The Country That Never Persecuted the Jews

Why is Ireland unusually "pro-Palestine"? History has some clues to offer.

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As Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, once observed: you campaign in poetry but you govern in prose. This is not just a matter of promises being compromised by their encounters with practical difficulties, it is also a question of language. Rhetoric which soars in opposition easily feels over-blown or contrived in power. Tone matters.

This came to mind last month when I saw how Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, greeted the news that Emily Hand, the nine-year-old Irish-Israeli girl abducted by Hamas, had at long last been freed:

Varadkar was straining for poetry here, invoking the …