Gerard Howlin

If you read one thing this evening, let it be this speech from Maurice Cohen, President of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland about the Herbert Park Hotel. He poignantly describes how this hotel - once associated with friendship, celebration and his mother - has now, rather tragically, acquired a very different place in his memory. ‘…contemporary antisemitism does not always arrive wearing the language of the past. It does not always announce itself with a slur, a threat or a placard. Increasingly, it can present itself as a question, a precaution, a policy, a request for clarification. It begins by treating Jewish identity as evidence of political allegiance. It turns Jewish people into representatives of a foreign state, Jewish gatherings into security concerns, and ordinary acts of welcome into decisions requiring special permission. That is the danger of antisemitism today: not only that it excludes Jews, but that it makes their exclusion appear reasonable.’ ‘Seventy rooms had been booked. Seventy people had been welcomed as guests. The only thing that changed was what they were understood to be. That is not a minor administrative inconvenience. It is a warning. Antisemitism survives by changing its vocabulary while preserving its logic: Jews are treated as different, suspect and collectively responsible. The words may be new, but the message is old. You may enter as an individual, but once you are recognised as Jewish, the terms of welcome can change. And that is why we still have a long way to go in Ireland, the land of 100,000 thousand welcomes: because the test of a society is not whether it welcomes people before it knows who they are. The test is whether it continues to welcome them after it does. Yes, a long way to go in Ireland and The Herbert Park Hotel.’ Shame on Herbert Park Hotel. And shame on Ireland for enabling and cultivating this culture of antisemitic exclusion.