Black Mountain, which looms above West Belfast, acts as a blank canvas for Irish republicans to plaster their thoughts across. Over the years, banners covering a range of subjects, from Irish unity to Brexit, have been draped across it. In recent days, a Palestinian flag was placed there by a group styling itself Gael Force Art, claiming it was in ‘solidarity with the Palestinian people who launched their biggest operation in fifty years against the rogue state of Israel’. Gerry Adams shared a picture of the flag on Twitter/ X. ‘The Mountain Speaks! Free Palestine,’ he wrote.

Irish republicanism has always been a reliable well-spring of support for their Palestinian equivalents. In the Troubles, PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) sympathetic graffiti would occasionally jockey for attention with similar pledges of support for the Basque terrorists ETA on the walls of the Falls Road. In recent years, messages of support for Hamas have appeared alongside so-called street art supporting dissident republican terrorists.

Sinn Fein, with its murky ties to a terrorist organisation, has a genuine chance of taking power

For some Irish republicans, their cause has much in common with that of the Palestinians. They see themselves as kindred spirits in the global battle against the forces of ‘imperialism’. It’s all about vibes and being on the alleged right side of history. In an example of this superficiality, in Glasgow, a group of self-described anti-fascist Celtic supporters called the Green Brigade, taking a break from their usual veneration of the IRA, hoisted Palestinian flags and a banner proclaiming ‘victory to the resistance’ on Saturday afternoon. No ambulance is left unpursued in the quest to be viewed as right on.

But the shameful truth is that banners like these were being bandied around while acts of unspeakable violence were taking place. A music festival was being turned into a massacre; children were being butchered in their beds in a kibbutz.

Such displays fit into a wider pattern of demented behaviour by parts of the Western left, undertaken at a comfortable distance from the horrors of southern Israel. However, in the case of Irish republicanism, it was not limited to the extreme fringes.

Plenty of Sinn Fein representatives – from TDs in the south to Martina Anderson, the former IRA prisoner – were putting out performative displays of ‘solidarity’ with the Palestinian cause on social media while footage of Hamas’s barbarism was already circulating. The party’s youth wing also got in on the act, plastering their Twitter/X profile with Palestinian-style graphics. Little wonder Israeli sources have described the party as the most outwardly anti-Israeli in western Europe.

This is not the inconsequential chaff of the discredited remnants of Jeremy Corbyn’s fan base or a hard-of-thinking Scottish Green MSP elected on the list system. Sinn Fein, with its murky ties to a terrorist organisation which the security forces all agree is still very much alive, has a genuine chance of taking power in Ireland, a sizeable player in the European Union.

Mary Lou McDonald, the party’s leader, has been at pains to strike a more equivocal tone. Writing in the Irish News, she said ‘there can be no justification for the targeting of civilians and the taking of civilians as hostages’ – a courtesy Irish republican terrorists failed to extend to many innocents in Northern Ireland and beyond.

McDonald even mused that Ireland could play an ‘immensely positive role’ in delivering peace, adding that ‘our history of oppression, colonisation, and dispossession means we are uniquely placed to make a real difference’. Quite an achievement to fit such a line in an article which predictably allowed the mask to slip, with McDonald also hitting out with the greatest hits about Israel being an ‘apartheid regime’.

All of this has come hot on the heels of the present Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, lamenting that the UK is disengaging from the world. In response to this weekend’s atrocities, the Republic of Ireland attempted to crowbar a line about the need to ‘avoid escalation’ into the EU statement responding to the Hamas onslaught. Other EU nations felt an undiluted expression of solidarity with Israel was more fitting, while Foreign Secretary James Cleverly was the first foreign minister to see for himself what took place at the weekend.

If the Irish response to this situation has already been lacking – Varadkar’s government currently pursues a policy of neutrality while continuing to hide under Nato’s petticoats and allowing the UK to police its airspace – then the response of Sinn Fein should act as a warning about the potential for things to get much, much worse should they come to power.