Pro-Palestine student protests have pushed Trinity College Dublin to cut ties with Israeli investors. Image source: Lászlo Molnárfi (SU), via X.
Trinity College Dublin has pledged to cut ties with Israeli institutions after five days of student-led protests and encampments shut the campus down.
University senior management agreed to the protesters’ terms following a meeting on Wednesday 8 May.
The college released a statement to confirm: “Trinity will complete a divestment from investments in Israeli companies that have activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and appear on the UN blacklist.”
Trinity has one Israeli company on its supplier list which the statement says, “will remain until March 2025 for contractual reasons”.
Senior Dean Eoin O’Sullivan said, “We are glad that this agreement has been reached and are committed to further constructive engagement on the issues raised.”
“We thank the students for their engagement.”
Pro-Palestine students set up the Fellows’ Square encampment on 3 May in a call for the university to divest from Israeli funding in response to the assault on Gaza.
On 4 May, Trinity closed its Dublin campus to the public.
The closure cost the university an estimated 350,000 euro ($571,500) in revenue as security turned away tourists who had come to see the world-famous Book of Kells.
Trinity News editor Ruby Topalian said, “I think the loss of revenue was key.”
Students Union President Lászlo Molnárfi said, “It shows the power of grassroots student and staff fighting for a just cause of Palestinian liberation and to end complicity with Israeli genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism.”
“It has been unprecedented this year that there is such mass support and yet our institutions take no action,” said Molnárfi.
“They have to be pressured into taking action, through student and staff power in universities, and people power in the place of wider society.”
Similar demonstrations have taken place across Europe, as well as in Australia, India, Lebanon and the United States, where police have arrested more than 2,000 protesters.
