The 2025 Tipperary International Peace Prize trolls the Middle East

Qatar wins peace prize.

The Tipperary International Peace Award was presented to the Qatari Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, in the grandly named Ballykisteen Great National Hotel this week. The Hotel is around the corner from the infamous Limerick Junction train station in County Tipperary, if you were inclined to visit sometime.

So there they were, the suits and the sheikhs, gathered in a banquet room where the cups of tea flowed like Qatari gas money, all there for an award to the absurd. Of all the cynical ploys in modern international relations, the spectacle of an authoritarian state laundering its reputation in the name of peace is galling. A nation built on the backs of an exploited migrant workforce, where dissent is a crime and basic freedoms are denied. Are you a woman who thinks she should be able to, I don’t know, marry, travel or receive reproductive healthcare without permission from a male relative? Slow down there, suffragette. In Qatar, a woman must obtain permission from their male guardians for all of the above. And if your romantic inclinations don't fit 12th-century Islamic norms, then Qatar is certainly not the country for you.

Basic Human Rights

Jailing people for being gay is generally frowned upon in a modern society. In Qatar, you can be jailed for up to 7 years for being gay, and it also carries the death penalty under Sharia law. Let’s hope none of the Tipperary peace prize committee are gay or have gay children and have to travel to Qatar. The police in Qatar regularly engage in the entrapment of gay people and like to torture them in jail. As happened to this British man in February 2024.

You might think a country receiving an international peace prize must have a robust and healthy democracy, or at least aspire to have a barely functioning one. Qatar's ‘discriminatory’ laws exclude thousands from voting or running in elections. In May 2022, Qatar sentenced three of its citizens to life imprisonment for criticising the local election laws, which bar some sections of society from voting or running for office. There is no democracy in Qatar; it’s an Islamic dictatorship disguised as a 5* resort. Political parties are not permitted, and public participation in politics is highly restricted—no freedom of expression, no free press and no spicy memes about the Emir dictatorship. You break any of those rules, and you get put in prison and tortured. So, imagine my surprise at a Middle East dictatorship getting a peace prize. Even if it was from some crowd in Tipperary with what we might call “notions” in Ireland.

I don’t know if they have the internet in Tipperary, or maybe Sky News, surely they have RTE and BBC? There was one dominating news story in the run-up to the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup. It was estimated that 6,500 deaths were related to building the infrastructure for the World Cup. Qatar claimed there were 37 deaths.

For the last three decades or so, the chief export of Qatar has been enough natural gas to launch the moon into a new orbit. But its capital city, Doha, has been a masterclass in how to look respectable while running a resort for the region’s mad, bad and corrupt. They’ve been hosting everyone from Chechen warlords to Taliban women haters. The whole world was invited to their big, shiny World Cup party back in '22. And to build the stadiums for this festival of footy, they imported a couple of million migrant souls from parts of Asia and Africa.

Migrant Labourers were enrolled in a quaint local program called the kafala system, which is a lovely, melodic Arabic word for what you and I might call “modern slavery.” You land in the shimmering heat of Doha, someone takes your passport, and suddenly your ability to change jobs or, say, go home is entirely dependent on the mood of a boss who might view “human resources” as something to be arrested and tortured. The sponsor holds all the cards—employment, legal status, the keys to the worker’s shoebox-sized living quarters—while the worker holds nothing. And if the boss decides to be a tyrant? Congratulations! You’ve just discovered the real meaning of “at-will employment”—their will, not yours.

Your boss is a tyrant? Too bad! Trying to escape his tender mercies isn’t just career suicide—it’s a crime. That’s right, folks: in this enlightened arrangement, running from abuse isn’t self-preservation, it’s breaking the law. Enjoy your choice of punishments: deportation, jail, torture, possibly all three. If you’re lucky, they’ll just cancel your visa and leave you stranded in legal limbo—a Kafkaesque situation.

Financing Terrorism

One study identified more than 20 fundraisers designated as terrorist-linked by the U.S. or UN who have benefited from a mixture of benign neglect or support in Doha. “With every important case of suspected terror finance involving Qatari nationals in recent years, the government in Doha has refused effectively to crack down,” according to the study, “Qatar and Terror Finance.” Two weeks ago, the FDD wrote that Qatar is currently backing a group of Muslim clerics who endorse suicide bombings and the kidnapping of civilians. Separately, the past president of the emirate’s football association, Al-Nuaymi, who also held major roles in official Qatari organisations, including serving as a board member on charities backed by the government and at the Qatar Islamic Bank, was sanctioned by the EU and U.N for funding terrorism.

Things got so bad in 2017 that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain cut ties with Qatar, accusing it of destabilising the region with its support for Islamist groups.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – a place where the authorities stone you to death for the heinous crime of being a woman who might look at a man, and where the closest thing to a free and fair election is deciding which prince gets to build a bigger palace. They took a break from their usual pastime of exporting Wahhabism and bombing anything that moves in Yemen to wag a finger at Qatar.

Egypt, a country that’s been on a decade-long bender of military coups and locking up anyone who can write a complete sentence that doesn't praise the Dear Leader. You have to admire their commitment to stability for a change.

Bahrain, a sunny island paradise, where the government's idea of a friendly chat with dissidents involves electrodes and a soundproof room. They’re awfully concerned about Qatari support for “sectarian groups,” which is a bit rich coming from a regime that treats its own Shia majority like uninvited guests at a royal wedding.

The UAE, a place so committed to free expression that they’ll build you a skyscraper tall enough to see the curvature of the earth, but won't let you start a book club without a government minder.

These pillars of rectitude, this coalition of the virtuous, pointed their fingers at Qatar, accusing it of “destabilising the region and supporting terrorist groups.” It seems Qatar's main offence was its “embrace of various terrorist and sectarian groups,” including the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida, and the Islamic State. Which they were.

To be lectured on human rights and regional stability by this particular crew, it's not just hypocrisy; it's a masterclass in it. It’s the pot calling the kettle, the pan, the wok, and the entire kitchenware aisle black. Qatar’s financing of terrorism was so bad that the other countries that were also financing terrorism thought Qatar was a bit OTT when it came to helping extremist terrorists. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. The Middle East always is.

Freedom House, an organisation that measures global democracy, ranks Qatar as one of the worst countries in the world for democracy and civil liberties.

Amnesty International says of Qatar.

“Migrant workers, including domestic workers, continued to face human rights abuses, including wage theft, harsh working conditions and poor access to redress mechanisms. Qatar and FIFA again failed to provide redress for the vast numbers of migrants abused while working on 2022 World Cup projects. The right to freedom of expression remains curtailed. Women and LGBTI people continued to face discrimination in law and practice.”

Qatar is a dictatorship that engages in state-sanctioned modern-day slavery, has one of the worst human rights records globally and has funded Islamic extremists and terrorists.

All of this—the dead workers, the thought police, the gender politics from another millennium, the questionable banking practices—is being whitewashed, or rather “sportswashed,” with a firehose of gas money. They buy influence, and host summits where Very Serious People can talk about Important Things, all while the Qatari state machinery of repression and regional meddling hums along just out of sight. But that’s the price of doing international diplomacy.

The reaction to awarding Qatar the Tipperary Peace prize did something rarely done in Irish Politics and united the left and right in incredulity and embarrassment. Some commentators claimed that nefarious geo-political reasons were behind the awarding of the prize, but Hanlon’s razor says, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Or the Tipperary Peace Prize committee must have no access to the internet.