Sinn Fein, Ireland’s largest opposition party, said Friday that it will skip a traditional St. Patrick’s Day visit to the White House in protest of US President Donald Trump’s proposal to oust Gaza’s residents and rebuild the Strip as a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald said in Dublin that she could not visit Washington “while there was a threat of mass expulsion hanging over the Palestinian people.”
Speaking at a joint press conference with party colleague Michelle O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s First Minister McDonald said, “There is an onus on us to act when we believe the US administration is wrong, catastrophically so in the case of Palestine.”
Irish government and opposition politicians are traditionally invited to the White House each year on or around St. Patrick’s Day — Ireland’s national day on March 17 — and see the festivities as an occasion for diplomatic networking.
But Trump’s comments on the “forced expulsion of the Palestinian people of Gaza cannot be ignored,” said O’Neill, who is also vice-president of the pro-Irish unity party.
Israel and Washington have denied the displacement of Gazans would be coerced.
Sinn Fein’s decision not to attend the White House St. Patrick’s Day event puts pressure on Michael Martin, Ireland’s prime minister or Taoiseach, who is expected to go ahead with meeting Trump at the White House, but has yet to be formally invited.
US President Donald speaks at the Republican Governors Association meeting at the National Building Museum in Washington, February 20, 2025. (Pool via AP)
Ireland has been a vocal critic of Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza that was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 assault on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took 251 hostages. Ireland has also supported South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.
Amid the worsening ties with Ireland, Israel in December shuttered its embassy in Dublin.
On Thursday, Ireland’s Tánaiste and Foreign Minister Simon Harris — who, as premier, in May recognized Palestinian statehood — accused Israel, without mentioning it by name, of “bombing innocent civilians,” in a statement slamming Hamas for parading the coffins of slain captives Oded Lifshitz, Shiri Bibas, and Bibas’s young sons Ariel and Kfir.
Palestinian terrorists carry to the Red Cross one of four coffins said to hold the body of a slain Israeli hostage, in the southern Gaza Strip’s Khan Younis, February 20, 2025. (Eyad Baba / AFP)
The bodies were handed over Thursday morning in a propaganda event that drew condemnations from Israel, the United Nations and the Red Cross. Israel has confirmed the identities of Lifshitz and the two Bibas boys — all of whom were found to have been murdered by their captors — but determined that the body presented as Shiri Bibas’s belonged to an unidentified Gazan woman.
Harris, responding to Hamas’s ceremony, said that “the parading of caskets of young children by Hamas today was cruel, heartbreaking and utterly despicable.”
“It is a stark reminder of the brutality of October 7,” he said.
Ireland’s then-Prime Minister Simon Harris (C), flanked by Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs Michel Martin (R) and Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan (L), announces his country’s intent to recognize Palestinian statehood, at the Government buildings in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. (Paul Faith / AFP)
“We must see an enduring peace in the Middle East, where neither terrorism nor bombing of innocent civilians is tolerated,” he said.
Israel has denied targeting Gazan civilians, saying its war is against Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups, and accusing them of using the population as human shields while hiding in a vast network of underground tunnels built under the Strip’s cities.
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