The Jewish community in Ireland has said it feels “weary” after a Dublin City Councillor posted a video calling for a second Holocaust.
Yesterday, independent Councillor Philip Sutcliffe posted a video to his WhatsApp status which called for a ‘real Final Solution’ and described Jews as ‘satanic’.
The ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ was a euphemism used by Nazis in 1942, after they had agreed to exterminate all Jewish people in Europe.
By the end of the Holocaust and the Second World War, just three years later, six million had been murdered - roughly two thirds of European Jewry.
On Newstalk Breakfast, Irish Times Security Correspondent Conor Lally said the one and a half minute video posted by Cllr Sutcliffe contained a mixture of “AI slop and the most vile, antisemetic language”.
“It starts off with a clip of of Hitler saying that they warned us about the Jewish people and what they were going to do to the world, before listing a series of well-worn antisemitic tropes, such as ‘the Jews are behind the banking industry’, ‘media degeneracy in Hollywood’ and the so-called ‘white replacement theory’,” he explained.
“Before escalating from there and saying that we need a ‘real Final Solution’ and calling the Jewish people the ‘spawn of Satan’.”
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Cllr Sutcliffe, who has represented Ballyfermot-Drimnagh on Dublin City Council since 2024, is a well known figure within the world of Irish boxing.
He has known Conor McGregor since he was a child and accompanied him to his civil trial for assault in 2024.
When contacted by the Irish Times about the video, Cllr Sutcliffe expressed “some confusion” about the nature of the content he had shared.
“He said he didn't really understand how it was posted, he said he doesn't think he looked at it,” Mr Lally said.
“He said he probably posted something that he shouldn't have and said that he often shares things without looking at them.
“He declined to comment further, saying he was preparing to go off and train Conor [McGregor] for his next fight.”
The arrival of a train containing Jews deported to Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Picture by: Alamy.com.In a statement to the Newstalk, the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland said that too often antisemitism is “minimised, misunderstood or treated as background noise” in Ireland.
“When it appears in public discourse, in schools, in political life, or in parts of the media without proper challenge or critical analysis, it becomes normalised,” he argued.
“Silence is not neutrality; it creates permission.
“The Jewish community in Ireland is weary of this; we are not seeking special treatment and we are not playing victims. We simply want to live openly and safely.
“If similar repeated prejudice were directed at almost any other minority, there would be immediate condemnation from all; antisemitism deserves exactly the same moral clarity.”
The Council said it was particularly worried about the impact of antisemitism on young Jews and urged schools and other organisations to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.
Main image: Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. Picture by: World History Archive / Alamy.
