The University of Galway governing body is hiding from consequences like a war criminal trying to dodge the firing squad. The hole that has been dug by the President, the Údarás and the University Management Team is so deep and so damning that they cannot leave their offices without facing an endless barrage of bodies and flags standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people. They cannot face the fact that they have signed and delivered themselves into complicity with the genocide in Palestine.
Students organised in the Palestine Solidarity Society, staff and academics, represented in the broader Anti-Genocide Coalition and Fórsa and SIPTU trade unionists, have all brought huge pressure on the university authorities. The refusal of three honorary doctorates to accept their honours has pushed the issue into national news, and the University board has scrambled and flailed about trying to save face. They know their position is indefensible; their sterile use of phrases like “it’s complicated” and “it’s under review” will no longer wash. The students, disgusted with seeing Palestinians shredded to death by Zionists, are outraged that their fees are contributing to an institution that is active in the ongoing genocide.
BDS
From October 2023, the Palestine Solidarity Society had been advocating a strong position on implementing Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of all Israeli goods and services and pushing the university to openly condemn Israel’s ongoing genocide. BDS had been a primary focus, as the Administration had tied the Student’s Union up in a 10-year monopoly deal with Coca-Cola, despite having BDS enshrined in the SU constitution since 2014, which meant that the only choice that students had when it came to consuming drinks on campus was Coke products.
Until February 2024, however, the university had been showing a double face, by not publishing the reality that they were about to enter a deal with an Israeli university. The Palestine Solidarity Society successfully pressured the university into carrying out a review of its dealings with Israeli institutions. The results of this review, and Human Rights Assessment, after over a year, have not been confirmed. But we can guess that the university knew they were guilty as sin, and decided against publishing anything on advice from their corporate lawyers.
Technion deal
The deal with Technion was left to be discovered by the students, despite the admin knowing about it for years. An article by Electronic Intifada exposed the University of Galway as the leading partner in the ASTERISK research project funded by the EU. Technion, the self-proclaimed technical wing of the Israeli Defence Forces, whose student-soldiers are an essential cog in the Israeli war machine, is a key participant in this project.
Technion weapons include Scream AI. This is a drone-mounted white noise machine used before bombs are dropped onto the civilian population in Gaza. Another Frankenstein’s monster they’ve created is the remote-controlled D-9 bulldozer. This is a heavy-duty machine which has been used to flatten Palestinian homes and turn what was once the city of Rafah into a flat wasteland. Technion has the highest percentage of students in Israel serving in the IDF reserves, a big gang of war criminals in waiting. Technion has raised $500,000 for the occupation forces to carry out their slaughter since October 2023. Their ‘best and brightest’ are working tirelessly to complete the displacement and genocide of 2 million Palestinians in Gaza.
ASTERISK’s Ecocidal Project
The ASTERISK project involves treating seawater through a process called electrolysis to create green hydrogen. This is a particularly twisted and hypocritical aspect to the deal, as Israel is not only carrying out a genocide, but also an ecocide on Palestinian land. It has consistently used water as a weapon of war. They have had full control over the flow of freshwater in Gaza since 1967, and in 2023 they shut off the sources and destroyed vital infrastructure to cut off access to freshwater for Gaza’s 2 million people.
90-95% of water in Gaza was deemed unfit for human consumption by Doctors without Border/Médicines Sans Frontiéres. Gaza’s only freshwater source, the Coastal Aquifer, was already insufficient for the needs of the population, and it has been contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration due to sabotage by the Zionists.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, water consumption among Palestinians is as low as 20 litres per person a day, while an average Israeli uses 300 litres. One Palestinian farmer recalls that “in 1967, when [Israeli authorities] started taking the water it was like a sickness in a body… slowly the land dried up.”
Meanwhile, illegal settlements on Palestinian land are flush with outdoor swimming pools and all the stolen water they could ever need. Things were dire enough before 2023, but during the current genocide, Israel has blocked 9/10ths of the water aid waiting to enter Gaza, facilitating the spread of disease and worsening the effects of infection by denying water that could help the wounded recover.
The idea that Israel should be invited to take part in research aimed at improving the environment while they deprive Palestinians of water and drop 100,000 tonnes of bombs over an area of 365 square km is deplorable.
Horizon Project Scam
A concerted effort is being made across Ireland and across Europe to kick Israel out of the Horizon project. The question should be asked as to why Israel was ever involved in a European Research project in the first place? Look no further than the efforts of the current chair of the Údarás of University of Galway, Márie-Geogheghan Quinn- an ex-Fianna Fáil TD and ex-European Commissioner for scientific research. Though Israel had been involved in EU affairs since 1996, it was the research initiative delivered by Geogheghan-Quinn which laid a silver platter for Israel to entrench itself in EU projects in 2014, despite having murdered over 2,000 Palestinians in that very same year. To this date Israel has benefitted from these projects to the tune of $5.3 billion, with a proportion of that going towards weapons deployed in the genocide.
When concerns from EU members were raised during the process of the deal to ensure that projects don’t take place within illegally occupied settlements in the West Bank, they were dismissed by Geogheghan-Quinn, who sided with Ulster Unionist Party member Jim Nicholson, who insisted that funds should not be denied to illegal Israeli settlers on Palestinian land. Goegheghan-Quinn responded by stressing “the need to find flexible ways of implementing the guidelines”: they were happy to break the Geneva Conventions for reasons of political expediency.
Máire Geogheghan Quinn advocated a flexible approach to war crimes. As a result, the EU has approved research grants to companies like Ahava, an Israeli cosmetics-maker whose main factory is illegally implanted in the West Bank, and which relies on exploited Palestinian labour. The circularity of this bloody deal is incredible – a member of the landlord party in Ireland, in the pocket of a sectarian Ulster loyalist, and both of them in the pocket of Zionist war criminals. The old enemies never went anywhere: it is still those in league with landlordism, colonialism and sectarianism that are the principal adversaries of the Irish people.
