Former justice minister Alan Shatter has described calls for a boycott of the the Republic of Ireland‘s matches against Israel, scheduled for later this year, as “utterly and completely and totally insane”. Ireland’s men’s football team are scheduled to play Israel on September 27th and October 4th in the Uefa Nations League.Shatter told Newstalk Breakfast with Anton Savage that he was personally “completely fed up with the attempt to sabotage every aspect of Irish sport and bring issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into it.“I’m personally sickened by the prejudice, the escalating anti-Semitism, the selective outrage based on false narratives. Let’s have backbone and let this match proceed.”On the same programme Sinn Féin TD Mark Ward said if the games went ahead they would give Israel an opportunity for “sportswashing”. He said Israel was an apartheid state and this had been highlighted in the findings of international human rights organisations. Shatter said if Ireland did not participate in the match it would “hand” points to Israel and have little material impact on the issues raised by Ward. The Sinn Féin TD disagreed and said many examples from the past of countries refusing to play sporting fixtures against South Africa and Russia showed such stances could be effective. “Let’s be real here,” said Shatter. “We boycotted Eurovision. It had no impact of any description on anything to do with anything that’s happening in the Middle East. We now want to self-harm Irish football.”“This was another example of selective outrage,” he added. “In August, the Irish cricket team is playing Afghanistan. There’s a population of 45 million in Afghanistan. One half, over 20 million, are women. Women in Afghanistan under the fundamentalist Taliban regime are invisible. They’re neither seen nor heard. Mothers aren’t allowed to go to parks with their own children or to children’s playgrounds. Women over 10 are denied any education. “Medical doctors in parts of Afghanistan who are men will not provide medical assistance to pregnant women. There’s an increase in maternal deaths. And Afghanistan is a horrific place. There’s no protest about the cricket matches.“We welcomed Qatar into the Aviva Stadium only last week. Qatar is the country that hosts Hamas that conducted not just the barbaric atrocity of October 7th [but], which fired over 25,000 missiles into Israel over a two-year period.”Sinn Féin TD Joanna Byrne described her party’s motion calling on the Government to support demands to stop the Ireland-Israel match from going ahead as an important intervention. Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, Byrne said it had become “abundantly clear in recent weeks as the Stop the Game campaign has grown momentum that the Irish people do not want Ireland playing Israel while the Palestinian people continue to endure genocide, occupation and apartheid. “I feel our motion is perhaps an important intervention as it paves the way for the FAI to do the right thing by refusing to participate in these matches, in asking the Government to support the FAI in that decision and the implications that might follow.”Such calls were not just coming from Sinn Féin, she said, and not just from politicians, they were also supported by the Professional Football Association of Ireland, trade unions, “the vast majority of Irish football fans and, crucially, they’re supported by the FAI’s own membership and their own stakeholders.“Moving to move this match to a neutral venue doesn’t resolve the issue, it’s just kicking the can down the road. . There’s moral implications for the players themselves and ... you’ve seen many players come out and express opinions on this. It puts them in a very conflicting position of having to choose whether they independently decide to fulfil this fixture or not.[ ‘It’s not right’: John O’Shea makes strong statement on Ireland v Israel matchesOpens in new window ]“That decision should never be shouldered on a player individually and that’s why we need the FAI, and supported and led by Government in this instance, to say these matches should not go ahead at all.” Byrne said her removal as chair of Drogheda United by its American owners because of her support for a boycott of Israel had been very upsetting for her. “I stood true to the courage of my own convictions. I think it was very disappointing that expressing such a moral view and ... one shared by the majority of Irish football fans ... led to my removal from a club that I love with everything that’s in me, but I stand over the comments. I made them from a very, very strong belief in equality, in human rights, in justice and in the power of sport to be able to take a principled position as it has done many times. It was a deeply, deeply hurtful price worth paying, but I stand over the courage of my own convictions.”