The Guinness. That effortless warmth. ‘The Craic’. A nation of poets and storytellers, irreverent but fundamentally decent.

A people whose chief role in international affairs today is the occasional extraction of cash from credulous Americans by convincing them their great-grandmother was from Cork.

That’s the Irish for you – at least according to benevolent stereotype.

Except now the image of modern Ireland is of a nation that is sanctimonious, angry, obsessed with its historical victimhood and addicted to lecturing everybody else on their behaviour.

On Sunday night, Ireland’s footballers played Israel in a Nations League match in Hungary. Before kick-off, the Irish players wore black armbands. During the Israeli national anthem, they bowed their heads. There were no customary pre-match handshakes with the opposition.

Ireland captain Dara O’Shea shook hands with the match officials, but not with his Israeli counterpart. Irish reserve goalkeeper, Gavin Bazunu, withdrew from the squad rather than play.

Fair enough, you might say, everyone has their principles.

Except, barely six weeks earlier, Ireland’s cricketers played Afghanistan’s men’s team. This is the country governed by the Taliban, under whose rule females have been systematically driven from public life. But the Afghans were made extremely welcome. Indeed, they thrashed the Irish 4-0 in the series.

Then there is Eurovision. Ireland refused to participate this year because Israel was permitted to enter. Ireland’s participation, RTE (the country’s national broadcaster) therefore declared, was ‘unconscionable’.

This is the Eurovision Song Contest, remember: a jamboree of the hilariously talentless and ludicrously camp whose traditional threshold for admission has been ‘possesses television transmitter’. To the unsmiling RTE, though, it was the Congress of Vienna. But this too was laced with hypocrisy.

Azerbaijan competed in Eurovision throughout, and after, its military conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh and subsequent ethnic cleansing of virtually its entire Armenian population. Throughout it all, Ireland sang happily on.

Ireland has developed a bizarre conception of itself as the world’s moral prefect. It is forever issuing judgments on the behaviour of other countries, particularly Israel and Britain, while displaying less enthusiasm for examining its own record.

So let’s do just that.

During the greatest moral and military struggle of the 20th century, the fight against Hitler, Ireland remained neutral. There were complicated historical reasons for that decision and Ireland did surreptitiously help the Allies in significant ways.

But Irish leader Eamon de Valera refused Britain access to Irish ports despite their enormous importance in the Battle of the Atlantic. Many British seamen died because of Ireland’s refusal to do the right thing.

And let’s not forget that, on May 2, 1945, with Hitler dead and the concentration camps being liberated and with that the horrors of the Nazi regime clear, De Valera visited the German representative to offer his condolences on the Fuhrer’s death. How’s that for ‘unconscionable’?

Ireland’s post-war record concerning Jews doesn’t make its contemporary moral grandstanding any less uncomfortable. Minutes of a September 1945 Irish interdepartmental meeting state: ‘It is the policy of the Department of Justice to restrict the immigration of Jews.’

The government worried about Jewish ‘wealth and influence’ and claimed Jews did not assimilate like other immigrants. As the headmaster Mr Deasy says in James Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews... Because she never let them in.’ The modern Irish are, of course, not responsible for loathsome De Valera. But if a large part of your national politics consists of rummaging through history to invoke your own victimhood, and thus your unimpeachable moral authority, you can’t complain when others have a little root around too.

You’d think all this might instil some sort of humility when it came to lecturing the Jewish state, the need for which was so indelibly proven by the Nazi gas chambers.

But self-righteousness does not yield to reality. So instead, we get endless Irish celebrities sounding off about Palestine.

The dreadful author Sally Rooney pledged her BBC royalties to the proscribed terror group Palestine Action: ‘If this makes me a “supporter of terror”… so be it,’ she said.

Then there’s terminally dim actor Liam Cunningham, who made his name playing a one-handed smuggler in a show about dragons, but feels qualified to incessantly critique the military operations of a country he has never even been to (though he did once get close, as a passenger on Greta Thunberg’s absurd and attention-seeking flotilla).

Perhaps most egregious, though, is Michael D. Higgins, who was Ireland’s president for 14 years. Before that, Higgins was a lecturer in political science and sociology (because of course he was) and was often photographed with his large dog, looking elderly and herbivorous.

But whenever he opened his mouth poison issued forth. In 2024 Ireland’s Chief Rabbi, Yoni Wieder, went to see Higgins with other Jewish representatives to discuss the growing anxiety among Irish Jews about anti-Semitism.

According to Wieder, Higgins’ response was to lecture them about Israeli atrocities. Think about that for a moment. Your Jewish citizens tell you they are frightened, and your response is to explain the evils of Israel to them. Higgins has now been replaced by Catherine Connolly, who says she ‘learned her socialism’ through ‘volunteering’, which gives a sense of how intolerable she must be.

Before becoming president, her deft analysis was to call Israel a ‘rogue’ and ‘terrorist’ state. Voters apparently decided that one intensely partisan, geopolitically ignorant and endlessly tedious occupant of its ceremonial presidency was one too few.

Why? Because, like so many others, Ireland has discovered the wonderful advantages of permanent victimhood. Its own history of British rule is projected on to practically every conflict on earth. Hence Belfast murals effortlessly transpose Ireland on to Palestine and the Irish famine on to Gaza; Irish hunger strikers become Palestinian prisoners; the famine becomes Gaza; history becomes a morality play with roles already allocated.

It’s the same historical analogy repeated interminably. Ireland was colonised by Britain. The Palestinians are colonised by Israel. So the Palestinians are the Irish and the Israelis are the British.

In this world, both Palestine and Ireland are eternally the oppressed and possess a sort of transferable certificate of righteousness in which victimhood is hereditary.

This has the advantage of allowing Ireland to present itself permanently as the little guy, even while becoming one of the richest countries in Europe with an economic model attractive to avaricious American tech giants.

When the European Commission ruled that Ireland had given Apple billions in unlawful tax advantages, you might have expected the principled little republic to seize the money. In fact, it fought the Commission’s decision. It did its best to reject cash that it could use to build schools and hospitals. In 2024, the EU’s highest court ultimately ruled against Ireland and Apple, and forced Ireland to take the cash.

I know many Irish people who are kind, moral, and sincere in their beliefs. But there is no doubt that a politics built around grievance and hypocrisy has gripped their nation, to considerably deleterious effect.