Leo Varadkar says Israel should be expelled from UEFA

Former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has made a strongly worded intervention on Israel’s place in European sport, saying the country should be thrown out of UEFA.

Speaking on the Path to Power podcast with Matt Cooper, Varadkar did not hold back in his assessment of the situation in the occupied territories, describing what is happening in the West Bank as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

He argued that Israel should never have been allowed to compete in European football in the first place.

‘UEFA should not have allowed Israel to play. They should be expelled from UEFA, in my view,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they should even be in UEFA.

‘They’re neither a European country nor a country of European values, so I don’t even think they should be in UEFA at all, or in Eurovision for that matter.’

Varadkar was speaking in the wake of Ireland’s controversial Nations League fixtures against Israel. Amid the controversy and heated debate around the fixtures, he praised the FAI for having formally asked UEFA to act, but noted the effort had won little support.

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‘The FAI, in fairness to them, put that to UEFA [that Israel should be banned], and there was a vote and a debate on that too. I think only Turkey and Norway sided with us on that,’ he said.

The former Fine Gael leader went on to set out his own test for when a country like Ireland should take unilateral action.

He said he would back going it alone only if there was ‘a reasonable chance that it will help the Palestinians’ and it would not cause undue harm, adding: ‘Now I don’t mind a bit of harm, a bit of self-harm, if I know it’s going to help the Palestinians.’

Rather than sport, Varadkar suggested the focus should now shift to economic measures, calling for Ireland to match recent sanctions announced by the UK, which he said had ‘gone beyond us’.

‘That seems to be the kind of thing we should be doing, and our British friends would welcome that, because it gives them a bit of help and cover if we’re doing it too,’ he said.

* This article was originally published on Extra.ie.