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🚨 Caoimhín Kelleher on why he refused the handshake with Dor Peretz: 🎙️ “I know people will talk about the handshake, and I understand why. But for me, this wasn’t about disrespecting Dor Peretz as a person. It was about making a statement about what is happening around this situation. Sometimes you have to decide where you stand, even when people don’t agree with you.” “I wore the captain’s armband tonight, and I knew what that responsibility meant. Respect doesn’t always mean pretending everything is normal. We had already made our position clear before the game, and this was another way of showing that we weren’t going to ignore what is happening.” “And yes, this has happened before. Dara O’Shea made the same decision in the first game, so nobody should be pretending this suddenly came out of nowhere. Tonight I simply carried on what the team had already decided.” “Football is supposed to bring people together, but sometimes football also becomes a platform for saying something bigger than the 90 minutes. People can disagree with the decision, they can criticise me, they can criticise Ireland that’s football. But don’t confuse a political protest with hatred for another player.”

The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect.  Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life. This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary. The $111 billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained to the public.  Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for serious national security review, and regulators still haven’t given the public a real answer. Until they do, the merger shouldn’t move forward. Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues, not step back or concede.