Northside school sing at 53rd weekly Cork Palestine Solidarity march

The voices of some 30 young members of the Gaelscoil Pheig Sayers school choir rang out high and clear in Cork city centre on Saturday afternoon as they sang at the 53rd weekly Cork Palestine Solidarity (CPSC) march and rally.

The children, third- to sixth-class pupils, sang Fonn na Saoirse, or Desire for Freedom, Inis Oirr, and their school song, Is Gael Mise.

Addressing the rally of some 500 people, Adrian Breathnach, principal of Gaelscoil Pheig Sayers, said the Palestinian flag had been flying over the school since last October.

“People said to us that we should stay neutral as a school, that we should stay out of it. You cannot stay neutral when there’s a genocide going on, you cannot,” he said, to cheers.

“It’s important for us to not just teach Irish history in our primary schools but to teach what is going on now, and the humanitarian crisis and the genocide, they are both linked.” 

Speaking to The Echo after the performance, Mr Breathnach said he believed all schools should fly the Palestinian flag.

“There’s children being killed, there’s schools being bombed, we’re very lucky to be able to wake up in the morning and go to school, but that’s not happening in Palestine.

“We felt the children should be aware of that, this is a part of history, this is a part of human rights, the world over.” 

Attending the rally, Thomas Gould, Sinn Féin TD for Cork North Central, said he was very proud of the people of Cork for turning out every week for over a year “to let the people of Palestine know they are not forgotten about”.

He said the Irish people, “more than many other nations” knew what it felt like to be colonised and oppressed”, adding that the Irish people would always stand against tyranny.

“Irish people will always stand with the Palestinian people,” he said.

CPSC co-chair Arthur Leahy quoted Israeli political scientist Ilan Pappé as saying Israel intends the next 12 months to be a replica of the past year.

“But history tells us that this is how a horrific chapter in the chronology of a rogue state ends – it is not how a new one begins,” Mr Leahy said.

The Israel-Hamas war erupted a year ago, after Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and took about 250 people hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, Gaza has come under heavy bombardment from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), with the death toll in the besieged enclave now more than 42,175, with about 97,000 injured, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

The war has displaced most of the Palestinian territory’s 2.3 million population and triggered widespread hunger. According to the United Nations, at least 1.9 million people across the Gaza Strip are internally displaced, including some people who have been uprooted more than 10 times.

On Thursday, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory accused Israel of committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination.

The UN inquiry said that Israeli forces were deliberately killing and torturing medical personnel, targeting medical vehicles and restricting patients from leaving Gaza.

The Israeli foreign ministry called the UN findings “outrageous” and said they were “another blatant attempt .. to delegitimise the very existence of the state of Israel and obstruct its right to protect its population, while covering up the crimes of terrorist organizations”.