A group representing the Jewish community in Ireland says it is considering legal action against a hotel in Dublin 4 over its cancellation of dozens of bookings made for delegates attending a conference on combating anti-Semitism.
Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, said “every angle will be considered” after the Herbert Park Hotel in Ballsbridge cancelled a booking for 70 delegates attending the Dublin conference.
In a speech on Tuesday addressing the Special Envoys and Co-ordinators Combating Anti-Semitism (Secca) conference, Cohen said when the World Jewish Congress began organising the event, a shortlist of hotels offering accommodation for 70 delegates was drawn up.
The Herbert Park Hotel was selected, after which there was “the usual discussion about rates and arrangements, and then came confirmation that the rooms were reserved”.
However, Cohen said the bookings were subsequently cancelled by the hotel without explanation just hours after he and the event co-ordinator met management to discuss the possibility of staging other elements of the conference at the hotel.
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He said he was asked by a hotel manager during the meeting what Secca was. In response, he said he “explained that it brought together Jewish community leaders from around the world and government-appointed officials responsible for combating anti-Semitism. Most of those government officials were not Jewish”.
He said he told the manager the conference was “associated with Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, that Government ministers would participate and that some of those attending would be meeting the Taoiseach as well as other ministers”.
As he spoke, he said, he noticed the manager’s “manner change” and said there was “a tension that had not been there before”. He said he was then asked if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would be involved.
“Nothing I had said had anything whatsoever to do with the Israeli army, yet somehow that was where the conversation had gone,” he said.
Cohen said he was then told that the owners of the hotel would have to be consulted ”to determine whether [delegates] would be permitted to stay there”.
A day later he was told the bookings had been cancelled.
In his speech, he said “contemporary anti-Semitism does not always arrive wearing the language of the past. It does not always announce itself with a slur, a threat or a placard”.
“Increasingly, it can present itself as a question, a precaution, a policy, a request for clarification,” he said.
The question about the IDF was “not an innocent misunderstanding”, Cohen told delegates.
“It revealed how quickly Jewish identity can be collapsed into Israel, how quickly Israel can be collapsed into suspicion and how quickly suspicion can become discrimination.”
Cohen told The Irish Times on Friday that the next steps had yet to be decided. One avenue would be lodging a complaint under the Equal Status Acts, which involved the Workplace Relations Commission.
Asked if he was considering legal action against the hotel on discrimination grounds, he said: “Every angle will be considered and action taken, as unfortunately people need to know that while we are a tiny community we have the same rights as others and we won’t be discriminated against.”
The Irish Times contacted the hotel offering it a right of response, but at the time of writing it had declined to comment.
In July, the Powerscourt Hotel, Co Wicklow, cancelled bookings for a “secretive” conference to be hosted in August by a group cofounded by US tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir, which is a defence contractor known for mass surveillance and has been criticised heavily for its “strategic partnership” with the IDF.