newspaper about the proscription and its ramifications. In it, she criticised the Irish Government for remaining silent about the Irish citizens arrested in the UK for expressing their support of Palestine Action; Irish citizens who, because of the very legislation they were peacefully protesting against, risked being imprisoned for up to 14 years. She also defended Palestine Action itself, and its direct-action tactics against arms manufacturers whose weapons were being sold to Israel, and which were used in the destruction of Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s October 7th attacks. In the incident that immediately led to the proscription, activists broke into an RAF airbase in Oxfordshire and sprayed red paint on two aeroplanes in protest against the UK government’s military support of Israel.

In this context she felt obliged to state her support for the group. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law, so be it,” she wrote. Her books were still available in British bookshops, she pointed out, and she was regularly in receipt of residual payments from the BBC’s television adaptations of two of her books. “I want to be........

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