Why Does Ireland Support Palestine?

Why does Ireland support Palestine? What the polling shows

Ireland isn't slightly more sympathetic to Palestinians than the rest of Europe. It sits somewhere else entirely, and the numbers show it. This page sets out why, with a source for every claim. If you want the wider background on the conflict first, start with our Palestine explained hub.

The most detailed evidence comes from a representative survey of 1,547 people, carried out in December 2023 and written up by Miceal Canavan (Ulster University) and Liam Kneafsey (Trinity College Dublin) for RTÉ Brainstorm in August 2026. Some 76% of Irish respondents said the conflict mattered to them "a fair amount" or "a great deal". The United States, normally the most engaged public anywhere, came in at 64%. Spain, the closest European country, reached 44%.

On sympathy the gap is wider. About 53% of Irish respondents sympathised more with Palestinians and 11% with Israel. Elsewhere in Europe, sympathy for the Palestinian side ranged from 12% in Germany to 27% in Spain.

It isn't a left-wing niche, either. Left-leaning voters were more pro-Palestinian, as they are across Europe and the US, but a plurality of voters for every major Irish party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil included, favoured the Palestinian cause.

Other polling points the same way. A November 2023 Ireland Thinks poll of 1,387 people, commissioned by the Irish Anti-Apartheid Campaign for Palestine, found 71% believed Palestinians live under an apartheid system set up by Israel (Euronews). Bear in mind that a campaign group paid for that one.

So what drives it? In the RTÉ study, the strongest predictors were political ideology and how closely people followed the conflict. Next came something more specific to Ireland: how strongly people agreed that "Ireland has faced historical oppression". Each one-step increase on that four-point scale raised the odds of sympathising with Palestinians by 36%, after other factors were accounted for.

A shared experience of colonisation and partition

History is the answer most Irish people give themselves, and the survey data backs them up. But the parallel is worth looking at closely, because it explains a lot and also gets some things wrong.

How Irish people describe the parallel

Almost one in ten respondents in the RTÉ survey compared Ireland's past to the Palestinian experience without being asked to, before any question about Irish history came up. "We as Irish know what it is like to be taken over and dominated by a bigger nation," one wrote. Another: "It's the same kind of colonisation Ireland experienced in the 17th century." Brendan Ciarán Browne of Trinity College Dublin put it to Euronews as a kind of "almost natural empathy towards other colonised peoples".

Partition is the sharper link. In 1937 Éamon de Valera, then head of the Irish Free State government, went to the League of Nations to oppose the Peel Commission's plan to split Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state (PalQuest). Rory Miller's history of Irish policy records him calling partition "the cruelest wrong that could be done to any people" (History Ireland). He was speaking as the leader of a state on a partitioned island.

Some of the connections are literal. After the Irish Free State was founded in 1922, some Black and Tans officers were redeployed to British Mandate Palestine (Euronews). For a lot of Irish people, the same empire drew the lines in both places.

Where the comparison has limits

Ireland got a state. Palestinians haven't. That is the biggest difference, and it's easy to lose in the rhetoric. Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab, writing for the Arab Center Washington DC in 2022, set out others. People in Northern Ireland can hold Irish or UK citizenship, or both, and move freely across the border; Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza are, in his words, "essentially stateless". He also notes that marriage across the Catholic–Protestant divide happened, in modest numbers, while between Palestinians and Israelis it is nearly non-existent. (For what occupation means in Gaza today, see is Gaza still occupied?)

The analogy can also flatten Israelis into stand-ins for British colonists, which isn't how Irish governments have ever framed it. Ireland's recognition announcement in 2024 stated that Ireland "has for many decades recognised the State of Israel and its right to exist in peace and security" (gov.ie). The 1980 Venice Declaration, which Ireland helped shape, paired "the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" with "the right to existence and to security of all the states in the region, including Israel" (EEAS). Irish policy supports Palestinian freedom alongside Israel, not in place of it.

And shared history didn't make Irish sympathy automatic. When Frank Aiken pressed Israel at the UN over the refugees and, after 1967, the occupied territories, Irish newspapers "unanimously condemned" his interventions, according to the History Ireland review of Miller's book. The Evening Herald asked whether he "would be just as anxious to hand back the Hill of Tara if it had been used to shell Meath farmers" (History Ireland). Opinion shifted over decades. It wasn't inherited.

Irish state policy on Palestine, 1937 to 2026

Irish support isn't only a matter of public feeling. It has a paper trail, and the state has often moved before the rest of Europe. The Department of Foreign Affairs describes Ireland as "the first European Union Member State to declare that a solution to the conflict in the Middle East had to be based on a fully sovereign Palestinian State" (DFA). The table covers the main steps; our full timeline places them in the wider history.

Aiken, the refugees and 1980

Ireland joined the UN in 1955, and Frank Aiken made Palestinian refugees one of his causes. His argument, as Miller summarises it, was that solving the refugee crisis had to come before a general peace settlement, not after it (History Ireland).

The 1980 moment is the one the Department of Foreign Affairs still leads with. Brian Lenihan's joint declaration with Bahrain in February recognised the PLO's role in representing Palestinians and called for Israel to withdraw from all territory occupied in 1967. The History Ireland review calls it the basis of the EEC's Venice Declaration four months later, which made Lenihan "a major architect" of Community policy on Palestine. Read the Venice text and you'll find Ireland named in it: the nine EEC states cite "the speech made on their behalf on 25 September 1979 by the Irish minister of foreign affairs" at the UN General Assembly (EEAS). The same declaration called Israeli settlements "illegal under international law".

