Irish students have been protesting over Gaza for months. Why are we only noticing them now?

Student protests over Israel’s war in Gaza failed to take off here in recent months in the same way that have in the US, despite the best efforts of many involved.

Irish student leaders have not been found wanting. The UCD Student Union president Martha Ní Riada valiantly heckled former US Speaker Nancy Pelosi on her recent visit to the campus to pick up an award from the college. Ní Riada was “removed” by security. Around 100 students later protested at the award dinner for Pelosi under the watchful eye of the Garda Public Order Unit, but there was no trouble.

Over in Trinity College Dublin students disrupted meetings, occupied buildings, and blocked access to the Book of Kells exhibition over issues such as fee increases and the university’s stance on Gaza. They barely made the news until last week when they were slapped with a fine of €214,000 by the university, which clearly did not fear any blowback from stymying their right to protest. That in itself speaks volumes about how seriously student protests were being taken.

Trinity would appear to have scored an own goal. It has to lock its gates over the weekend after a camp modelled on the ones sets up on US campuses sprang up. Where things go from here is not clear. Scenes similar to those seen on campuses the US in recent days are unlikely, but the question remains as to why it took for long for Irish student protests to register with the public.

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Irish student leaders tried pretty much all the moves in the student activist playbook over the last few months, but they didn’t seem to be able to rouse their fellow students in any significant numbers. Student politics has always been something of a minority sport and there is no doubt that the attitudes and priorities of Irish students have changed since the heyday of student radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s. They are worried about getting on PwC’s graduate programme. Their parents got angry over the Reagan administration adventures in Central America.

This is the nub of the matter when it comes to Irish student protests falling flat: there is a very wide consensus both in politics and across Irish society generally in support of Palestine and the Palestinians

The change in mindset – along with summer exams – no doubt contributes to the relative apathy on display by Irish students when it came to the war in Gaza. But all of the same forces are also at play on the US campuses, which have seen increasingly militant protests since the war began in October, and those protests have become headline news. They culminated in the police entering the campus of Columbia University in New York last week to remove and arrest dozens of student protesters who were camped on its grounds. Similar moves followed at other universities including University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

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There is clearly something else going on and it was inadvertently highlighted in a letter to this paper last week on behalf of over 300 members of Academics for Palestine. The letter writers were enthusiastic in their praise of the UCD students who protested Pelosi, but the purpose of the letter was to accuse UCD and other Irish universities of hiding behind the notion of academic freedom to avoid having to respond to what is happening in Gaza. They want universities to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and divest from anything financially complicit in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

Support for displaced Palestinian students and academics is also part of the platform. In the letter they pointed out: “The International Court of Justice has determined that the actions of the Israeli state toward the captive civilian population of Gaza may plausibly constitute genocide, a view shared by the Irish Government.” They might equally have added that Ireland is one of the EU countries pushing for recognition of the Palestinian State and has declared its intention to do.

This is the nub of the matter when it comes to the hitherto lukewarm support for Irish student protests falling flat; there is a very wide consensus both in politics and across Irish society generally in support of Palestine and the Palestinians, as evidenced by the numerous marches and meetings across the country. It is hard to protest effectively when you have no nearby target for protest. Even the Government agrees with them.

The opposite is the case in the United State and, as Amanda Taub pointed out in a recent New York Times article, the political divisions over Israel and Palestine in Washington are one of the main drivers of the US student protests. Her argument, in short, is that the Republican Party is happy to fan the flames of the student protests to try to drive a wedge between the various pro and anti-Israel factions in the Democratic Party.

Republican politicians in Congress have focused their efforts in this regard on the leadership of some of the most prestigious American universities who were called to testify about their handling of pro-Palestinian campus protests, and particularly the threats to the safety of Jewish students. Equivocation on the issue contributed to the resignation of two of them, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.

Taub argues that the decision of Columbia University’s president Nemat Shafik to call the police in to clear protesters from its New York campus was directly related to her being called before Congress the week before. The police intervention had the predictable effect of generating more support for the student protesters, which is a win for the Republicans who like to characterise universities as hotbeds of left-wing radicalism and progressive policies on gender and race, according to Taub.

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The nearest equivalent here would be an Oireachtas Committee hauling the heads of the Irish universities in front them to grill them about their position on the war in Gaza and student safety. It is unlikely that even the most publicity-mad member of the committee of education would see much mileage that.