{"id":18334,"date":"2025-08-23T12:35:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T12:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/18334\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T12:35:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T12:35:07","slug":"is-the-uk-absurd-enough-to-arrest-sally-rooney-at-heathrow-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/18334\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the UK absurd enough to arrest Sally Rooney at Heathrow? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is Sally Rooney<\/a> a folk hero? The British media seems determined to turn her into one. It makes sense on one level. She has already been seen with an owl. Maybe someone should check if the beautiful bird<\/a> from that photograph of the writer is also a \u201csupporter of terror\u201d under UK law. You can never be too sure.<\/p>\n

It has been quite the week for a genre of reporting I would dearly like to call speculative fiction but can\u2019t. That\u2019s because it\u2019s unclear which is the more absurd: the actual ramifications of Downing Street\u2019s move to proscribe Palestine Action or the excitable reaction to Rooney\u2019s reiteration of her support for it.<\/p>\n

Certainly, the authoritarian and counterproductive proscription of the direct-action group by Keir Starmer<\/a>\u2019s government is deeply serious, while many of the Rooney headlines are not. The coverage has a tone I can only describe as keen, almost as if the UK press were willing the novelist to be arrested.<\/p>\n

I offer this scenario: Rooney lands at the Queen\u2019s Terminal and switches on her phone. Somewhere between the runway and Heathrow\u2019s bag-spurting carousels she fires up a payments app and hits send. At arrivals she\u2019s detained by counterterrorism police on a 24-hour airport stakeout until the Intermezzo<\/a> author is no longer at large.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s ludicrous \u2013 at least, I hope it is \u2013 but it\u2019s also not too far from one hypothetical outlined in the Sunday Telegraph, which, in a nice moment of literary specificity, imagined Rooney flying into Heathrow and proceeding to donate money to Palestine Action. If this were to happen she should be fined, its columnist insisted<\/a>, and the money \u201cused to fund the British armed forces\u201d.<\/p>\n

This step-by-step outline only followed the acknowledgment that she \u201cresides in the Republic of Ireland, not the UK, and is an Irish national\u201d. Let\u2019s just say this technicality \u2013 this tiny hiccup \u2013 wasn\u2019t equally prominent everywhere.<\/p>\n

Rooney\u2019s comment piece<\/a> in The Irish Times, in which she pledged to use the proceeds of her work \u201cto go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can\u201d, led to a spate of headlines in which the word \u201ccould\u201d did heavy lifting.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Sally Rooney: I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a \u2018supporter of terror\u2019 under UK law, so be itOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cSally Rooney could be arrested under Terrorism Act after pledging royalties to Palestine Action,\u201d read<\/a> the Guardian\u2019s, before the newspaper explained that this could happen if she restated her position at a UK literary festival.<\/p>\n

But you can\u2019t get an \u201cif\u201d into a headline, apparently \u2013 and, look, if people confused about her nationality and residency were left thinking an arrest was imminent, with Rooney about to join Liam \u00d3g \u00d3 hAnnaidh<\/a> of Kneecap<\/a> at Westminster magistrates\u2019 court in an Irish two-for-one, that\u2019s on them for scrolling by.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Kneecap leave London police scrambling once again as hundreds of fans descend on courtOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In fairness to the Guardian, it explored the potential fallout from Rooney\u2019s words for the same reason she wrote them: to highlight the wrongness of the UK government\u2019s path, or what one legal expert it quoted termed the \u201cgross disproportionality\u201d of it all.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere Rooney attracted eager takedowns thanks to her status as a millennial novelist, a self-identified Marxist, a successful young woman and, most outrageously, someone who earns residual fees from the BBC. <\/p>\n

No, please, do tell us what you think of her books. Thought this was about Wayne<\/a> because you had never heard of Sally? I believe you. The BBC is \u201cunder pressure\u201d now? Naturally.<\/p>\n

As for suggestions that Downing Street directly \u201cwarned\u201d Rooney, there was a slight narrative leap there. Starmer\u2019s official spokesman declined to comment on her remarks. Then, when prompted, he provided a more general reminder<\/a> that support for proscribed organisations is a terror offence.<\/p>\n

So if it winds up looking like No 10 is taking time out to scold the author of Conversations with Friends in a week when Israel expanded and intensified its assault on Gaza<\/a>, it\u2019s a case of hapless communications, wildly skewed priorities, or both.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going with both. The good news for this zero-tolerance UK government was that another lawyer quoted by the Telegraph thought Rooney wouldn\u2019t have to do or say anything after landing at Heathrow, as the \u201cextra-jurisdiction reach\u201d of anti-terror law would allow authorities to arrest her the minute she entered the country.<\/p>\n

You just think, wait, aren\u2019t you busy dragging placard-carrying grandmothers into the back of police vans? Have you run out of genocide-opposing British poets to arrest? What about that guy nicked for wearing a T-shirt branded Plasticine Action<\/a>? Are you sure his brazen support for Morph, of animated-clay fame, wasn\u2019t a crime? I suppose it\u2019s best to storm the literary-festival marquees and seize all the totes just in case.<\/p>\n

After the arrest of 532 people<\/a> at a peaceful London protest on August 9th, the big date is now September 6th, when another is planned. Expect brave Rooneyites to be well represented. They know, as she does, that none of this is normal and all of it is profound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is Sally Rooney a folk hero? The British media seems determined to turn her into one. It makes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,2215,3761,6,3857,5446,4066,11,12,4436,15,16,10303,5,7406,7,8,3802,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-18334","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-for-you","13":"tag-gaza-strip","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-israel-hamas-conflict","16":"tag-keir-starmer","17":"tag-kneecap","18":"tag-latest-news","19":"tag-latestnews","20":"tag-laura-slattery","21":"tag-main-news","22":"tag-mainnews","23":"tag-mo-chara","24":"tag-news","25":"tag-sally-rooney","26":"tag-top-stories","27":"tag-topstories","28":"tag-wayne-rooney","29":"tag-world","30":"tag-world-news","31":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}