Who is the Irish student who took on a furious anti-Israel crowd at an Ilan Pappé lecture?

When O Mahony, who is not Jewish but is a fierce advocate for Israel, saw the event publicised, he decided to attend with a few friends. He had previously read a book by Pappé – an Israeli professor at the University of Exeter who frequently speaks out against the Jewish state – and thought, “I can’t let a guy like that come along to my home city and not give him a bit of a challenge.”

The Israel advocate speaking at an SSI conference last December (photo: courtesy)[Missing Credit]

He sat through the 40-minute lecture before raising his hand during the Q&A. Speaking from the back of the room, O Mahony pointed out that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where critics like Pappé enjoy freedom of speech, and claimed the professor “hates Israel also because it’s a capitalist success story.

“By that stage,” he recalled, “70-plus people were booing and shouting at me.”

Undeterred, he took out an Israeli flag. As he began to unfold it, he told the keffiyeh-clad crowd: “Boo all you like – Am Yisrael Chai.”

At that point, a man sitting in front of him tried to snatch the flag.

O Mahony resisted. “Adrenaline kicked straight into action,” he told the JC from his home in Limerick. “The main thing I was thinking was that I cannot let him take this flag from me.”

With a background in rugby, he managed to hold on. “I tried to put up a fight.”

Footage of the incident later circulated on social media, showing both men being physically restrained. In the video, O Mahony can be heard telling the man: “I have freedom of speech.”

O Mahony and his friends were ejected from the lecture hall. But outside the building, the confrontation continued. While he is being pushed away by another man, O Mahony says: “I thought you were better than that sir. I have a right to express myself. I listened freely and respectfully.”

A separate man told O Mahony’s friend, who was filming, to leave and pushed him out of the building. “You are not welcome, go,” he said.

The man who lunged for the flag was subsequently identified as Gerald (Ger) Downes, listed on the University of Limerick website as its Postgraduate Research Development Manager.

O Mahony told the JC that Downes is an old family friend – “almost the reason my parents met.” In the video, he can be heard telling Downes repeatedly, “I know you.”

“Ger would have been over to our house for dinner parties. I remember being a boy and playing with his son, who was a similar age. He didn’t recognise me because he hadn’t seen me in about ten years,” he said.

O Mahony is critical of the level of anti-Israel activism in Ireland, especially in academic circles. “Ireland is fuelled with antisemitic and anti-Zionist content, especially across academia.”

O Mahony identified the man who tried to snatch his flag as Gerald (Ger) Downes, an old family friend (Photo: X/screenshot)[Missing Credit]

The location of the Limerick incident made it particularly resonant for O Mahony, occurring just steps from the site of the notorious 1904 Limerick Pogrom – also known as the Limerick Boycott – in which Jews were forced out of the city.

“It is tragically ironic that 100 years after the Limerick Pogrom, merely a stone's throw from there, this event occurred.”

He believes “Ireland doesn’t want to confront its antisemitism.”

“It has rightly been called an antisemitic place, [but] people are so self-righteous about it and don’t want to confront it at all. They want to say: ‘They only call us antisemites because we criticise Israel.’”

Ireland’s Chief Rabbi Yoni Wieder said the incident showed that “Public discourse around Israel in Ireland is increasingly marked by attempts to silence dissent. This is now the second time that someone has been manhandled simply for calmly expressing disagreement with the prevailing narrative.

“We’ve reached a point where some believe that when it comes to Israel, they are above the law, and that anyone who dares disagree can be met with intimidation, even in broad daylight, in an academic lecture hall.

“How can meaningful dialogue take place when one side is shut down?”

The Chief Rabbi went on: “Contrast this to the tolerance shown in recent months to masked protesters who freely paraded Hamas and Hezbollah flags through the streets of Dublin and openly called for Tel Aviv to be bombed. It’s a glaring, embarrassing contradiction.”

Israel’s Cabinet Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, called for the university to address the incident.

O Mahony addressing a classroom during the founding meeting of Students Supporting Israel DCU, a branch of the global Zionist student movement, which he started on his campus (Photo: courtesy)[Missing Credit]

O Mahony said: “I never would have thought that the Israeli cabinet would be talking about something I did.”

A student of International Business with French at Dublin City University, O Mahony traces his convictions back to childhood and his father, who “brought me to Speakers' Corner in London when I was a boy. It’s something he always instilled in me.”

Explaining his pro-Israel views, O Mahony said these too came from his father, “who had a Jewish friend growing up, which isn’t the norm in Ireland, and was always positively inclined towards Israel.

“We lived in Vienna for a period in my youth, a few hundred metres from the old Gestapo headquarters... As I came into my teenage years, I became more interested in geopolitics, and Israel became a big cause for me.”

After the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, he started to become more active in pro-Israel advocacy, explaining, “In my lifetime, [the massacre] was probably the most horrific thing I had seen.

O Mahony visited the site of the Nova festival in May (Photo: Courtesy)[Missing Credit]

“The manner of the attack – we had a young Irish woman killed in Nova, we had an eight-year-old girl kidnapped... I remember walking through Dublin two days after October 7 and people were out saying ‘glory to the Palestinian resistance.’ I was absolutely disgusted.”

O Mahony began speaking up for Israel through his university’s debating society. He met the Israeli ambassador to Ireland Dana Erlich and launched a campus branch of Students Supporting Israel. But the backlash to his Zionism has been intense.

“It got an awful lot of attention. I was the chair of my debate society – I was removed. My relationship with my girlfriend ended. I had to stay off campus for a week because people were leaking my timetable. It got quite dangerous. But since then, I’ve become more determined.”

O Mahony with Israel's ambassador to Ireland, Dana Erlich (Photo: courtesy)[Missing Credit]

He has visited Israel on several occasions, recently in May, when he travelled to the site of the Nova Festival attack. The flag he unfurled at the lecture is one of two that he owns; the other is a gift from a friend in the IDF who took it to Gaza and has “shrapnel holes.” 

Now a fellow with CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis), O Mahony has travelled to Europe and America through his activism.

“I was only in Poland last week,” he said. Referring to the horrors of the Second World War, O Mahony added, “I saw there what happened when enough people don’t speak up against the dominant ideology in society – that can only bring bad things. I am thankful to live in the freest part of the world, but all the more reason to try to preserve those ideals.”

And despite the risk, he’s determined to keep fighting for those ideals of freedom: “If even one person is inspired to speak out a bit more, then that’s a good thing.”

The JC approached Dr Downes, the University of Limerick and Professor Pappé for comment.