Editorial: An utterly ill-timed criticism of Israel on Holocaust Memorial Day from President Michael Higgins of Ireland

For many years, Michael D Higgins has been a highly political president of Ireland.​

To a greater extent than any of his recent predecessors, the Republic’s head of state has found a way to make clear his views on matters.

His partisan interventions on Northern Ireland are too many to list, and at times almost comically high minded: three years ago he scolded the province over integrated education, yet he presides over a state in which the Catholic church still has a central role in schooling – a Catholic church that is the biggest opposition to integrated education in NI.

The year before that he snubbed the centenary service held in Armagh, seemingly on the grounds that he considered it to be an event that celebrated partition. In fact the service was almost the opposite – Northern Ireland was essentially not allowed centenary celebrations, and the Armagh service was a neutral marking of the events 100 years before, in which the then president of the Methodist church Rev Dr Sahr Yambasu gave a sermon that barely mentioned NI, let alone celebrated it. The failure of Protestant churchmen to counter the Catholic archbishop’s comments in that service about the pain of partition meant that the main BBC news angle that evening was in fact criticism of partition. Yet this event, which was an insult to people who wanted to celebrate NI at 100, was still too much for President Higgins.

While he has condemned utterly the taking of Israeli hostages by Hamas and the October 7 massacres at, for example, the Nova music festival, it has been clear since that dark day that President Higgins remains undimmed in his long-time criticisms of Israel, despite his supposedly apolitical office.

Holocaust Education Ireland can hardly be surprised that he used Holocaust Memorial Day, of all days, to criticise Israel again – the state that emerged from the sheer horror of the Nazi genocide.