The Herbert Park Hotel had initially accepted the booking for representatives from the EU's 27 member states to stay and was in conversation with the organisers about hosting the conference.

Every six months, The World Jewish Congress holds a SECCA conference, which stands for Special Envoys and Coordinators Combating Antisemitism, and the plan for this one was for it to be held in The Herbert Park Hotel.

That is, until the organisers got an email to say that the hotel wouldn't be able to hold the "event".

Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, spoke to The Pat Kenny Show ahead of Saturday's broadcast (as Saturday is the Sabbath) and explained that there was one question asked during the planning process with the hotel that "cooled" the vibe.

"The coordinators in Brussels employed a local event coordinator here, and she checked out various hotels and found 70 rooms in one hotel, in the Herbert Park.

"We [he and the Irish coordinator] sat down and we spoke about the conference [with the hotel's General Manager]. I explained what it was and we had also reviewed the conference facilities.

"We went down and had a coffee and when I started explaining about it being a conference against anti-Semitism, to coordinate combating anti-Semitism, I was asked a question which absolutely took me aback.

"And that was, 'Is the IDF involved?' And I responded, the IDF? Yes, the IDF. I said, why would they be at a conference to do with anti-Semitism in Ireland? This has nothing to do with Israel.

"It's nothing to do with the IDF. This is a conference to combat anti-Semitism, which is on the rise throughout the world and it takes place every six months.

"I explained that it was under the auspices of the Irish EU presidency and in fact, that I'd already organised a meeting with the Taoiseach for certain delegates.

"Once the IDF had been mentioned, or once the anti-Semitism conference had been mentioned, and then the IDF, I could immediately see there was something... A cooling.

"Because it had been friendly for the meeting and having looked back at all the emails, it had been friendly between our event coordinator and the hotel.

"There was never any disguising of what the conference was about, I mean, with the event organiser. It was always upfront.

"The general manager said, 'Look, I need to check with the owners of the hotel to see whether this can go ahead'. And then approximately a day or so later, an email came in to our event coordinator, just to say, 'I'm sorry, we can't go ahead with this conference.' Sorry, with this event. They use the word event.

"It didn't make clear whether the rooms were still available. So we emailed the event coordinator, emailed and asked the question, 'Is this just the conference you can't go ahead with? Are the rooms gone as well?'

"We were told the rooms were automatically released approximately seven or eight, nine days earlier because there was some technicality.

"So no explanation, just the event is not welcome in this hotel. We did pursue and the reason we were given [for the cancellation] was that the contract hadn't been signed."

One factor that Mr Cohen added was that the team had been working under the assumption that the rooms were booked as they had an email confirmation of that and the conversation with the General Manager came after those rooms supposedly were released.

He raised the question of why would the General Manager meet with them and not mention the issue with the rooms.

Newstalk reached out to the Herbert Park Hotel for comment on the situation, to which they replied: "No comment."

Main Image: The Herbert Park Hotel Pic: Hotel Media Kit