Ireland is rewarding Hamas for 7 October

For once, the Irish government has actually done something it promised. The problem is that it’s precisely the wrong thing, at precisely the wrong time.

On Wednesday, Ireland, along with Norway and Spain, committed to recognising a Palestinian state. Ireland will formally ratify this on 28 May. It’s a bizarre and utterly counterproductive move which has the very real potential to plunge the region into even more carnage, but one which many Irish politicians from all parties have been demanding for the last few months.

It’s easy to see why Taoiseach Simon Harris decided to engage in such a fatuous piece of political virtue-signalling. He has only been in the top job for a month, but is hugely unpopular with the general public. His administration’s abject failure to cope with the country’s mammoth housing crisis and an escalating resentment about record levels of illegal immigration, which have even seen ‘tent cities’ full of migrants appear on the streets of Dublin, has placed his back firmly to the wall.