A DIRECT appeal has been made to former OFI President Sarah Keane to stop the Central Bank facilitating Israel bonds.
The Central Bank of Ireland is the sole authority which facilitates the sale of so-called ‘genocide bonds’ in the European Union.
This is set to be renewed in September but more than 300 sports people – including Dublin football captain Con O’Callaghan and former Ireland international James McClean – have signed an open letter to Keane.
Keane was the President of the Olympic Federation of Ireland between 2017 and 2024 and is credited with overseeing much-needed reform in the organsiation.
She remains the CEO of Swim Ireland and is a Central Bank board member which has prompted Sport for Palestine to make a direct appeal to her.
Former Leinster player and prominent activist Trevor Hogan said: “Without trying to make it personal to Sarah but Sarah is involved in swimming and you know obviously she’d have an awareness of what it’s like to compete and to play sport.
“For my own self, it really hits home when I think about what’s happened to sport on top of everything else, on top of the starvation, the forced displacement and everything.
“There’s no sport, it doesn’t exist, every facility has been destroyed and all sporting teams have been either subject to killings or just shut down so, from that, how can we not have some sort of sanction on the people who are doing that, which is the Israeli state, who are still involved in all sorts of sporting activity, they travel freely.
“We have a chance to say, ‘No, we’re not going to contribute to that continuing genocide’, and we can actually appeal to Sarah from a sporting point of view.
“It’s not necessarily even a sanction, it’s just a little bit of a signal to say, ‘Hold on, we need to review this, this isn’t right’.”
Sport for Palestine said they had written to all 10 members of the banking commission, including Keane, individually on three occasions to make their case.
They also contacted the commission itself. The only response it received was in relation to that communication.
It referred to its governor Gabriel Makhlouf’s statement in front of an Oireachtas committee last month when he said the UN’s Genocide Convention applied to the Irish state rather than the Central Bank.
But Hogan added: “They maybe thought they could put it to bed and hide it. For me, it feels like they’re hiding behind the regulations, whereas there’s a wider legal interpretation that they could take.
“Most reasonable people would say ‘Yeah let’s do that and let’s take a step’.”
Hogan took part in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in 2011. Asked if he could have seen things worsen to the extent they have, the four-times-capped Ireland international said: “I probably didn’t think it would be this bad.
“I didn’t think that the genocide would have got to the level where they wiped out every university, every school. Every hospital has been attacked.
“I didn’t anticipate that but I do think that has brought it to a turning point in a way. The mask is off on what they’re trying to do, the mask is off in who is supporting them in terms of America and Trump so now we have a choice now because of that clarity.
“It’s ‘right where do we stand now?’ so it’s not this ‘both sides’ anymore, ‘Well if I say this about Palestine, I have to balance it with this’.
“No one needs to do that anymore, they know where to stand so let’s push hard like we did with South Africa in the apartheid era where everyone knew the kind of right and wrong there and we’re at that stage now.”
Hogan also voiced his dismay at the rejection of visa applications for a group of 33 kids and 14 adults from the West Bank who are due to travel to Ireland on a two-week GAA tour next Wednesday.
He said: “We got a Gaza kids group here in 2015-16. A lot of those obstacles were put in place but we managed to get through and it was just so uplifting to see the outcome of that when the kids came over.
“Show a little bit of leeway, it feels like they’re artificially making it difficult but we keep going, keep appealing to them because there is time for it to still happen.”
