The Irish Congress of Trade Unions has today called on the FAI not to fulfil Ireland's forthcoming football fixtures against Israel.
The call came following a discussion of trade unions leaders at the ICTU Executive Council, which agreed to support the Stop the Game campaign, in line with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction campaign.
Speaking after the meeting, Congress General Secretary Owen Reidy said:
The trade union movement is united in its view that for Ireland to fulfil the upcoming fixtures against Israel would be unconscionable, and we are fully in support of the Stop the Game campaign.
For almost three years, Israel has perpetrated a genocide against the people of Gaza, at a cost of over 70,000 lives, while ethnically cleansing the West Bank. It has done so in defiance of international law, in defiance of the International Court of Justice, and in defiance of human rights organisations. Irish football should not be complicit in normalising those crimes.
Sport does not occur in a vacuum and cannot be divorced from the surrounding political context. There is clear and established precedent for sporting sanctions applied to nations that breach international law and violate human rights, from apartheid-era South Africa to Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.
FIFA and UEFA's failure to apply that same standard to Israel is indefensible, but their cowardice does not relieve the FAI, or the Irish Government, of their own moral obligations. It should also not be left to the young players on the team to respond due to a lack of leadership from the authorities.
Moving the fixture to a neutral venue does nothing to address to fundamental issues at stake, and Irish fans have made their views clear. They understand the risk of sporting sanctions, but they know that participating in these fixtures is unconscionable. The FAI must reach the same conclusion.
