Doctor, Sailor (Capn Pug), Dad Author "In the Shadow of the Eighth", Penguin 2019
Dublin
Joined November 2011
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I raised my concerns on @NTBreakfast this morning re new @hselive guidelines on water births and problems including haemorrhage - water births are unnatural for humans and guidelines should be revised
link.goloudplayer.com/s/pNml…
@TheJournal.ie @irishtimes @nwhip @roinnslainte
Peter Boylan retweeted
Please bear with this slightly long post because it is one hell of an illustration of Israel-derangement syndrome in Ireland. An international conference of 'Special Envoys & Coordinators Combating Antisemitism' is currently taking place in Ireland. There was a reception for delegates this evening at the Department of Foreign Affairs. Maurice Cohen of the Irish Jewish Representative Council told the delegates and other guests that he had booked 70 rooms at the Herbert Park Hotel for delegates. But once the hotel discovered what the event was for, they cancelled the booking asking if the conference had a connection to the IDF. (It doesn't, and what a bizarre question to ask). How deeply ironic that this should happen to delegates attending a conference dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism. What this does say about today's Ireland? Nothing good. This story is eminently newsworthy. Journalists should contact Maurice Cohen. (The hotel should be sued). @Alan__Shatter @abrahamson_ed @RachelMoiselle
Peter Boylan retweeted
easy when you remove the first part of the sentence, isn't it?
And I accused no one. I made a reference to the data on deaths during the war... it can well be argued and starvation was caused by Hamas
Peter Boylan retweeted
Jews have been left in an invidious position, increasingly isolated and explicitly threatened - for being Jewish
Peter Boylan retweeted
Powerful and important >
"To some people it makes no difference whether we are Zionist or not, distressed by images of Gaza or not. We are Jews"
A heartfelt please for peace and a better future for Israelis and Palestinians 👏
Ed Abrahamson: October 7th was a piercing, shrieking alarm call for all Jews irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/…
Peter Boylan retweeted
Well said @CilComLFC . Spot on.
The religious motivation to destroy the Jewish state that powers Hamas and other Islamists is totally overlooked by Irish critics of Israel and Israeli actions. Is it ignorance, bias or both?
See also 👉 hebronfund.org/1929-hebron-m…
@cooper_m @OHanlonEilis @OdohertyI64991 @Casey5122dark
Peter Boylan retweeted
A final note on Emily Hand’s kidnapping.
At 48M views on this site alone, this is definitely a contender for the most offensive diplomatic blunder of any Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) in recent years.
Leo is shameless and never even apologised for this, despite widespread condemnation. He brazenly said ‘I think the vast majority of people understand what I was saying, recalling the amazing joy and awe that occurs when a child comes home.’
Given that it is a New Testament reference*, no, many of my Jewish friends did not at all understand or recognise this phraseology. It was justifiably received with shock and confusion: why would Leo describe a child’s brutal kidnapping by terrorists as her being ‘lost’?
I will say that for those of us who understand the reference, it is even more repugnant. Because the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son (‘For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found’) is about spiritual redemption.
Emily had done absolutely nothing wrong that required her to be redeemed.
This was a difficult read. Ireland’s profound and eternal shame.
‘Hand said that while he still viewed himself as an Irishman and truly loved the country, he had been left “very disappointed” by the land of his birth. He said that despite the enormity of the shadow cast over people’s lives by the events of October 7, he believed the Hamas attacks had not had a lasting impact on public consciousness in Ireland.
“That was forgotten within two days. My daughter was kidnapped for 50 days. My ex-wife, who is the mother of my two older kids, was killed. Shot in the stomach, shot in the neck. I have a hundred people that I know that were murdered that day. I have 30 friends and people that I know that were kidnapped that day.”’
Remember this every time Irish officials pontificate on an international stage about how our anti-Israel stance is driven by ‘humanity’ and ‘our history’. Ask them this: where was the humanity towards an Irishman whose ex-wife was murdered and daughter was kidnapped? Where was the empathy towards one of our own who has *actual* family history in our nation, not simply a claim to it due to an imposed narrative of ‘parallel struggles’?
They won’t have an answer for you. Because they know very well that we betrayed little Emily Hand, a kidnapped Irish child that our then Taoiseach egregiously described as ‘lost and found’.
A poster of her was viciously torn to shreds in my hometown of Dún Laoghaire, which is incidentally Tom Hand’s hometown also. The shame of it all is unbearable.
Peter Boylan retweeted
“Nowhere has this moral confusion become more obvious than in a place called Gaza. A little strip of land that was not part of the original Israel, but which they won in a war launched against them, but then gave back as a peace gesture. Did they tell you that part on TikTok, kids?
