GAVAN REILLY: If SF wants diplomacy, it has to put up with the diplomats
Those Shinners are wily folk, you know. Decades of creative ambiguity in political talks in Northern Ireland have given them a great education in how to say things without actually saying them: for their meanings to be understood without the words needing to be explicitly uttered.
You’ve probably seen headlines in the last week about Sinn Féin now calling for the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador to Ireland. Her position in Dublin is, according to a statement from Mary Lou McDonald last Friday, “now untenable”. “The Ambassador should no longer enjoy diplomatic status in Ireland while Israel refuses the imperative for ceasefires and as the suffering and death toll grow,” it said. Having previously been more equivocal on the issue, Sinn Féin justified the hardened language by pointing to Leo Varadkar’s own comments about Israel’s offensive looking less like self-defence and more like ‘revenge’.
You’ll notice that in that language, there is no explicit call for the ambassador to be expelled – but of course, that’s still the ultimate point of the statement. Would a replacement ambassador be any more tenable than the current one? Of course not: they would represent the same Israeli government. Nor would it be tenable for a former ambassador to lose their diplomatic status, but remain as some kind of envoy – or even to live – in Dublin. The statement is therefore a call for expulsion, without ever using those words.
Sinn Féin’s pivot was almost certainly driven by pressure from parties further left, like People Before Profit who had made the same call two weeks earlier. (If you were more cynical, which I’m not, you would also wonder if SF knew the ambassador would be invited to hear Micheál Martin’s address at the FF Árdfheis – which is not remarkable, most ambassadors are invited to hear leaders’ speeches from government ministers.) But so remarkable is the subterfuge in this statement, that it even comes with a title that contradicts its substance: the statement calling for the ambassador to be kicked out, carried in its title an affirmation that Ireland “must use all diplomatic and political options to achieve ceasefire”.
Imagine for a moment that the ambassador was kicked out as Sinn Féin desires. Firstly, Israel would retaliate in kind, and send Ireland’s ambassador home too – diplomatic relations are not a one-way street. To whom would Ireland then make its diplomatic overtures? Who exactly is the Minister for Foreign Affairs supposed to call, when he wants to impart Ireland’s position? Is he supposed to find a way to make contact with his direct counterpart, without having embassies as go-betweens to set it up? And in the midst of a war that Israel sees as existential, how likely is Israel’s foreign minister to take a call from a government it perceives as ambivalent if not outright hostile?
And if Ireland now has two priorities – seeking the release of 35-40 Irish citizens who are still trapped in Gaza as food runs out, and now also agitating for the release of 8-year-old Irish citizen Emily Hand who may remain a hostage to Hamas – surely there has never been a more imperative time to maintain open channels.