‘He’s lost my vote’: Many Irish Americans turn against Biden over Gaza war

A series of protests on St Patrick’s Day points to the threat Biden faces from the loss of a key vote in swing states.

One evening in 2004, when John Francis Mulligan, a US-born Irish citizen, was in the West Bank, a stranger asked him to walk her to a funeral.

It was after curfew in Nablus, and Palestinians weren’t allowed out on the streets. A young man had been killed earlier that day, and because of religious beliefs, his family needed to bury him within 24 hours, Mulligan recalls. But if they went outside, the Israel armed forces “would open fire on them for violating curfew”.

The dead man’s mother asked Mulligan: “Can you march with us? Can you stand at the front with our family? Because they’re not gonna shoot you, you’re white … I just need someone, literally, to stand with me.’”

This moment – the struggle to bury the dead in peace – hit home for Mulligan, 54, who went to primary school in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the late 1970s.

“It felt, to me, very much like going into political funerals in the north of Ireland, where helicopters would be overhead – in that case, it was the British Army. And here it was the Israeli army,” he says. “It really resonated.”