ACLAÍ Palestine's Ainle Ó Cairealláin: "It's about defying the isolation that the occupation want to push Palestine into"

From the new KNEECAP x Bohemian FC jersey, and the keffiyeh-patterned shorts of professional boxer Tyrone McKenna, to the ongoing fundraising efforts of local communities and inspired individuals around the country, one logo, and word, has become increasingly synonymous with Irish-Palestinian solidarity this year – ACLAÍ.

The community gym has been operating in the Aida refugee camp, near Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, since early 2020. But recent years, and 2025 in particular, have seen a remarkably wide-ranging movement of people uniting under the ACLAÍ Palestine banner. Before the year is out, Amble will have headlined a major benefit show at the Gleneagle Arena, Picture This will have hosted a special opener event during their two-night stint at the SSE Arena, and Móglaí Bap will have completed a 10km run at each stop on his latest tour with KNEECAP – all in aid of ACLAÍ Palestine’s ongoing projects.

Female boxers in ACLAÍ Palestine after a training session with Tyrone McKenna

Clearly, the gym’s ties to the Irish music community run deep. Its founder, West Belfast native Ainle Ó Cairealláin, is Móglaí Bap’s brother, and KNEECAP – among numerous other Irish acts – have been closely involved in ACLAÍ and its various fundraising efforts since the idea for the project was first hatched, back in summer 2018.

“We fundraised for the gym for the first two years,” Ainle recalls. “For one of the first fundraisers, KNEECAP played a set in [Phibsborough café] Bang Bang, which is tiny. They weren’t as well known then as they are now, but still, the café was crowded – there were about 40 people squished in.

“KNEECAP were standing up on the counter, doing ‘C.E.A.R.T.A’,” he resumes. “And in the middle of it all, this wee old woman walked in, looking to see if she could buy a half a dozen eggs. So they had to stop the set, and sell her the eggs...”

 

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The hip-hop trio were also part of the line-up of another early fundraiser, 2019’s Gym Jam, which took place at ACLAÍ in Cork – a unique, community-oriented gym that Ainle previously ran in the city for 10 years.

“That’s the nature of the fundraising that we did,” he says. “It was all small gigs, and it was all done on a completely grassroots level in Ireland.”

The origins of the Palestinian gym project stretch back to Ainle’s first trip to the West Bank, in 2018. He remembers feeling “a real sense of familiarity” when stepping into the Lajee Centre – a cultural centre that was set up within the Aida refugee camp back in 2000, by a group of camp residents looking for ways to serve their community.

“That older generation were doing what they needed to do, to provide these cultural and educational opportunities for the community – because that help wasn’t going to be coming from the outside,” he remarks. “That’s kind of what it was like here in Belfast, and West Belfast in particular, especially when it came to the development of the Irish language.

“In Belfast, it was a relatively small group of people, who were committed to setting things up that would give future generations more opportunities than what they had,” Ainle – the son of the late Irish language activists Gearóid Ó Cairealláin and Aoife Ní Riain – continues. “And like this, it was all very much independently driven.”

While in the Aida camp, he quickly struck up a friendship with Salah Ajarma, a founder and former director of the Lajee Centre, who has since passed away. It was a conversation with Salah several months after that first meeting – when Ainle returned to the centre as a participant in Lajee’s annual International Summer Camp – that sparked the initial plans for ACLAÍ Palestine.

“Myself and Salah were sitting up late one night, and he was talking about the issues that exist in the camp, in terms of health and illness,” he says. “The level of diabetes and hypertension, or high blood pressure, is through the roof in the camp, compared to other places. And it’s largely down to the living conditions, and the pressure that people are living under.”

The lack of facilities in the overcrowded camp, Ainle points out, “really exacerbates the situation.”

The Aida camp was established not long after the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’, of 1948, when over 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes, villages and cities by Zionist forces. According to 2023 figures from the UNRWA, there are over 7,000 people living in the camp, in an area of just 0.071 square kilometres.

“There’s no space to expand, because the camp is hemmed in by the Apartheid Wall,” Ainle explains. “There’s a military base right beside it – practically on top of it – and there’s about eight watchtowers, some of which are manned around the clock by [Israeli] soldiers.

“It’s really hard to understate how much effort the occupation has gone to, to suppress all aspects of life in Palestine,” he adds. “And that includes simply being able to exercise.”

BURSTING AT THE SEAMS

Off the back of that conversation with Salah, Ainle – drawing on nearly two decades of experience in the field of strength and conditioning – set to work establishing ACLAÍ Palestine within the Lajee Centre. Following extensive grassroots fundraising, equipment was moved into the gym in early 2020.

The project has only continued to develop from there – with the demand having grown so great that, this time last year, the gym relocated to an even bigger space next door.

“At the start we just had one coach in the gym – a female coach called Athal, who really carried the project on the Palestinian side for quite some time,” he reflects. “Now we’ve got six local coaches, providing over 500 training sessions every month.”

Open from the early mornings until midnight, every night except Friday, the gym is “bursting at the seams,” Ainle says. ACLAÍ work with men and women of all ages, including people with disabilities and various medical conditions – all of whom avail of the gym’s services for free, with coaches’ salaries and other costs covered by fundraising in Ireland.

“We’ve also got a boxing club set up,” Ainle tells me. “Tyrone McKenna, the professional boxer from Belfast, was there for three weeks this year training the kids, and he ended up doing part of his training camp for his latest professional fight over there. And then, for the fight, he wore shorts that had ‘Aida’ written on them – and he won. That was a huge boost for the boxing club. They were all watching it on the projector in the gym.”

