Pádraig Ó Meiscill

The fission and fusion of it all would be enough to drive you spare.
Featured in The Ditch, Red Pepper, Frieze, Luncheon & elsewhere.

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

'Always, there are lowlifes conspiring and scribbling, dancing and loving, smoking and drinking and singing, forcing a future into the air.'
I wrote a few words in August on @KNEECAPCEOL's Falls Park concert. Luncheon were sound enough to publish it in their latest edition...

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

At least 260 Palestinian journalists have been killed since Israel launched war in October 2023, according to the Committee to Protect journalists...
‘Kind, principled’: Palestinian journalists remember slain Gaza journalist https://t.co/fr3QxD4HEq via @AJEnglish

[The Ditch @wereontheditch]

10 June: The Ditch publishes a story on an unreleased report showing child patients are forced to wait significantly longer than private patients at Children's Health Ireland facilities

11 June: Paul Murphy raises the story in the Dáil, saying, "That’s pretty much across the board in terms of a massive discrepancy of waiting time in public versus waiting time for private"

15 June: The HSE is forced to publish the report – which it had refused to do before The Ditch story and Murphy's intervention – and RTÉ's Fergal Bowers covers it. "The HSE added that the review does not identify evidence of inequity in access to care and this is important," he wrote. An RTÉ radio segment with Bowers questions previous interpretations of the leaked report

The report itself:

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

The unpublished report exposing hospital consultants prioritising child patients with private health insurance... The HSE, Children’s Health Ireland, the state: all have refused or failed to publish the report. Here it is.
@thed
https://t.co/SUqsTJj5Xk

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

'Ordinary people who wanted to step in to support their neighbours rallied round, at times in the face of danger, in full knowledge that state institutions would offer no effective support to families affected by racist pogroms.'
https://t.co/eMp3T7fioY

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

The report also found in 2023 alone the HSE paid more than €2.1 million for children’s spinal surgeries at Dublin’s private Blackrock Clinic despite senior health staff insisting there was capacity in public hospitals.
@theditch
https://t.co/AXd3CL92Ep

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

If there were a word that could encapsulate Northern Ireland in theory and practice, that word would be pogrom

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

The journalists are Hamas. The aid workers are Hamas. The doctors are Hamas. The patients are Hamas. The children are Hamas. And when Israel bombs the bones because there's no one left to kill, it will have to be seriously considered that the bones might be Hamas too.

[The Ditch @wereontheditch]

Drew Harris misled an Oireachtas committee about his knowledge of airlines illegally using Irish airspace to transport weapons to Israel

He said he's 'not aware' of the flights even though he was emailed directly after gardaí ignored criminal complaints

https://t.co/xjiCQnw6zJ

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

Read the remarks in this 1994 report on the killing of innocents in Sarajevo searching for food & compare it to the silence on the daily slaughter of the starving in Gaza today. The only conclusion is that Palestinian lives are regarded as less than cheap
https://t.co/eiBQqxiP1I

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

This morning, on my way to the clinic, though even calling it that feels absurd now, it is more graveyard than refuge; I saw a girl. She was sixteen, no older. She was thin, with the kind of tiredness around her eyes that children should never know. In her hands, she carried a pot, a blackened metal container, steaming faintly. Inside was a thin, soupy liquid. It was mostly water, with a few pale white beans floating like little wrecks in an ocean of absence.

Behind her, her father moved through the crowd with a soldier’s gaze. It was not the gaze of one trained for war, but of one forced to survive it. He was scanning faces, perhaps for danger, perhaps for hope, or perhaps for something in between.

The girl looked back once, then again. When she saw him turn away, she seized that brief moment of freedom. She dipped her fingers into the pot, scooped a few beans, and stuffed them into her mouth with the speed of guilt. Her eyes darted around as she chewed, terrified that he might see her, that he might scold her. Not because he was cruel, but because that pitiful soup was meant to feed not one child, but an entire family. Perhaps five. Perhaps ten. We no longer count mouths. Only spoons.

