UCD Justice for Palestine and Academics for Palestine strongly support the solidarity encampment established by UCD students at Belfield. This comes especially light of wide-ranging commitments made by Trinity College Dublin to fully divest from complicit Israeli companies and review all ties with Israeli institutions, following principled student and staff activism which led university management to engage in constructive and good faith negotiations. Universities who refuse to engage constructively with student activists in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza risk falling out of step with the general public as well as international human rights bodies who deplore the atrocities being committed in Gaza.

We support all demands made by UCD student organisers, which can be found here. In particular, these demands are centred around four primary principles:

1) Severing any existing academic ties and institutional partnerships, projects or affiliations with Israeli universities and state institutions.

2) Full divestment from Israeli companies, funds, enterprises and suppliers complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
3) Comprehensive and targeted scholarships and supports for displaced Palestinian students and academics, and concerted lobbying of the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, and Innovation, the Higher Education Authority and the Irish Universities Association to fund extensive and ongoing supports.
4) Institutional condemnation of the genocide in Gaza, support for a ceasefire, and the constructive transformation of UCD into a place that expresses and models solidarity and support for justice in Palestine.

UCD staff, in alliance with students, have been requesting institutional action in this area since the autumn of 2023, when this horrible genocide began. However, we must remember that activists have been asking this for many years within the context of a 75+ year history of ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid. Ireland has long been at the forefront of such solidarity struggles, as evidenced by the inspiring actions of Dunnes workers against apartheid South Africa, and UCD students, as well as student activists across Ireland, are currently carrying on this proud and principled tradition.

However, as of this point, the UCD administration’s responses to student and staff demands have been, to be frank, dismissive, patronising, and at times, suppressive and misleading. Along with cancelling meetings and threatening punitive actions against students speaking out against the genocide, and the violent removal of UCDSU President Martha Ní Riada from US Representative Nancy Pelosi’s honorary conferral several weeks ago, UCD academics, staff, and students have been increasingly concerned that the university administration is demonstrating repression and contempt for student activism. As evidenced by a recent letter with nearly 500 staff signatures across HEIs in Ireland, including over 100 from UCD, staff members across all Irish HEIs are equally concerned about institutional responses to student protests.

In this current climate, we request that UCD, Ireland’s largest university, take leadership in respecting the democratic and humanitarian concerns of its students and staff. Because this is coming at a time when the genocide is intensifying in Gaza: with renewed Israeli air and ground offensives in the decimated north and south, and the further displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians from Rafah, the time to act in solidarity with Palestine is way past due. As President Michael D. Higgins intoned over the weekend, “It is outrageous that those who oppose war must fight for the space to argue for peace.”

UCD Justice for Palestine and Academics for Palestine urge UCD administration to come to the table, to follow the leadership that some other HEIs across Ireland have finally been starting to demonstrate, and to negotiate with students to make UCD a place that stands against genocide, apartheid, and occupation wherever it occurs. Student demands are modest in comparison to the horrors unleashed daily in Gaza, and the 75+ years of history leading us to this point.