And the people who run Gaza, Hamas, who you celebrate as a liberation movement but are really a terrorist mafia gang, just like the one that terrorizes Haiti, only ever used it to stage attacks on Israel.
I think Macklemore spoke for all clueless celebrities when he said: ‘I know enough to know this is a genocide.’ Actually, you don’t know sh*t. It’s not a genocide. It’s a counterattack in a war. A war that’s been waged on Israel since 1948 based on the ridiculous premise that Jews don’t belong in the one place on earth they are indigenous and indisputably their ancestral homeland. Hey geniuses, they’re the Indians in this scenario.
Any famine that happened in Gaza is because Hamas stole the food, just like the Haitian gangs do. Israel ran 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid into Gaza, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad.
‘Gaza equals genocide’ is a lie, and the fact that so many prominent Democrats go along with it is, to me, the party’s worst moment since they undid Reconstruction after the Civil War. Democrats are policing their candidates really hard on this issue. ‘Say it! Say it’s a genocide! Say it!’
You can’t just change the definition of genocide to mean counterattack in a war where people, including civilians, die. That’s every war. There have been about 73,000 deaths in Gaza, about 3% of the population. Tragic. Not genocide. Not close. There were 3 million Jews in Poland before WW2. After? 45,000. That’s genocide.
This explosion of antisemitism around the world that we see. This is where it’s coming from. Because if you really think someone is committing genocide, of course you have full permission to hate them, and history shows, for whatever reason, when it comes to hating the Jews, people don’t need a lot of permission.”
@billmaher , American comedian and political commentator.
Photo: Angela George / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0. Cropped.
The Nation of Israel Lives
Peter Boylan retweeted
This was a difficult read. Ireland’s profound and eternal shame.
‘Hand said that while he still viewed himself as an Irishman and truly loved the country, he had been left “very disappointed” by the land of his birth. He said that despite the enormity of the shadow cast over people’s lives by the events of October 7, he believed the Hamas attacks had not had a lasting impact on public consciousness in Ireland.
“That was forgotten within two days. My daughter was kidnapped for 50 days. My ex-wife, who is the mother of my two older kids, was killed. Shot in the stomach, shot in the neck. I have a hundred people that I know that were murdered that day. I have 30 friends and people that I know that were kidnapped that day.”’
Remember this every time Irish officials pontificate on an international stage about how our anti-Israel stance is driven by ‘humanity’ and ‘our history’. Ask them this: where was the humanity towards an Irishman whose ex-wife was murdered and daughter was kidnapped? Where was the empathy towards one of our own who has *actual* family history in our nation, not simply a claim to it due to an imposed narrative of ‘parallel struggles’?
They won’t have an answer for you. Because they know very well that we betrayed little Emily Hand, a kidnapped Irish child that our then Taoiseach egregiously described as ‘lost and found’.
A poster of her was viciously torn to shreds in my hometown of Dún Laoghaire, which is incidentally Tom Hand’s hometown also. The shame of it all is unbearable.
Peter Boylan retweeted
The Sunday Independent's @Fearghaloc publishes his fifth piece today on @AIGIreland's head of consumer marketing and sponsorship John Gillick, whose personal account @JohnnyGpops was discovered over a month ago to contain a substantial archive of extremist antisemitic content. This included calling Jews "evil," "vermin," and "thieves," and saying they should be expelled from Ireland.
Today's piece describes the antisemitic content as having been posted "over an extended period of time." That matters, because the Independent's first account was of a few weeks' worth of tweets posted by a hacker. The antisemitic archive is much more extensive, running from at least January 2025 to August 2026, and any explanation of what happened has to account for that whole timespan.
Second, the paper notes that everything posted on the account after 2022 was deleted once screenshots began circulating online. It still isn't clear why Gillick claimed on September 2nd that he didn't write "recent posts" but then blanket-deleted four years of his account's history.
Third, there is the inconsistency of AIG's response. In early September, the company was prepared to tell a national newspaper, within a day, that its executive had not written the posts. Then, it backtracked and launched an investigation. A month on, it will not say what its investigation has found or even where it stands. It will not even say whether its head office is satisfied with how its Irish management handled the matter.
And fourth, there is the silence of Mr Gillick himself, who on September 2nd claimed that the antisemitic tweets had been posted by "unauthorized person(s)" and said he "unequivocally condemn[ed] the views expressed in those posts." Since then, Mr Gillick "has not responded to numerous queries" from the Independent. He also has not posted on his LinkedIn account since late August, which is at odds with his previous pattern of posting regular updates from sporting events sponsored by his company.