There was a kitchen once, a charity. They cooked for over a thousand families every day. They did it not for profit, and not for recognition, but because their souls could not do otherwise. That kitchen shut down three days ago. Not because people stopped being hungry, but because the shelves became empty. The rice, the oil, the flour — everything ran out.

And now the people go to the American aid centers.

Yes, of course. "Humanitarian corridors." What a beautiful phrase. How clean, how sterile, how bureaucratically elegant. It sounds like "collateral damage" or "operation." The Americans built them. The Israelis secured them. And forty people die at their gates every day.

Crushed. Shot. Starved. They come seeking bread and leave as corpses.

Everyone knows this. Absolutely everyone. And yet they still go.
Hunger will drive a man to walk toward his own execution if there is even a shadow of rice behind the gun.

Yesterday, my friend Al-Aloul went. He is not a fighter. He is a software engineer, a quiet man.

He came back stabbed, in the neck.
Six stitches. Blood soaked through his shirt.

But he smiled.

"I got the box," he said. "They did not take it."

What kind of world is this? What kind of man smiles through blood because he has a box of flour?

This is not the war of tanks and planes. Those have become irrelevant. This is the war of hunger, the war of slow death.
Mothers fast for days, not in spiritual devotion, but because their sons must eat first.
Children stand in line for aid, not knowing if they will return alive.
Girls eat in secret, and fathers carry shame heavier than bread.

This is genocide by exhaustion, by silence, by paperwork, and by averted eyes.

Do you want to know what the modern age has made of evil?

It has made it bureaucratic.
Digitised.
Professionalised.

A genocide in which the world debates definitions while children chew air.

The child who ate those beans is more real than your opinions.
My friend who smiled through blood has more dignity than your excuses.
Gaza is not a headline. It is a mirror.
And when you look at it, what you see is the measure of your own humanity.

You want God to speak?
Perhaps he already has.

He speaks through the silence of that girl.
Through the blood on that box.
Through the words I now write with shaking hands.

Gaza is not dying.
It is being crucified.
And we are the crowd at Golgotha.
Watching.

#GazaGenocide‌

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

A reminder that even now, at the peak of Iran's attack, many more innocent people are being killed in Gaza than in Israel, and that you won't read a word about them in any Western news source. It's as if they are invisible, or at least regarded as subhuman, by our newsrooms

[Motasem A Dalloul @AbujomaaGaza]

Don’t look away 😔
We are being bombed by Israeli occupation, and cut off from food, water, internet and cell service!
We, 2.4 million Gazans, are being forced into a very slim strip of land off the coast.
Israel has destroyed our homes, cut off our trees and demolished our schools and hospitals!

[Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura @arnesa_kustura]

But I remember what my mother wrote and I remember what the line I wrote too, in 2002:

“We survived the horrors and all those terrible things and for what, now we have to leave too.”

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

The crew of the #Madleen are trying to educate us. They might be about to demonstrate that the abduction of 10 Europeans counts for more than the lives of 60,000 Palestinians

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

Don't look away.

[Motasem A Dalloul @AbujomaaGaza]

Gaza | 2025

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

Right about now, in all sorts of comfortable places, there are people of means & influence trying to get their stories straight. About how they'd never condone a genocide, they hate the thing, hate the word & if their silence was understood as complicity, well that's just not on

[Ghassan Abu Sitta, Chair of Conflict Medicine AUB @GhassanAbuSitt1]

The Blood Bank in Gaza is unable to accept blood donations. The doners are too malnourished from the famine, too dehydrated from the diarrhea disease they got from drinking dirty water, and many have Hepatitis viral infections.

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

“They killed my mother — and before that, my brother. I urge everyone: do not go to the American aid distribution points soaked in blood. This bag only contains 2 empty flour sacks — nothing else — & yet they shot & killed my mother as she tried to get us something to eat today.”

[Pádraig Ó Meiscill @OMeiscill]

Is there a half-decent book about data capture centres out there?