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John O'Driscoll 🇺🇦🇮🇪🇵🇸
@jodris16
Dublin City, Ireland
Joined July 2015
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Israel abducted a 20-year-old woman from her home in the occupied West Bank in the middle of the night on June 2.
Her name is Sama Safi.
She is not a combatant.
She is an American-Palestinian university student.
She has now been caged in an Israeli dungeon for 58 days — without charges, without reason.
And yet, the same voices that claim to care about human rights have nothing to say.
No outrage. No headlines. No urgent calls for her freedom.
Because Sama is Palestinian, her story is ignored.
Anti-Irish bigot Douglas Murray
Who tries, poorly, to infer Ireland was pro-Axis in WW2.
Suggesting a policy of neutrality identical to America, Belgium, and many others, was unusual or untoward?
The reality? It’s a common misconception of the 20th century that remains among those who stopped reading history
MI5, in their declassified Ireland file, released 1999, says “Ireland was of more use neutral”
Acting head of Americas Office of Secret Services in Europe in WW2, said:
“The Irish cooperated as if they were Allies - they have never received the credit due to them”
The facts show Ireland worked with the Allies by:
- Contacting British intelligence in 1938.
- Arranging secret joint defence plans with Britain to counter a German invasion
- running a nationwide coast watch which reported German shipping & air movements to Britain
- Giving Air & sea access to Irish territory denied to Germany
- Routing of German & Italian communications to Ireland through London for spying purposes
- Full unrestricted access to all mail to & from Ireland for censorship purposes
- Full unrestricted access & cooperation with MI5
- Use of Irish airports for British military aircraft - 48k mostly military & refuges through Foynes
- Codebreaking Axis embassies wireless sets & sharing info
- Reducing Irish broadcast efficiency so German bombers couldn’t use it for guidance
- Returning downed or sunk Allied aircrew & sailors while interning German
- Facilitation of huge Irish enlistment in the UK armed forces & war labour
210k Irish went to UK Armed Forces or factories - 9% of the population, and all Irish savings & investment to UK
No Irish went to Hitlers forces - not one. The Irish government gave nothing to Germany, being one of the few neutrals to criticise German actions
Don’t get your history from uneducated bigots like Douglas
Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write.
This is the article: https://t.co/YkZrpqBWBQ
IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE
There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"
Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?
Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!
And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.
Francesca Albanese is that someone.
She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."
Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.
And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.
Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.
There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.
There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."
There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”
Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.
She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".
Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.
What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.
These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.
Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.
We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."
Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.
So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.
A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.
Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.
Let us stand with her.
Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.
[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]
![yanisvaroufakis's tweet photo. IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE
There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"
Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?
Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!
And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.
Francesca Albanese is that someone.
She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."
Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.
And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.
Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.
There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.
There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."
There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”
Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.
She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".
Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.
What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.
These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.
Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.
We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."
Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.
So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.
A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.
Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.
Let us stand with her.
Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.
[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HHsnlr9WIAEr4Cw.jpg)
Hi Ayne, Irish Jew here, daughter of a German born Holocaust surviver. I should be angry at this outrageously stupid and ridiculis post and was tempted to scroll on, with an eye roll, but found I could not. So.. here goes ..I love my country, Ireland, and its people. We Irish "give out" a lot about many things, and rightly so, but when it gets down to the nitty gritty we stick together, love and protect each other. There is a long history of oppression and colonialism in Ireland which allows us Irish to understand the subject pretty darn well. I have many many friends here, most of whom I have no clue of what religion they might or might not practice or even how they vote in elections as that is of no interst to me and its a vice versa thing. The Irish couldn't give a sheit if you are Jewish or not. They do however, give a sheit, if you are blowing children to pieces, commiting genocide and stealing homes and land. The few people who I do know to be Jewish or of Jewish decent, are venimtly anti Zionist, as am I, and can be found on the front lines of Free Palestine marches, even speaking at them. To us..never again means never again.. to any one ..anywhere... ever! I hope that clarifies the issue for you.
Israel just blew up a public high school in Marwahin, South Lebanon.
Not a military base.
A school.
Breaking news!
European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) to suspend the 🇪🇺EU 🇮🇱Israel Association Agreement has passed the threshold for 11 countries and at 1,034,599 signatures now.
🇫🇷France 🇧🇪Belgium 🇪🇸Spain 🇮🇹Italy 🇮🇪Ireland 🇫🇮Finland 🇸🇪Sweden 🇩🇰Denmark 🇳🇱Netherlands 🇵🇱Poland 🇵🇹Portugal have passed the threshold. Incredible! 🫶🏾
We needed minimum 7 countries to pass the threshold.
We have 11 countries that passed the threshold.
For a European citizens' initiative to be valid, it must obtain at least one million valid signatures and meet the minimum thresholds in at least seven countries.
This was not just on track to reach the 1 Million threshold; this may well become the most supported EU Citizen Initiative EVER.
Please keep signing! Let's show the power of the people! 🇪🇺🕊️🙏🏾
https://t.co/8CSJ2sd0Zo
"Israel wants to live in peace with its neighbours" is the biggest lie of all time.
This is the West Bank.
No Hamas, no war, yet attacked like this daily by "settlers" backed by the IDF.
A savagely violent Jewish supremacy armed by the EU/UK/US
If Dublin City Council wishes to memorialise these contributions, there are many worthy names to choose from – Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons, Con Leventhal, David Marcus, and Robert Briscoe, to name just a few options.
Jews for Palestine Ireland fully support the campaign to rename Herzog park so that it no longer honours a man who gladly took part in a large scale ethnic cleansing.
@SmallerFishGAA Maurice Fitzgerald could teach him a thing or two about kicking points with the outside of the boot 😊
@Shauns_Aviation We’ve just been told that it’ll be an hour and a half before we get moving again
@Shauns_Aviation Flying from Nice to Dublin and we’ve just landed in Charles De Gaulle
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