Billy Linehan

Contributor to Irish Tech News

[Holocaust Awareness Ireland @Holocaust_Irl]

We welcome this wise and sympathetic tribute to Tomi Reichental by the Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Yoni Wieder.

His message offers moral clarity - Holocaust survivors are leaving us and we, the next generation must ensure that their stories remain alive.

Rabbi Wieder perfectly captures Tomi's unique quality of selflessness and a quiet determination to communicate his key message, the danger of using language that demonises a minority based on identity.

[Holocaust Awareness Ireland @Holocaust_Irl]

Thank you @PatLeahyIT. Remarkably, there has been endless discussion in Ireland about antisemitism, much of it excluding the very people most directly affected: Jews.

[Holocaust Awareness Ireland @Holocaust_Irl]

I was honoured to pay tribute to my friend, the great Tomi Reichental.

[Holocaust Awareness Ireland @Holocaust_Irl]

My aunt by marriage is an Iraqi Jew.
Her father and her grandparents were forced to flee to Israel during the Farhud as Jews were being hanged in the square of their home town.

[Holocaust Awareness Ireland @Holocaust_Irl]

An tender account in the Irish Times by Alexandra Senfft of her first encounter with Tomi Reichental.

In 2022, Holocaust Awareness Ireland in association with the OPW (Office of Public Works) held a panel discussion between Tomi Reichental, Alexandra Sennft and me, moderated by Conor O'Clery at Saint Patrick's Hall in Dublin Castle.

The atmosphere bristled with anticipation. An Irish audience had seen nothing like it. Belsen survivor, Tomi Reichental sitting next to the granddaughter of the Nazi who had signed the deportation orders that sent Tomi and his family to the concentration camp.

Tomi's absence of bitterness or anger towards his tormentors and his embrace of Alexandra will stay long in the memory with everyone present that evening.

It was the very first time I had shared a platform with the descendant of a Nazi. Tomi and Alexandra opened the door to the only mechanism of conflict resolution that ever works: the painstaking act of exchanging shared experiences with those you might reflexively consider antagonists or enemies, with trust, respect and love.

Tomi and Alexandra were guilty of nothing but individually felt enormous responsibility to speak out about the past. The dialogue between them did not so much involve reconciliation but conciliation, where the audience became, perhaps unwittingly, the neutral third party.
https://t.co/pYgcMG79tV

[MaltaToday @maltatoday]

Daphne memorial vandalised again after Labour victory celebrations, Occupy Justice says https://t.co/UuBNulecss

[Nicky Kyle Gardening @nickykylegarden]

Happy #June1st - First day of #Summer! There's still time to sow many #easy, fast-growing crops to #growyourown #foodsecurity and #healthy #realfood, and even save your own #seed from! Here's my list of #seeds you can sow now in #organic #peatfree compost
https://t.co/7xf7hzQ7zp

[Billy Linehan @BillyLinehanIRL]

StartUp Ballymun’s upcoming 2026 event is "Steering a Business in Choppy Waters," taking place on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, from 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM at the Council Chamber in the Ballymun Civic
#startupballymun #ballymun #startups

https://t.co/Psb3KragL2

[Billy Linehan @BillyLinehanIRL]

@donie Hungry?

[Dutch Blockchain Week @DutchBlockWeek]

📰 A new media partner is joining DBW26.

@Irish_TechNews, one of Ireland's leading tech news outlets, is helping bring the Summit to a wider European audience.

#DBW26 #DutchBlockchainWeek

[Maurice Black @mauricejblack]

Pat Leahy in the @IrishTimes ponders the looming economic consequences of Irish antisemitism.

"Whether we like it or not, demonstrations against the Israeli soccer team playing in Dublin, booing the anthem and so on, will be interpreted in many quarters – especially in the United States – as further evidence of anti-Semitism in Ireland.

Yes, I know you think that’s unjustified. But the perception is taking hold. For a country that is so depending on foreign direct investment – and has grown wealthy on the back of it – this is something we would be foolish not to consider.

[...]

Look around. Last week a Dublin city councillor posted online about how we needed a 'real final solution'. Protesters routinely call, not just for the salvation of Palestinians, but for the destruction of the state of Israel. Of all the streets and parks that Dublin city councillors choose to rename, they pick the one named after an Irish Jew."

https://t.co/sy3Tn1i0yK

[Daniel Mulhall @DanMulhall]

I have followed football since before you were born and have just as much right to an opinion as you have. I expect that Israel will be indifferent to whether we play them or not. This has to do with Ireland’s direction as a football-playing nation which, for me, is a matter for @FAIreland to decide.

