Fintan Drury has worked in professional football as a licensed agent and an adviser for over 30 years. He is also known as an advocate and writer on migration and Palestine. Here he reflects on events around Ireland’s matches against Israel.

LAST FRIDAY AFTERNOON I spoke at the Clifden Arts Festival. The talk was entitled ‘Indifference – A Genocide and Our Part in It’.

We consider ourselves fiercely pro-Palestine. The truth is more nuanced. When it comes to the cíulpability of the West for the horror in Gaza, most attention has focused on the United States, Germany, the UK and the EU. In this context, sovereign support actors can escape scrutiny; Ireland is among them.

In Clifden, I used the fact that we were scheduled to play Israel in two Nations League matches as symbolic of how weak our institutional support of Palestine has been. In a previous life, I managed the commercial interests of the Irish squad that contested both the 1990 and 1994 World Cup Finals.

Their exploits generated unprecedented levels of excitement. The whole nation was intoxicated by it; metaphorically at least. The next time an Irish football squad generated anything like the same attention was when Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy fell out in Saipan in 2002.

It was a footballing calamity for a talented squad, one that should have been avoided. Football administrators in many countries have shown a capacity for mismanagement, but the FAI has a particular gift for it.

What emerged over the course of last weekend in relation to the FAI’s handling of the Ireland vs Israel games, did more than expose that flaw as never before; it betrayed the wider institutional indifference that has characterised much of Ireland’s approach to Palestine’s suffering.

The FAI board put this Irish squad in a hopeless position, but did so with clear government support. This matters. Last November, the board formally asked UEFA to ban Israel from all national and club competitions. It believed then that no nation, no group of players, should be asked to fulfil a fixture against Israel as long as its........

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