Renaming proposal shows perspective has been lost
Paul Fitzpatrick
Years ago, some lads I knew lived in a house in Rathgar, which was owned or maintained by the princely Kerry footballer Jack O’Shea.
‘Jacko’ was regarded as one of the true all-time greats, not just an idol in Kerry - where cliché tells us you must double-check your change in a shop or pub in case an All-Ireland medal has inadvertently made its way in there – but nationwide. When he called around to check something with the house, the occupants, all of whom were Gaelic football fans, were in awe, knowing themselves to be in the presence of a true living legend of the game.
I thought of the Cahirciveen icon recently when the controversy around Herzog Park, which is on Orwell Road in Rathgar (more of which later) exploded.
In case you missed this episode, Dublin City Council looked set to vote to change the name of the park – named after Dr Chaim Herzog, the Irish-born former President of Israel - before the plan was derailed.
Herzog’s story is unique. His father, born in Belfast and raised in Dublin, was the Chief Rabbi in Ireland.
A fluent Irish speaker, the father is said to have been an ardent supporter of the First Dáil and the republican cause and a close ally of Eamon De Valera’s, so much so that he was reportedly nicknamed “the Sinn Féin Rabbi”.
What a curious turn of events that the Shinners are now leading the charge to besmirch Herzog’s son by posthumously stripping away a rare honour.
It was November of 1995 when the park in Rathgar was named after Herzog Jr.
At the official opening, Sean Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus, Dublin's Lord Mayor, “spoke of the city's horror at the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin”, which had occurred not long before. Loftus was an interesting character in his own right – married to a Cootehill native, Una Uí Lachtnáin, he had changed his name by deed poll and is regarded as a leading campaigner on environmental issues before the Green Party was founded in Ireland.
The City Council “had voted to name the park after the Israeli President to commemorate the tri-millennium of Jerusalem and to recognise Mr Herzog's links with Dublin”, it was reported.
Chaim Herzog died two years later, the Irish Independent reporting that “Taoiseach John Bruton yesterday led tributes to Dr Chaim Herzog, the Irish-born Israeli President who died during a short illness.
“Mr Bruton said he would be remembered as a great friend of Ireland during the years he held high office in Israel.”
Fast forward 28 years and Herzog almost got the Jacko treatment. O’Shea was famously named at midfield on the GAA’s prestigious Team of the Century in 1984; he subsequently won two more All-Ireland medals and one Footballer of the Year award, scoring a key goal in the 1985 All-Ireland final.
Fifteen years later, the Team of the Millennium was named and O’Shea was replaced at midfield by Laois’s Tommy Murphy, who had retired 47 years earlier. What Murphy, who passed away in 1985, had done to further his case and how Jacko’s was diminished, nobody could say.
Something similar almost happened to Chaim Herzog.
A man regarded by the then-Taoiseach as “a great friend of Ireland” was to have his name removed from the little park in leafy south Dublin because some politicians are unhappy with the state of Israel’s actions now, a quarter of a century since his passing.
Or, at least that’s what I presumed it was.
It turns out that partly, according to Sinn Féin councillor and apparent pedant Daithí Doolan, it’s about tidying up something that was in breach of a minor bye-law at the time.
Cllr Doolan, showing an unusually-stringent approach to technicalities, told RTE’s Morning Ireland that the proposal was “about renaming a park that was named in 1995 when Herzog was actually alive, which was against DCC's own rules and regulations about naming parks.
"It's meant to be 20 years after somebody's passed away,” he said, before getting down to the real issue - “but this is about a statement about current Israeli government carrying out genocide in Gaza.
“It's an act of solidarity with Palestinians and also Herzog himself, his history of being involved in terrorism in Israel, driving Palestinians from their home.
“This is about trying to undo that.”
I have no inclination to get into the rights and wrongs of the Israel-Hamas war but, regardless of where one stands, surely this latest caper must be viewed for what it clearly is – antisemitic hysteria. It should be possible, if you’re so inclined, to view Israel as a bloodthirsty, colonising force, as many Irish people do, and still find this proposal appallingly ill-judged – but shades of grey are vanishingly rare in a time when public discourse is driven by bite-sized Twitter takes.
The Irish have never seen a bandwagon they didn’t like the look of and there is no doubt that support of Palestine, in some quarters but certainly not all, has the hallmarks of that.
The trend bears the same characteristics as other recent fashionable causes – driven largely by social media, it is all-consuming, it is often performative (literally) and the most devout adherents view themselves as morally superior. If that doesn’t make you feel queasy, remember that celebrities are leading the charge, hand-in-hand with politicians, two groupings whose motivations should always be treated with extreme cynicism.
Covid, I thought at the time, was the preachiest grand-daddy of them all, taking elements of poppy culture in the UK and doubling down.
But then came the war in Ukraine, which picked up where the pandemic left off. Suddenly, some of the good people - ‘gooder’ than you, remember - had moved on. A new topic was dominating their thoughts, seamlessly replacing the previous one.
Another thing all of these trends have in common is that to deride them – not dismiss but simply point out how clearly phoney much of the curated outrage is – is to invite accusations of not caring about the dying or the dead.
That was all the rage during the pandemic and during the early part of the Ukraine war and, now, it is thrown around daily.
To doubt the bona fides of those who often literally couldn’t find Palestine on a map, those who swap one cause célèbre for another and have the neck to pontificate about them all, is to open oneself up to being called callous or uncaring or, whisper it, far right.
Don’t believe me? In a delicious piece of symmetry, Orwell Park – not named after the author, by the way – has made headlines in the recent past, before this country became obsessed with the conflict in the middle-east.
That road houses the Russian Embassy and, as such, it was felt by some public representatives - not Student Union types, I mean grown-ups - that it might embarrass or annoy the Russians and, in the dread phrase, show “solidarity” for Ukraine if the name was changed to something inflammatory.
Three years ago, then, a sub-committee of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council voted to start the process of renaming it. Dermot Lacey of Labour brought forward the motion and was quoted at the time – and this is not parody, now – stating the following:
“There was a difference of opinion on what the road should be called, in terms of the new road. Free Ukraine Road, Independent Ukraine Road, Zelenskyy Road - there was different views on that.”
Of course, few in Ireland seem too annoyed by the situation in Ukraine any more.
Last Friday, there were major developments in that conflict – the RTE website rightly led with the story but I had to trawl deeply through the other mainstream news outlets to find any coverage.
Ukraine has simply gone out of fashion; Palestine is all in.
Chaim Herzog once wrote a piece for the Irish Independent in which he quoted George Bernard Shaw, who, asked at an advanced age how he felt, replied “Considering the alternative, very well”. Alternative views inform perspective; those who suggested and supported this insane proposal have clearly lost theirs.
Protest is fine and worthy but this tawdry episode casts all involved - bar the government, who come out, for a change, looking like the adults in the room - in a poor light.