Church and GAA must cut ties with Allianz

In the 45 or so years since I started writing a weekly column in the Western People, I think this is the first time I’ve returned to the same subject in successive weeks. After so many years and so many columns, I realised (as I began to write this column) that I’ve never done that before.

Last week I wrote about Gaza. This week I return unapologetically to the same subject. And I suspect that I may revisit it again. Because while past atrocities are indelibly imprinted on our historical consciousness, for me this is the first time in living memory that I’ve felt an onlooker as a small corner of the Middle East became a theatre of horrors.

Week by week what became impossible to even imagine was unveiled outrage by outrage, threat by threat, until each evening on my television screen (despite Israel banning media from reporting directly from Gaza) I became an eyewitness to a Hamas outrage that morphed through a series of phases into what the United Nations has now pronounced ‘a Famine’ and what is now clearly designated genocide – an intentional and systematic policy of obliterating a whole population.

Up to now, I was just an onlooker, appropriately appalled at the pictures of infants suffering from acute malnutrition, a landscape devasted by bombs, hordes of adults and young children holding out saucepans of every shape and colour and screaming for food, while risking their lives in the process. Armageddon with a capital ‘A’.

Then I read that a United Nations official, Francesca Albanese, had listed companies who were profiting from their investments in Israeli bonds and which, through other associated companies, were involved in the instruments of war. Allianz, the biggest insurance company in the world, was on that list. In fact, it was described as the principal institutional shareholder in Elbit Systems, one of the main suppliers of drones to the Israeli military - weapons used to kill men, women and children.

Suddenly my status flipped from that of a casual onlooker at the agony of Gaza to a personal connection with Allianz - albeit distant, but there all the same. The background is this. Allianz and the Catholic Church in Ireland have had a long and close commercial relationship. Many years ago, the Irish Catholic Church owned a company called Church and General Insurance which was taken over by Allianz. For decades, Allianz has been a trusted friend of the Catholic Church - even to the extent of enjoying representation on the Allianz Board - with Catholic Church properties in Ireland including places of worship, schools, cars, etc, almost all being insured by Allianz as a matter of course.

So if the insurance on the car I drive or the church you worship in or the school your children attend is covered by Allianz, we have a problem. You and I and anyone else connected through that commercial relationship are, in effect, connected too with the Gaza outrage.

It’s difficult for me to get my head around this turn of events. It’s one thing to write a column commenting on public events - it’s an altogether different matter to find myself connected with genocide - albeit, as I say, from a distance. There are many, including possibly the readers of this column, who will find themselves in a similar quandary.

Like members of the GAA. Allianz, as many in Ireland must know by now, is a prominent sponsor of the GAA, not least on National Football League Final day with their name is extensively emblazoned on the proceedings, including being thanked for their sponsorship. When news of the Allianz connection broke, a delegation of GAA players, past and present, delivered a letter to the GAA authorities in Croke Park asking that the GAA immediately end the sponsorship by Allianz, in particular the Allianz sponsorship of the upcoming football league. And a petition of GAA players to that effect, signing on Change.org, has already reached 800 (as I write) and will surely be much in excess of that by the time these words are read.

This is not something that’s going to go away quietly. It can be confidently suggested that the vast majority of Irish people are completely and utterly opposed to what’s happening in Gaza. Indeed that they are stunned, appalled, outraged and shocked at the evidence on their television screens of the terrible suffering, especially of starving children and their hapless parents begging for food.

Imagine how they will feel, when they realise that, through no fault of their own so many of them find themselves connected – again, I say, by extension – to Allianz, simply because they are Catholics or GAA supporters.

Central to this issue is to understand that Allianz is not an innocent party in these matters. Colm O’Rourke, the former Meath player and GAA analyst, pointed out in the Sunday Independent that Allianz "has form in this regard": "It (Allianz) profited from the German policy of extermination in World War II but said it had atoned." Not apparently so.

When this story broke, the Association of Catholic Priests (the ACP), of which I am a member, issued a statement ending with the words: "Because the present sense of outrage in the Irish Catholic Church at what’s happening in Gaza will be increased exponentially by the revelation of the Irish Catholic Church’s connection with Allianz and Allianz’s connection with the state of Israel, we ask that the response of the Irish Catholic Church should be immediate and far-reaching in cutting our links with Allianz."

It is the very least that Catholics deserve.