Ireland? I will not be watching this team again. My children can decide for themselves
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: Republic of Ireland head coach Heimir Hallgrimsson, left, and FAI chief executive officer David Courell during Saturday's press conference at Nagyerdei Stadion in Debrecen, Hungary. Pic: Ben McShane/Sportsfile
At approximately 3.10pm on Saturday, time of death was called on the integrity of the Irish football team. Nobody needed to check the conscience of the FAI for a pulse as they had long assured us they had none.
For several hours, there had been the possibility of something extraordinary. Gavin Bazunu had said he would not play Israel. Other players were apparently wavering. Ireland’s footballers could have shown what happens when people with something miniscule to lose decide that principle matters more than their own convenience.
With history on the line, they chose self interest, and voted to play.
Before anyone calls that a football decision, remember what that playing endorsed. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been reported killed in Gaza since October 2023, the figure already outdated and insufficient. The figures for dead footballers and athletes are horrifying. But we should not need a sporting affiliation to compartmentalise our horror. Every child is a footballer. Give a kid a ball and enough space to kick it and you have the one language this game claims belongs to everybody. Ergo, every dead and crippled man, woman or child is a footballer, too.
The Palestinian women’s team came to Dalymount Park in 2024 and told Irish people about their lives. Brian Kerr and others in Irish football have called for a boycott. There are Palestinian footballers, journalists and families who could have told the squad what playing Israel would mean to them. Did anybody in that meeting call one? Did anybody ask an Irish Palestinian? Or, a Lebanese person? Did anybody open a humanitarian report? Or watch the fucking news, or scroll one of the half dozen social media accounts they pretend they’re not on?
The Irish Independent has reported that Finn Azaz put forward “the other side” of the argument. The other side? Israel’s military stands accused of genocide. What, precisely, was presented to the room, and who was there to answer it? I do not object to a player speaking; I object to a process in which the squad apparently had months to debate its own discomfort, while there is no indication that a Palestinian voice was invited into the conversation.
If a Palestinian account felt too distant, I could have recommended an Irish one. An friend of mine survived the genocide in Gaza, working through it while never once considering himself a victim or a target. He was undoubtedly both. He grew up following the boys in green, as I did. We’ve had a hundred conversations about bodies left at the roadside and dogs eating the dead. He lived with the sound and shock of a thousand airstrikes, encountered Israeli soldiers and witnessed desperate people fighting for scraps of food.
Yet when he speaks about what haunts him most, he describes miles of displaced men, women and children walking along the road with their hands raised. Silent. Carrying nothing. A procession of people whose raised arms offered in silent surrender, though there was nowhere safe for them to surrender to.
Keep that image in mind when the FAI talks about protecting players.
Of course its administrators put the squad in a difficult position. They made the decision to fulfil these fixtures, then let its moral weight land on the footballers. They had not even asked Bazunu how he felt before calling him up. They have long displayed the efficacy of a chocolate teapot. New leadership has made the old look as effective as the Israeli military at clearing Lebanese villages.
But this so-called “difficult position" was also an incredible opportunity and privilege. Most people who witness injustice never get the chance to make a refusal that the world will see. Ireland’s privileged players had one. Bazunu took it. The others were free to follow him. Deliberations aside, they did nothing.
There are few things more fickle in international football than a calf, hamstring or hip flexor when a player or his club has doubts about a call-up. Some injuries are entirely genuine. The point is that players and clubs routinely make hard calculations about availability in their own interests. Here was a chance to make one against those interests. We are asked to believe that suddenly the matter was beyond them.
The FAI warned of lost points, damaged seeding and possible sanctions. It chose to make those things decisive, and deliberately divisive. Even viewed through the narrowest public, cynical relations lens, this was an open goal: an Irish team, just back from losing to Kosovo, willing to accept a sporting penalty for a stand against the mass-killing of civilians. If six points had to be lost, lose them for something noble and pure. Instead the association kept the points in sight and surrendered something it cannot recover.
There will be another familiar manoeuvre. Anger from ordinary Irish people will be recast by the FAI (and likely the players themselves) as bullying. Spare me. Abuse and threats should be condemned wherever they occur. So should the attempt to label fierce public criticism of a public decision as abuse. These are adult professionals surrounded by agents, officials and media staff. They have a right to safety. The public has a right to say that they failed.
By now the match has happened. I do not care whether Ireland won 4-0 or lost 6-0. I do not care what was printed on their shirt or what they wore on their arms. I care how many Palestinians were killed last night and whether my Lebanese friends will ever see their homes again. A gesture at kick-off cannot undo the choice they made.
One refusal might have brought another, and another. Nobody can say how far the dominoes would have fallen. We know only that Bazunu pushed the first one and his teammates, his friends, sat on their hands and watched him leave.
What the young Dubliner clearly understood is that the sorry state of the world will only change when comfortable people acknowledge the status quo, and the criminal harm it does to others. And reject it.
I will not be watching this team again. My children can decide for themselves. But when they ask me why, I will tell them.