UNIFIL: Irish soldiers in Lebanon

For many Irish families the Middle East isn't abstract. Ireland first sent 50 officers to Lebanon in 1958, and a full contingent joined UNIFIL in 1978, after a Palestinian attack from Lebanon killed 30 civilians in northern Israel and Israel invaded in response. Forty-seven Irish peacekeepers have died in Lebanon, 15 of them in the line of fire; RTÉ's history notes they were at risk from "either side in the conflict". The most recent was Private Seán Rooney, shot dead in December 2022. The UN Security Council voted on 28 August 2025 to withdraw UNIFIL by 2027 (RTÉ).

2024 to 2026: recognition, the ICJ and the settlement goods ban

Taoiseach Simon Harris announced recognition on 22 May 2024, effective 28 May, saying Ireland "recognises Palestine as a nation among nations" (gov.ie). On 6 January 2025, Ireland used Article 63 of the ICJ Statute to intervene in South Africa's genocide case against Israel. That's an intervention on how the Genocide Convention should be read, not a joint application (ICJ).

Then came the law. The Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Act 2026 bans imports from settlement postal codes designated by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Oireachtas; Revenue). Its long title ties it to the ICJ's advisory opinion of 19 July 2024. We explain how it works in the Occupied Territories Act explained.

The rhetoric has kept pace with the policy. Addressing the UN General Assembly's 81st session on 24 September 2026, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said "we, the collective international community, have failed Palestine", and described conditions in the West Bank as amounting to "ethnic cleansing", with violent settlers acting "with near-total impunity, while Palestinian communities face a sustained campaign of displacement and destruction" (gov.ie; RTÉ).

Civil society: pressure from below

Irish governments rarely got there first on their own. In July 1984, Mary Manning, a 21-year-old cashier at a Dunnes Stores shop in Dublin, refused to handle a South African grapefruit. She and her colleagues stayed out for nearly three years, and the dispute ended in 1987 after the government decided to ban South African fresh produce (History Workshop).

The settlement goods ban started the same way. Independent Senator Frances Black first brought an Occupied Territories Bill in 2018 (Irish Times). After the government's goods-only version passed, she said she would bring a new bill covering services in September 2026, arguing that "70 per cent of trade with Israel is services" (Irish Times). That figure is hers; we haven't seen an official breakdown.

Culture has moved too. On 4 December 2025 RTÉ said it would neither take part in nor broadcast the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, calling participation "unconscionable given the appalling loss of lives in Gaza" (RTÉ).

The RTÉ survey authors draw the conclusion plainly: "Pressure from below explains the arc of Irish policy" (RTÉ Brainstorm). For the groups doing that work, and how to join them, see our solidarity page.

Is Irish support for Palestine antisemitic?

The best available evidence says antisemitism isn't what drives Irish support for Palestinians. Antisemitism in Ireland is still real, and Irish Jews report it rising. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other.

Start with the data. In the RTÉ survey, most respondents rated their comfort with a Jewish neighbour at 9 or 10 out of 10, higher than for a Muslim neighbour. In the open-ended answers, antisemitic content appeared in 8 of 1,547 responses and Islamophobic content in 14. To be fair to the question, the authors did find that antisemitic respondents leaned more Palestinian; there were simply too few of them to explain national opinion. Their verdict: the evidence for antisemitism as the engine of pro-Palestinian attitudes is "extremely weak" (RTÉ Brainstorm).

The accusation comes mostly from the Israeli government. Announcing the closure of Israel's embassy in Dublin on 15 December 2024, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar cited Ireland's "extreme anti-Israel policies" and "antisemitic rhetoric". Harris replied: "I utterly reject the assertion that Ireland is anti-Israel. Ireland is pro-peace, pro-human rights and pro-International law" (France 24).

Now the part that gets less attention. The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland recorded 143 antisemitic incidents between July 2025 and January 2026, in a community of about 2,200 people: verbal abuse, graffiti, threats and exclusion. Chief Rabbi Yoni Wieder said that "for many, Jewish belonging in Ireland feels more fragile than it should". The council's chair, Maurice Cohen, rejected linking the incidents to events in Gaza and the West Bank as "victim blaming" (Irish Times).

He's right to. Blaming Irish Jews for what the Israeli government does is antisemitism, full stop, and it does nothing for Palestinians. Criticising a state's actions under international law is a different thing, and the Irish evidence suggests that is what most people here are doing.

The limits of Irish policy

Ireland leads Europe on this, but leading Europe is a low bar, and there are clear places where Irish policy stops.

The biggest is services. The 2026 Act covers goods only. Ministers cited Attorney General advice that the legal basis for a services ban was "not as strong", and an amendment to add services was voted down; the bill itself passed the Dáil without a vote (Irish Times). Taoiseach Micheál Martin was more direct about the economics. He said a services ban could "damage Ireland more than anybody else" and that he had to protect about 250,000 jobs, with the Irish Times reporting his concern about a possible negative US reaction (Irish Times).

Context matters here. According to the American Chamber of Commerce, over 970 US companies employ more than 211,000 people in Ireland (Euronews). Browne's reading is blunt: Ireland "will be very reluctant to do anything that would damage that relationship" with America. If Frances Black's 70% figure is anywhere near right, the part left out is the bigger part.

None of this makes Irish policy meaningless. It does mean the honest answer to "why does Ireland support Palestine?" includes a second question: how far will it go when support has a price? For the documents behind every claim on this page, and further reading, see our resources.