The reception at Ireland’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday night was meant to open a gathering of diplomats and officials who spend their working lives fighting antisemitism. Before the meeting had formally begun, Maurice Cohen told the room, its organizers had already run into the very problem it was convened to address.

Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, described how the Herbert Park Hotel, in Dublin’s Ballsbridge neighborhood, canceled a booking of 70 rooms for delegates once it learned what they were coming to discuss.

The delegates, representing the European Union’s 27 member states, were in Dublin for a meeting of the Special Envoys and Coordinators Combating Antisemitism (SECCA), a group supported by the World Jewish Congress and the European Commission.

According to Cohen, the hotel had already confirmed the reservations when he sat down with its general manager. As he explained the purpose of the conference, the atmosphere shifted.

“I noticed her manner change,” he said. “There was a tension that had not been there before.”

Then came a question he hadn’t expected. The manager asked whether the IDF would be involved.

“We were talking about a conference in Dublin on antisemitism, attended by Jewish community representatives, diplomats, civil servants and government officials,” Cohen said. “Nothing I had said had anything whatsoever to do with the Israeli army, yet somehow that was where the conversation had gone.”

The manager told him she would need to check with the hotel’s owners whether the guests could stay. A day later, she returned with their answer. They could not.

The delegates were placed in another Dublin hotel, and the meeting went ahead as planned. The Herbert Park Hotel declined to comment when contacted by The Times of Israel.

For Cohen, the episode was a small, telling preview of the larger issue.

“There is an uncomfortable irony in organizing an international conference to discuss antisemitism and finding that, before the conference has even begun, you have already encountered something that forces you to ask exactly the questions the conference was created to address,” he said. “How quickly does the word ‘Jewish’ change a conversation? How easily does a gathering about antisemitism become associated with the Israeli army?”

The danger, he said, lies in how ordinary such exclusion can be made to seem.

“It begins by treating Jewish identity as evidence of political allegiance,” Cohen said. “It turns Jewish people into representatives of a foreign state, Jewish gatherings into security concerns, and ordinary acts of welcome into decisions requiring special permission.”

Ireland hosted the event during its presidency of the Council of the European Union, and part of its purpose was to underscore the country’s commitment to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. Over three days, delegates met with Ireland’s head of government, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, visited the European offices of TikTok and Meta, and took part in other high-level discussions.

The incident comes as Irish Jewish leaders voice growing alarm over antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the country. Ireland’s Jewish community numbers about 2,200 people, and it recorded 143 antisemitic incidents between July 2025 and January 2026, according to Cohen.