On match days, Peadar Browns, a pub in the Liberties district of Dublin, is usually packed with football fans piling in to watch the screens. As kickoff approached on Sunday in the Republic of Ireland’s Nations League game against Israel, the crowd was similarly busy, with one significant difference: none of the televisions were on. “We committed about a month ago not to show any of the upcoming Nations League fixtures until Ireland made a stand against Israel,” owner Aidan Brown said. “We didn’t show the Kosovo game, and we’ve absolutely no intention of showing the Israel games.” The dark screens are a protest against what the campaigners behind the boycott call Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
Brown has been compiling a list of venues refusing to screen the match. At his last count it stood at 140 pubs and bars, in Ireland and abroad, and he expected the number to rise before kickoff. In Derry, Liam Doherty of the Delacroix bar describes the same mobilisation from the other end of the island. “It has to come from the bottom up, and it has to come from a small nation,” he said. “I think that we have to be the one that shows that this is just wrong.”
The sentiment is measurable. A poll of Irish football supporters found 76 percent opposed to the fixture going ahead, and 63 percent of members of the Professional Footballers’ Association of Ireland voted against playing. Rebecca O’Keeffe, chair of Irish Sport for Palestine, which has led the Stop the Game campaign, puts it plainly: “It’s a mass movement. It’s reached corners of Ireland that maybe wouldn’t have been engaged with this issue before. It’s all people can talk about. We are past the point of symbolic gestures and hollow words.”
Against that stands the Football Association of Ireland’s own arithmetic. In November, 93 percent of FAI members voted for the association to seek Israel’s suspension from UEFA competitions. In July, when the FAI voted on whether Ireland should actually play Israel, the motion to fulfil the fixtures passed 75 votes to 32, with three abstentions, the association citing consequences such as potential points deductions and UEFA sanctions; Ireland is due to co-host the 2028 European Championship with England, Wales and Scotland. Daniel Lambert, the Bohemian FC chief commercial officer who helped propose the November motion, sees a broken instruction. “It’s been mishandled from the very first day by the FAI,” he said. “The November vote was a very clear instruction from the membership, but they never really entertained not playing the games.” He argues there were “huge benefits to not playing,” and that a refusal “would have enhanced the FAI’s reputation, not damaged it.” Susan Shalabi, vice president of the Palestinian Football Association, goes a level higher: “Had football’s international governing bodies [FIFA and UEFA] consistently applied their own rules, this dilemma would not exist.”
So the decision fell to twenty-five players in a team hotel. On Saturday, with the first game in Debrecen, Hungary, a day away, Ireland’s press conference and training session were delayed by more than five hours while the players talked among themselves. A vote followed; reports suggested eight voted against playing. Only one man acted on it. Gavin Bazunu, the 24-year-old goalkeeper, told his teammates he did not want to play, then left the squad, announcing on social media that it would be “wrong to participate,” based, he said, “purely upon my personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong.” His stance, he stressed, was “not in opposition of the Israeli people or the Jewish community but against the atrocities in the region. There are few times where you get a chance in life to stand up for something bigger and I strongly believe that this is one of them.” The country had been weighing conscience against UEFA sanctions for months, and more than 160 Irish sportspeople had signed an open letter urging a boycott.
FAI chief executive David Courell said a “significant majority” of the players voted to continue, and the association decided “this fixture would continue as we have always intended to fulfill the fixtures.” The players, he said, were uncomfortable with questions “that are not about football,” asked to be excused media obligations around the match, intend to wear black armbands “in recognition of all lives lost in the conflict,” and will skip elements of the pre-match ceremony. Players and the FAI will make a “significant contribution” to charity from the match fees, neither Israel game being open to Irish fans.
Coach Heimir Hallgrimsson had already laid his own line down: “we’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide. We’re playing against Israel, we’re not playing with Israel.” The Israeli football federation answered with an accusation of “stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy.” Hallgrimsson concedes the pressure has grown “almost to a breaking limit”; midfielder Jason Knight said the games should not be happening; former Ireland coach Brian Kerr said the FAI had “lost the respect of the Irish people.” The SIPTU trade union hung a poster beside the River Liffey urging the players to “Go with your conscience!” and “Don’t play with genocide,” over an image of a blood-splattered ball. RTÉ, the national broadcaster, will carry only stripped-back contractual coverage of the Israel games, with no studio, no analysis and no advertising, and has said Ireland will boycott next year’s Eurovision Song Contest over Israel’s participation.
Lambert, who also manages the hip-hop trio Kneecap, watches the squad’s fault line and thinks of the music business, where Irish-American rapper Macklemore was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s US tour after speaking out for Palestine and fellow support acts, including Irish artists Aaron Rowe and Beoga, withdrew in solidarity. “We’ve seen a real watershed moment in music,” he said. “I think this still has the potential to be one of those moments in sport.” Of Bazunu’s solitary refusal he said: “To do that on your own in a group of 25 players is staggering courage. He’s represented Ireland more than those 24 players ever will. He has the respect of the Irish people forever.”
The calendar offers no relief. Austria come to Dublin on Wednesday, where the players will face an angry home crowd, and the second Israel game, Ireland’s nominal home fixture, shifted for “operational reasons” to Bačka Topola in Serbia, with no fans, follows on October 4. Brown compares the national mood to the Saipan drama of 2002, when Roy Keane walked out of Ireland’s World Cup squad; that argument was about football standards, he notes, and this one is about moral ones. In the Liberties, the televisions at Peadar Browns will stay off for the return fixture too. “The points are just not important at all,” Brown said. “Football is just football. Sadly, it just doesn’t mean that much when a genocide is going on.”