Editorial: Ireland's unfriendly views on Israel are, at last, being noticed

Ireland’s ambassador to Israel has been summoned to the Israeli government after crass remarks by Leo Varadkar.

The Irish prime minister issued a message on the social media platform X saying that the release of Emily Hand, an Irish girl taken hostage, was a source of “enormous joyn and relief”, but also saying that "an innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned”.

The Taoiseach has said people will understand what he was saying, and insisting that he has always been unequivocal condemnation of Hamas and hostage taking. Defenders of Mr Varadkar point out that a reference to being lost and found is also a biblical one. But many people in Israel and indeed in Britain and Ireland have recoiled from Mr Varadkar’s “lost" and "found” remark.

Such language in any circumstances would be at risk of seeming to undermine the seriousness of what happened in which, as Israel has pointed out, Hamas barbarians massacred many hundreds of civilians in Israel, including 260 or so young people at a dance festival, and kidnapped more than 200 people. But there is a particular problem in Mr Varadkar having used this language, when Ireland is widely seen to have been one of the least friendly European countries towards Israel in recent decades, and one of its most bitter critics since the October 7 massacre of Jews, the worst such attacks since the holocaust ended in 1945.

Ireland’s focus has been overwhelming on the wellbeing of people in Gaza. Sinn Fein wants the Israeli ambassador expelled. This is all being noticed by influential people in Britain and even some in America, and by many Jewish observers.

Yet London always gushes about relations with Ireland, as Michael Gove did last week, even as Dublin has the nerve to threaten to sue the UK over the legacy of the past – a legacy of terror in which Ireland has so many questions to answer.