Gardaí say their enquiries are continuing, and nobody should prejudge them. But @AIGinsurance's internal inquiry is not a criminal process. Nothing stops the company from saying where it stands. As @Holocaust_Irl recently noted, nothing stops it either from stating plainly that the content was antisemitic and unacceptable, regardless of who wrote it.
What's striking is the contrast between how quickly Gillick and AIG spoke up in early September and how little either will say now, more than a month on.
independent.ie/business/iris…
Peter Boylan retweeted
The Israel/Palestinian conflict explained in a single sentence
Seven seconds. That’s all it takes to explain the entire conflict. And it came straight from the mouth of a Palestinian Arab. Watch.
He doesn’t bother with the charade. He isn’t talking about settlements, or a checkpoint, or an armistice line drawn in 1967. He says that in his religion, in the Quran, it is forbidden for the Jews to have their own land.
Read that again and again.
In the Quran, it is forbidden for the Jews to have their own land.
That’s the conflict. Everything else is insignificant.
A two-state solution requires both peoples to accept that the other one has a right to exist as itself. Jews have spent a century offering that, and the offers were rejected every single time because it included a Jewish state that would remain a Jewish state.
The rejection wasn’t a negotiating tactic. It was the whole doctrine. Accepting that the Jews as a people have their own land would mean accepting that Jews are equal and not a subservient population under Islam, and that is the part Islam won’t grant. The choice he leaves is the old one. Subservience, or death.
You can argue maps for another century. He already told you that the map isn’t the objection. The objection is that the Jews are on it as owners and equals.
H/T @AskProjectYT
Peter Boylan retweeted
On this day—October 2, 1947
David Ben-Gurion stood in Jerusalem and asked the Arabs to take a state of their own and meet the Jews as sovereign equals.
Not after the war. Seven months before it. The UN had not yet voted. No Arab army had crossed a border. The British were still the government.
Ben-Gurion admitted the Arabs had refused to even sit at the same table as the Jews. But he made the offer anyway:
“We will do everything in our power to maintain peace, and establish a cooperation gainful to both. It is now, here and now, from Jerusalem itself, that a call must go out to the Arab nations to join forces with Jewry and the destined Jewish State and work shoulder to shoulder for our common good, for the peace and progress of sovereign equals.”
Six weeks later, the UN recommended two states. The Arab Higher Committee said no. In May 1948, five Arab armies invaded to kill in the crib the state whose chairman had just asked them to be partners.
The people who left during that war are now described as the victims of a plan drawn up in the Jewish Agency. The plan on the table that October was the opposite: have your own country, and those who stay in ours will become citizens and together we will build our countries as equals.
The Arabs heard him, and then chose war.
Peter Boylan retweeted
Ireland since independence has always rejected the political extremes. Communism and fascism were rejected in the 20th century and militant ultranationalism during the Troubles was overwhelmingly rejected by voters.
Opinion polls show that middle Ireland does not support the extreme obsession of a minority with one of the world’s many awful conflicts. That so many politicians (and most media) are so detached from the average voter is a real cause for concern. The political class has shown itself to be out of touch on other issues, eg the referendums of 2023. Some self reflection by politicians on the obsession with one of the Middle East’s conflicts is needed more than even after tonight’s game.
Peter Boylan retweeted
A truly excellent article by the Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Yoni Wieder, in the Irish Times today. It is a lament of what could have been with the Ireland/Israel fixture; the conversations between two peoples it could have started, the minds it could have opened.
‘It might have been naïve, but when the draw was made, I was hopeful. I marked the date of the Dublin match in my calendar. Thousands of Israelis would surely have travelled here, and I looked forward to them experiencing Ireland through the everyday encounters you have in a country where so many people are happy to strike up a warm conversation with a stranger, rather than through political point-scoring or angry headlines.’
He continues:
‘One of my concerns about the public discourse around Israel in Ireland is how narrow it is. Ordinary Israelis are seldom heard explaining how they see the reality they’ve been living through, the fears and traumas they carry, or the dilemmas they face. Without their voices, it becomes much easier to dehumanise and demonise them.’
The Chief Rabbi concludes with a poignant lament that perhaps this dream of human connection between the Israeli and Irish peoples was an impossible one, because the atmosphere here has become too hostile for it.
A truly excellent and most touching article; one I implore everyone to read. Link below.
Peter Boylan retweeted
Statement from @Alan__Shatter Former Irish minister for Justice.
Please share widely.
He asks for no political gestures on the Anniversary of the 7/10 atrocities during the Ireland V Israel game.
Peter Boylan retweeted
It's bizarre how we seem to be ok with charlatans exploiting vulnerable patients - thanks to @guardian for covering our concerns.. theguardian.com/society/2026…
