PalFest Returns to Maynooth, Centring Culture as Resistance
The Maynooth Festival of Palestinian Culture (PalFest) launched on April 20 at 4pm in Maynooth University’s Iontas Building. Co-organised by MSU, Academics for Palestine (AfP), and the Maynooth branch of Boycott Divestment Sanctions (Maynooth BDS), 2026 marks the second year of the town-wide, week-long celebration of Palestine culture, arts, and academia.
The festival opened with the launch of Hosam Ghaith’s photography exhibition, Illuminations. Ghaith, a former lecturer at the University of Gaza, has a background in 3D and social media design. However, he pivoted to photography to express otherwise inarticulatefeelings about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. According to Ghaith, the medium substantiates itself as “a language [which attempts] to understand what happened, and another attempt to survive.” The photographs of Illuminations feature scenes of evacuation and individuals among the rubble. Israel bombed the campus of University of Gaza on October 10, 2023, three days after the launch of its most recent long-term attack on Palestine. Illuminations remained on exhibition in the Iontas Building for the duration of PalFest.
Following the exhibition launch, speakers rotated in the Iontas foyer. First to speak was Palestinian writer Eman Alhaj Ali, whose book We Are Not Numbers launched as part of PalFest on April 22. She was followed by Dr. Rita Sakr, a co-organiser of the event and member of the English Department, who invited Palestinian writers Gráinnemir Abualrob and Abdallah Aljazzar to read from their work.
Abualrob, an actor who has lived in Dublin since 2019, read three poems exploring motifs of navigating immigrant experiences, the difficulty of acknowledging and reflecting on the Palestine from which they came, and the exile of artists and intellectuals. Aljazzar, a Master’s student who emigrated to Ireland last year and has published an autobiographical article in The Irish Times, read a short narrative diary about his brother, Nour, who has been missing since going to retrieve items from the family home.
Dr. Mark Walsh of AfP, and the Mathematics and Statistics Department followed the readings. Active in previous activist movements in and around Maynooth raising awareness of the genocide in Palestine, Walsh criticised the lack of adequate response from Maynooth University, which has yet to release a statement on the severing of relationships with companies involved in the genocide.
Walsh then invited People Before Profit leader and personal associate Richard Boyd Barrett TD to formally open PalFest, as he did last year. Boyd Barrett reflected on the use of literature and culture as tools of repression by imperial powers, and, reflexively, their potential as powerful instruments of resistance. He also condemned what he described as Irish political complicity not only in the genocide in Palestine, but the U.S. – Israeli war on Iran, which has resulted in thousands of casualties.
Calls to end the military use of Shannon Airport were also echoed, incidentally following an investigation which found that 248 unrecorded U.S. military aircraft had flown through Irish airspace since last summer due to what the Department of Foreign Affairs described as an “administrative error.”
As the speakers concluded, organisers reminded attendees of the multiple upcoming events comprising PalFest. A full programme of these events remains available here.
