The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) president Jarlath Burns has received an award at the 2026 Guaranteed Irish Business Awards, despite outrageous remarks made about Palestine and the Troubles just days earlier. Burns was given the Special Recognition Award by the business coalition. Guaranteed Irish claims to honour enterprises that provide good quality jobs, enhance the wellbeing of their community and are of Irish provenance.
It is fitting that Burns received a business award, given that’s exactly what he has been treating the GAA as, rather than as an organisation that prioritises values over profit. The former attitude has been epitomised recently by the retention of a sponsorship agreement with backer of Zionist genocide Allianz. The German insurance behemoth has been named as one of the complicit firms in UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s Economy of Genocide report.
Activists have escalated protests against the Allianz deal, coming to a crescendo on Saturday February 28 when a group of around 20 stormed Croke Park to interrupt the GAA’s annual congress. Burns alternated between flustered and fuming, as he sat stony-faced before the demonstrators. His response afterwards was to make spectacularly tone-deaf comments about what had just occurred.
Jarlath Burns minimises genocide and insults all of Ireland
He began by comparing the relatively brief occupation of the GAA building to the 78-year long illegal occupation of Palestine by so-called ‘Israel’:
It’s a bit ironic that people who are protesting against illegal occupation will come in and illegally occupy our building.
This is a cringy remark, not a burn Mr. Burns.
Not content with that obscene remark, he went on to insult all those who lost loved ones during the Troubles in Ireland:
It was in 1975. The Glenanne Gang came into Donnelly’s bar, which is our local shop, and murdered three people, one of whom was a good friend of mine, Michael Donnelly. And I went into my car on December 19 2025 and drove to the front of Donnelly’s house, shop, pub, which is still there, to make a speech.
Fifty years on, justice still hasn’t been served for the 120 innocent Catholics who were murdered by the Glenanne Gang in a four-year period in my area, in my community.
I don’t need any lectures about what it’s like to feel the pressure of illegal occupation. I don’t need any lectures or people shouting in my face about what it’s like to go to bed at night, fearful that somebody would barge into your bedroom and riddle you with bullets. Because that was my lived experience when I was young.
The Glenanne Gang were a notorious loyalist death squad secretly assisted by British security forces. However, over 3,500 people lost their lives during the violence between the late 1960s and the peace agreement of 1998. Nearly 50,000 were injured, and the conflict affected the entire island. Jarlath Burns is not uniquely entitled to rule on which Irish people can and can’t have a say on illegal occupation, as everyone experienced its consequences in one way or another.
GAA ‘turn gaze…away from occupation, torture and genocide’
Burns has received a torrent of opprobrium following his comments. Fachtna O’Raftery, in an excellent letter to the Irish Examiner, said:
I wonder how Michael Donnelly’s family feel about Jarlath Burns using their relative’s name and loss to justify turning the gaze of the GAA away from occupation, torture and genocide in Palestine today.
He also responded to Burns’ remarks about how Saturday’s action had breached “unwritten rules” about how protest ought to be conducted. In other words, according to Burns: protest is fine, as long as it’s not so disruptive that it might actually have an effect. O’Raftery said:
If people followed the “unwritten rules” of protest that Burns imagines exist, then we wouldn’t have gay marriage or reproductive rights. We wouldn’t even have a free, independent nation.
Well, semi-free and semi-independent, but the general point stands – direct action works. Fermoy Stands With Palestine pointed out how it was in fact the GAA that “crossed a line”, another phrase deployed by Burns following Saturday’s protest:
The line was crossed last November, Jarlath, when 2 of the 5 people on the ethics committee resigned as a business case was put forward to justify why the [the GAA] should stay with Allianz as a sponsor of our league as they pump billions into a genocidal regime!
The so-called Ethics and Integrity Commission of the GAA ruled in December 2025 that it was justified to keep its deal with Allianz. Strangely for a commission with that name, it barely touched on the ethics of the matter. It instead focused on practical and business considerations, implausibly claiming that:
…it would be impossible to secure an alternative insurer that would not have similar links.
The policy of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is not to seek perfection when choosing alternatives. The GAA could certainly do better than a company named as backing Zionist war crimes in a major UN report, which said:
Their insurance policies also underwrite the risks other companies necessarily take when operating in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, thus enabling the commission of human rights abuses and “de-risking” their operational environment.
This is an issue that will not go away, especially given Jarlath Burns’ total inability to respond to protest with any sort of nous. The sensible and ethical thing would be to cut the GAA’s losses now, and sever the relationship with this appalling company.
Featured image via the Canary
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