[Billy Linehan @BillyLinehanIRL]

@PremSportsIRL @leinsterrugby Farcical change, missed 15 mns

[Billy Linehan @BillyLinehanIRL]

✔️The history of one can not be used to erase the history of the other and does not need to do so, the pursuit of knowledge, one of the delights of human life and is the mission of the BM .... can celebrate and recognize all of these, yes!
@simonmontefiore

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

This matters.
An obscure London event on the history of the ancient Jewish kingdoms in Judea and Israel is cancelled because of ‘security concerns’ and it turns out this was a reaction to a campaign to fill and then undermine the event by activist disrupters.
How strange! Why would a posse of aggressive activists be interested in the arcane details of bullae and steles and ostraca and inscriptions and numismatics in some small South Levantine kingdoms in the Iron Age?
Well, it is a little more than that which is why it is both disturbing and important. And it matters because at its least it is a threat to history in Britain’s - but also the world’s - greatest temple of History @britishmuseum - and its scholarly integrity.
The BM and its leadership are decent and well-meaning and have explained that they wished to save an event from disruption by bullying vandals but I am sure the BM realizes it is essential to announce a new event fast lest it give the impression that the permission of tiny cadres of aggressive bullies are required before it hold events. But the significance is wider than an event about the Moab and Tel Dan steles in a great museum.
British cultural life is the right and exercise of civic and cultural freedom – a privilege of our liberal democracy - that does not require the permission of gangs of ideological activists nor can it cancelled or postponed nor endured at their beck and sufferance nor permitted with a bend of the knee to their permissions or veto. But that is what this appears to be.
Across the cultural world in the West, though the bewildered middleaged managers of our institutions that are confronting and often submitting to a wave of self-righteous blackmail and mob threat, there is an increasingly thin – indeed ever more fragile and sometimes nigh invisible – line between ‘security concerns’ – and institutional pusillanimity.
Then there is the history itself.
This event concerns the study of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel that existed between roughly 1100BC and 586BCin the Levant. It is not a coincidence that this was chosen for disruption. The history of the Judean kingdoms and the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem that stood for most of the time between 1000BC and 70ADetc is important and fascinating history in its own right, supported by complex and growing archaeological finds.
These small kingdoms and the subsequent Temple priestly mini-state (restored by the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius 539BC) and then the larger Judean kingdoms of the Hasmoneans and Herodians – between 167BC and 135AD chronicle the long indigenous history of Jews in the region – which the protesters are keen to erase. This is a political project of ideological erasure and malicious incitement of course concerned with the complex, brutal Israel-Palestine conflict that has now gone on for a hundred years and is unlikely to be solved in a small lecture theatre in the British Museum. But it also attempts to deny or erase Jewish history itself – and by implication the heritage of British Jews who live here in Britain, a small community that is now under cultural and sometimes physical threat.
Incidentally - but it is worth saying, this history does not deny anyone else’s history, nor the many other small realms in this region through ancient times nor the many names of the region and its entities and the historical origins of those names (Canaan, or Philistia or Peleset, Phoenicia, Aram Damascus or Moab or later Nabatea and the provinces of Palaestina Prime, Seconda and Tertia and the Ghassanid kingdoms and so on etc etc). The history of one can not be used to erase the history of the other and does not need to do so. The pursuit of knowledge which is one of the delights of human life and is the mission of the BM and indeed anyone who writes, reads or enjoys history, can celebrate and recognize all of these.
Yet this protest and the many like it deployed across Britain nowadays is the opposite of that - an attack on history using the methods of intimidation and vandalism. Much of this involves distorting or dismantling actual history or often lying to replace it with a fabricated ideological structure that nourishes no one and helps no one but degrades our culture and civic life not to speak of history itself. By the way, the frequent claims that these histories or names are ‘denied’ or ‘noone knows them’ is nonsense: anyone and everyone who is interested knows this history. (Much of it appears for example in my book Jerusalem a history of the Holy Land.)
And this is relevant not just to those of us who write study or enjoy the history of the region but also to those who believe that cultural life and civic society is a right that must not be submitted to the aggressions and plots of loud well-organized much-indulged ideologues who take advantage of the freedoms of our society to undermine its principles and the very freedoms they are designed to guard.
Just as vital is a rule of history itself that concerrns the rise and fall of civilizations: the society that ceases to allow to free discussion of ideas and stops respecting and recognizing the value of scientific and historical sources and facts is a society that will fail.

[The Tec Dr @tecdr]

@Irish_TechNews has been busy on day 1 of @DubTechSummit 3 podcasts have been recorded and published. The third #dts podcast with @armintosar & Lydia Foott from @QashioMENA can be heard on all major podcast platforms and here
https://t.co/okTKgdq2VQ

[The Tec Dr @tecdr]

@Irish_TechNews has been busy on day 2 of @DubTechSummit 3 podcasts have been recorded and published. The sixth #dts podcast with James Wilson and Jeff Shapiro from
@HaystackID can be heard on all major podcast platforms and here https://t.co/Z6IDtDf12C

[The Tec Dr @tecdr]

@Irish_TechNews have been busy on day 1 of @DubTechSummit 3 podcasts have been recorded and published. The first #dts podcast with Luke Treacy from Business Technology Academy can be heard on all major podcast platforms and here https://t.co/RUloEuyYuR

[The Tec Dr @tecdr]

@Irish_TechNews has been busy on day 1 of @DubTechSummit 3 podcasts have been recorded and published. The second #dts podcast with Phil Barnes from @GEOTAB can be heard on all major podcast platforms and here https://t.co/QlMB5PeP9y

[Billy Linehan @BillyLinehanIRL]

@TFIupdates @dublinbusnews On Bluesky if you wish to follow up

[Billy Linehan @BillyLinehanIRL]

Tale of disappearing Dublin buses, 39 and 39a
@dublinbusnews were there a minute ago

[Billy Linehan @BillyLinehanIRL]

@dublinbusnews @TFIupdates Stop near DCC offices, Woodquay