Ireland concert hall cancels Israel aid event for second time

Dublin’s National Concert Hall canceled for a second time a fundraising event for a civilian rescue service in Israel, the head of the Magen David Ireland association said on Sunday.

“The event’s cancellation by the NCH can be properly described as an act of antisemitic censorship,” MDA Ireland head Alan Shatter, a former minister of justice, wrote on X. “What behind-the-scenes lobbying or pressure, if any, impacted the decision is unknown.”

The scheduled event was a play titled “OCTOBER 7,” which consists entirely of eyewitness accounts of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacres in Israel. Ann McElhinney, who wrote the play with her husband, Phelim McAleer, penned an op-ed in the Irish Independent on Sunday where she said that with the cancellation, “no venue in Ireland has the courage to stage” the piece.

In response to a JNS query on the reasons for the cancellation and for a reaction of the hall’s management to Shatter’s allegation, a spokesperson for the hall wrote only: “The proposed event with MDA Ireland on 11 May will not proceed.”

The concert was booked in November as a venue for the show, which would have featured a narrator’s reading of accounts of survivors and victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel, Shatter said. Management then canceled, but reversed its cancellation, only to cancel again with “each cancellation having a spurious basis,” he wrote.

Magen David Adom is an emergency medical intervention organization in Israel, with thousands of Jewish, Muslim and Christian volunteers. Charities in countries around the world collect money for the group by soliciting donors and organizing benefits.

Gilad Erdan, the world president of Magen David Adom, in a statement Monday wrote that the National Concert Hall’s decision “to cancel a non-political charitable event designed to help save lives in Israel clearly shows that its integrity and morality are compromised at best, and perhaps has been abandoned entirely.”

He added: “This decision is antisemitic—censorship tainted by bad faith and ignorance.”

The controversy in Ireland follows several similar ones across Europe, including one involving the Royal Concert Hall in Amsterdam. It announced the cancellation of a Chanukah concert scheduled for December because one of the cantors was a reserve soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, but reinstated the booking, with some technical changes, following a public outcry.

Ireland’s government is one of the most anti-Israel in the European Union. Israel announced in December 2024 that it was closing its embassy in Dublin, citing the Irish government’s “extreme anti-Israel policies,” including support for the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and Ireland’s recognition of a Palestinian state.

“There is an escalating global perception of Ireland as one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe,” Shatter wrote. “After years of denial, the Taoiseach in January acknowledged the existence of a problem that uniquely impacts our Jewish community,” he added.

(Taoiseach is an Irish-language word that refers to the country’s prime minister. The incumbent, Micheál Martin, in a speech ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, said: “We are seeing growing instances of people feeling comfortable expressing antisemitism, racism and intolerance.”)

The National Concert Hall’s decision “will add to that perception” of Ireland having an antisemitism problem, Shatter wrote.

“I am deeply saddened that we have arrived at the position in Ireland where it is acceptable that our publicly funded National Concert Hall and its board stop the factual, undecorated narration on one of its stages of the worst Jewish tragedy since the Holocaust that also impacted others, a tragedy involving murders, rapes and abductions, and heroism of responders and rescuers,” he added.