“EU laws”
One excuse that the University tries to make is that they must abide by EU laws and see through their early commitment to the project. The previous president, Peter McHugh, released a statement the day he left office, stating that they could not back out of the deal. Yet no European Union contract law can supersede International Law in relation to states carrying out a genocide; nor can it supersede Irish law, which is beholden to international law, This makes even less sense given that the Irish government has recognised the genocide and has said it will intervene in South Africa’s case at the ICJ.
The campus-based Irish Centre for Human Rights, delivered clear guidance to the governing body, affirming their right to renegotiate the deal, and providing a step-by-step guide on how this could be done. The administration deliberately chose to ignore them. The Palestine Solidarity Society brought BDS founder Omar Barghouti and UN Special Rapporteur to the Occupied Territories, Francesca Albanese, to the university in 2024. They both sat down with then President Peter McHugh to warn of the university’s complicity. This too was ignored. The admin is aware that their legal standing is nil; they have no arguments left. All they can do is hide and wait for it to blow over. And it won’t.
The University of Galway’s Double Standards
Nelson Mandela visited the University of Galway in 2003, receiving an honorary doctorate and thanking Ireland and the university for speaking up about apartheid when it “wasn’t popular to do so”. The University then initiated the Nelson Mandela Anti-Racism week in respect to his visit. The complicit trifecta of the President, the Údarás and the UMT have turned this sentiment into a farce.
Today, the governing body of the University, and President David Burn, accepts genocide, scholasticide, ecocide, racism, and apartheid as reasonable downsides to a profitable deal.
The University of Galway, which prides itself as a beacon of inclusivity, has labelled itself a racist institution, by collaborating with Technion, the technological spearhead of Zionist ethnonationalism.
In light of this, Vice-Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Dr. Deirde Curran’s resignation from her role stands out as a model of principle. In resigning she declared that the university’s capitulation is “making a mockery of EDI, making a mockery of the Nelson Mandela Anti-Racism Week, and abusing the name of Nelson Mandela”.
Curran’s action was accompanied by the refusal of three distinguished figures to accept honorary doctorates from the University. Historian Kerby Miller, actor Olwen Fouéré, and filmmaker Margo Harkin each refused to accept awards, explicitly due to the university’s complicity. Their principled actions have plunged the university’s reputation further into the mud and tipped the scales towards breaking the Technion deal.
It must be said that the first person to turn down the honorary doctorate due to the Israeli collaboration was the late Margaretta D’Arcy, the fearless Galway activist who had been at the forefront of every protest at the university since 2023 and who sadly passed away earlier this month.
Catalyst
The University administration thought they could wait out the storm, stall until the deal was finished or until the movement grew tired, and then call it a diplomatic victory when the deal expires. But students, staff and alumni are not going to wait for an expiration date: we understand that waiting it out has the same effect on the lives of Palestinians as supporting it.
These revelations about the deal and the institutional cowardice of the admin have been a catalyst for direct action from students. The Palestine Solidarity Society has been driven to live up to their commitment of emphasising the importance of the liberation of Palestine. Students have on multiple occasions blocked the entrance to the Quadrangle, as well as holding marches through campus and blocking off access to the coca-cola vending machines.
Students know that their ambition reaches beyond a degree. Francesca Albanese has reminded us that amidst the inhumanity of the genocide there is also hope for renewal, for a ‘rupture’ in the descent into brutality. “Palestine’s immense suffering has cracked open the possibility of transformation,” she said. “Even if this is not fully reflected into political agendas (yet), a revolutionary shift is underway—one that, if sustained, will be remembered as a moment when history changed course.”
At another key turning point, around the May 1968 movement in Paris, Daniel Cohn-Bendit observed that “as opposition to the Vietnam war assumed international proportions, French students, particularly in Paris, were increasingly involved in campus demonstrations, the more so as their hatred of this war went hand in hand with the dawning realisation that their own universities were nothing but cogs in the capitalist machine.”
The strategic-economic deals that are made behind closed-doors give no regard for humanity; they are chiefly aimed at maximising strategic opportunity and profit. This time, it has blown up in the face of the University of Galway. But we cannot take this as an isolated event. The movement in 1968 succeeded in making sure that students understood that the suffering that the Vietnamese were experiencing at the hands of the US, and the suffering that Algerians were suffering at the hands of the French, were intrinsically tied to the economic and systemic hardship of students across Europe.
For profit
It should be no surprise to us, seeing as this is the same university administration that, in 2003, raised the student levy by €100 per person to pay for the construction of a new sports centre, only to privatise it when it was completed. The sports centre now charges the very students who paid to build it to use it. This is the same university administration who rakes in millions of euros in profit from campus accommodation, while medical students are sleeping in their cars because they can’t find a room to let.
It should come as no surprise that this administration would jump into bed with a Zionist institution. These issues have always been connected, the same system of global financial capitalism, on its bloodthirsty hunt for profit has trampled on human rights and dignity everywhere, from Palestine to Shantalla.
The path forward is clear- this is the endgame for the governing body of the University of Galway. Their time is up. They have attached themselves to the rotting carcass of global Zionism, which is itself sinking, besieged by a global workers’ and student movement which rejects it entirely in every form. Just as they did in Madrid, Rome, Berkeley, and Tokyo in 1968, students across the world continue to mobilise against imperialism. They are joined by workers across the world, as we’ve seen recently in Genoa. Students across Ireland, north and south, are uniting to give Israel the boot, not just out of the Horizon project, but out of every institution on this island.
