Has Paddy Cosgrave overstepped the mark?

Didn't know that, just thought that old saw fitted this story!

Yeah that could be true (the former anyway - surely such people will know it is not the UK!). If a person or a company from the US that is actually doing business here is completely ignorant of the Irish govt./state policy etc. and does not know or could not give a monkies about their position on Israel/Palestine issues etc., they likely won't want one of of people they deal with in Ireland giving them a lecture on the rights and wrongs of the ME situation + Israeli or US sins either!

Ireland is small fry when it comes to their world. I'm not surprised at all.

I don't like Paddy Cosgrave , I think he's a dickhead and so you'd think I should have a degree of glee over this but what has happened to him in this instance is very worrying and is a prime example of corporate censorship.

Basically nobody can say a critical word about Israel now (and I'm not one of those people that has Israel as public enemy number 1 like a lot of people are. i.e those people who only seem to highlight Israels flaws but are very quiet when it comes to China) or you put yourself and your business at serious risk, this is essentially fascism at work, big business all align with each other and the American government and EU to shut down dissenting opinions.

It's disgraceful what has happened to him.

Actions in your private life have always carried a potential risk to your employment and rightfully so.

I agree with what he said but I also agree with him getting sacked as a consequence.

Go figure.

The issue is that this has a chilling effect on everyone and having so ridiculous an over reaction to a not outlandish opinion (in this instance) means people who question what mainstream media, politicians and big business want us to think never get a chance to express their opinions freely in those institutions for fear of getting cancelled and this just results in a repetition of the same old ideas and opinions in the mainstream over and over again and the same problems not being resolved ever.

Anyone who converts from one religion from another is not to be trusted and the sign of a fanatic.It means they'll believe any old nonsense. I can understand being religious because you were born into it and grew up with it and don't know any better but converting as an adult to a religion is just bizarre behavior.

BTW for fear of being accused of being Anti-Semitic I feel exactly the same about people who become born again Christians or convert to Islam.

Most of the anglosphere were conflicted about how to react to Covid, so his batshittery was lost in the deluge like the then leader of the free world talking about sticking lightbulbs up arses as a covid cure.

Israel on the other hand is the US's special child who can do no wrong.

I think most of this thread know that, but in retrospect in the online anglosphere it was only one thousands such shitposts at that time.

Where did I say it didn't?

Where did I say it wasn't bat shíte crazy?

Come on, tell me where you imagine I might putting some positive slant on it because I can't see what the point of your responses are?

Saying that his nonsense was part of a tsunami of wacko doesn't dilute it.

It is weird to find myself in agreement with him on Palestine, but in every other instance the guy is a self centred Ahole.

As a citizen, I am a little concerned about where these commercial cancellations are headed. You can be sure Xi and other tyrants are watching this closely to figure out how far they can go with such a tactic to silence criticism of their regimes abroad. As a worker, though, I can’t believe how reckless Cosgrave was, just wading into such a controversial area at a horribly inopportune time.

Paddy Cosgrave is a social media bully. If you disagreed with him he posted some horrible sh!t. He has put up absolute drivel about the government

Allison O Connor was on the BOC show this morning and mentioned this tweet below. It was not the first time he tweeted about her either.

he is just another rich man who thinks he is entitled to pontificate to us and we are not allowed to disagree. He is the same as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Bono etc.

As a citizen I am delighted he was cancelled. The only people I feel sorry for are the employees of the web summit

F@@k him he deserved it

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Bye bye Paddy

A salient lesson in what happens when student union politics meets the real world.

I would say his social media antics have more in common with Musk. He's just a lot smaller fry.

Why was there so much of a gap between the comments and all the companies starting to pull out?

Now that the guy is gone won’t they just come back? A lot of people going to lose jobs if they don’t and that will make those companies look bad.

I’m all for free speech but in the real world you don’t have it.

Is the problem that he said something against Israel or that he said anything at all? Because it is bit hypocritical of these companies to support Israel in the first place.

Sorry, how foolish of me. They are Americans… so yes, hypocrites.

The Israel lobby can be very dangerous. A good Irish friend of mine who is well known in the tech world, has gotten so much abuse because he dared stand up for children in Gaza and call for a ceasefire.

The cause of Irish independence was a lot less hopeless than the Palestinian cause. DeValera was able to go to America as an escaped felon ( unperturbed) and raise money for Irish independence and Sinn Fein and the IRA had many friends in America during the troubles much later . It is completely disingenuous to equate the Palestinian cause with Irish independence. They have nothing like the soft/ hard power that nationalists in the north had behind them. Their situation ( while very much rhyming in sympathy with ourselves ) is completely hopeless in my opinion. They don’t even have any solid Arab/ Muslim allies. Egypt had to think about opening its borders. Syria has its own problems. Jordan , Lebanon are woefully weak players in comparison to Israeli allies . The Iranians will drop them like a hot snot with the slightest concession. And encouraging them to keep the struggle going is only causing more death and destruction. The goals of hamas is completely unrealistic and a death wish. Irish people can take a position and virtue signal their support for freedom from oppression but it’s all hot air and meaningless to changing anything on the ground. And as soon as the next big thing happens it will be on to that. And Palestine will be forgotten again.

Wasn’t taking you to task in particular just highlighting the folly of equating the Palestinian to the Irish struggle. Yes Hamas are a murder machine totally devoid of any pragmatism .

Absolute horseshit, he condemned murder of all civilians on both sides.

Its the fact he didn’t say just Israelis and **** Gaza, that’s the issue for the tech companies.

Oul Paddy has said worse things in the past.

I think this was an escape route seen by Tech companies to not attend the web summit. (Something they've wanted to do for a while now)

Web Summit is basically start ups paying top dollar to speak to venture capital and CEO's of big tech companies. It's just marketing and nothing ever happens at it.

He's made his few bob, he'll be ok. I'd say his 300+ staff are goosed though

And we had to accept a two state solution/ partition, as did India/Pakistan/Bangladesh. We had politicians that accepted that while not our preferred option we had to accept it

The problem for Palestinians has always been the refusal to accept the two state solution. Even lok at some of there supporters cry ''Palestinian will be free from the border to the sea'' which equates to the elimination of Israel. This is what Paddy Cosgrave and many more like him think the solution should be.

His remarks about Allison O'Connor calling her a partitionist, anti-intellectual and a gombeem showed exactly where he stands on people disagreeing with him but also that he accepts terrorism as a legitimate form of violence