 

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ACLAÍ’s work stretches beyond the gym too. In response to the genocide in Gaza, Ainle and his friend Stephen Loughran launched a special fundraising campaign in June 2024, with a massive round-Ireland cycle. That subsequently grew into the Gaza Food & Play Project, which has allowed ACLAÍ – in partnership with the Beit Lahia Development Association and the Gaza Stars Circus School – to deliver over 1,812 food parcels across the Gaza Strip, as well as circus workshops for over 5,000 children taking shelter in camps.

Alongside the genocide, there has also been a serious escalation of violence in the West Bank – with Israeli soldiers and settlers having killed approximately 1,000 Palestinians (including at least 219 children) there since October 2023.

In the Aida camp, Ainle has found that conditions have become “infinitely worse” over the past two years. In September, the Lajee Centre shared footage on social media of Israeli soldiers raiding the gym during a youth training session.

“The occupation forces raid the camp on a regular basis,” says Ainle. “At the start of November, they came in and closed the Lajee Centre down, so they could turn it into a temporary military base.

“But usually they come into the camp in the middle of the night,” he continues. “They’ll break down the doors of people’s homes, wreck the house, take people out of their beds, blindfold them, and take them away. These are the conditions that people in the camp are living in – as well as having a water supply that is switched off by the occupation. When I was there in June, July and August, the water supply was only running for a couple of days, at most, during that time.”

DEFYING THE ISOLATION

From the very beginning, one of Ainle’s main goals with ACLAÍ was to create a “bridge between Ireland and Palestine” – while “the occupation tries to isolate Palestine from the rest of the world as much as possible.”

“You can see that clearly, in the fact that the international media has been banned from going into Gaza in the last couple of years,” Ainle points out. “A lot of the time, if you’re in Palestine, it just feels like the rest of the world is blind to what’s happening there.”

But the outpouring of Palestinian solidarity throughout Ireland – and the strong stance of Irish creatives on the world stage – is definitely “something to be proud of”, Ainle reflects.

“What we’ve witnessed over the last two years in Ireland is the most sustained, grassroots mass movement of our generation – and probably further back as well,” he says. “But over those two years, we’ve seen that there are a lot of Irish artists who have borne an inordinate amount of burden, when it comes to speaking out for Palestine. And they’re being punished for it.

“KNEECAP and Bob Vylan are two prime examples,” he continues. “They’re not complaining about the price they have to pay. But at the end of the day, they’re being banned from countries, and they’ve had campaigns against them from various angles.”

One of Ainle’s biggest highlights of 2025, he says, was seeing how the people of Ireland rallied in support of KNEECAP, in the face of what the group described as a “smear campaign”, and a “carnival of distraction.”

“Electric Picnic was a special moment – because the British government have pulled out all the stops to make an example out of KNEECAP,” says Ainle. “To try and push them to stop using their voice, and make sure that other artists don’t use their voices. They’ve met that challenge in the courts, and they haven’t backed down.

“And people have come out and supported them, because they know that they’re on the right side of history.”

ACLAÍ and KNEECAP are capping off the year with a special new collaboration. The trio’s new jersey with Bohemian FC features the gym’s logo on the back – with 30% of profits from the shirt, Ainle explains, “going towards getting a music academy open in the Aida camp, as part of the Lajee Centre.”

Credit: bohemians.ie

As KNEECAP's manager Daniel Lambert, who is also CCO of Bohs, revealed in a recent interview with Hot Press, the music academy will include a studio, where young people in the camp can learn about music production, and artists can record their work.

“Whether it’s supports, syncs, samples or hooking them up with artists here, we’ll try to platform their music and make things happen for them,” Daniel said.

“That’s just another extension of the way that we’re working,” Ainle resumes. “Again, it’s about building bridges, making connections, and defying the isolation that the occupation want to push Palestine into.”

TIME TO TAKE ACTION

In Ireland, activists and opposition parties have continued to call on the government to “stop the delays and the watering down” of the Occupied Territories Bill – and finally implement a ban on trade, covering both goods and services, with illegal Israeli settlements. If such legislation is enacted, Ainle stresses the need for it to be “impactful”.

“There’s potential here for Ireland to be a leader,” he says. “Palestinians, and people from all around the world, expect that from Ireland, because we have got such a history of standing against injustice. So it would be the greatest shame if we ended up with a watered down version [of the bill], that wasn’t going to have a real impact on the ground for Palestinians.

“The occupation isn’t going to come to an end through fundraisers,” he adds. “We have to force the hand of our governments to end our complicity in the occupation of Palestine. That’s ultimately where we can have the biggest impact.”

Ainle himself recently made the decision to stop uploading his Rebel Matters Podcast – which has been platforming anti-imperialist voices since its launch in 2017 – to Spotify, after it emerged that the company’s founder, Daniel Ek, had invested €600m in AI military weapons company Helsing. Acts like Massive Attack and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have taken similar action in protest against the streaming platform.

“We’re at the point now where we have to come to terms with the fact that a lot of the things we’ve come to be so used to are complicit in the occupation of Palestine, and are complicit in the development of the weapons of mass killing,” he remarks. “If we want to be on the right side of history, then this is the time to take action – because we can’t say that we didn’t know that these things were happening.”

Over the years, Ainle has interviewed the likes of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and Catherine Connolly on the podcast, as well as Palestinian activists and cultural figures.

“It’s providing a perspective that people aren’t always presented with,” he says of Rebel Matters. “It’s a rare opportunity to get to sit down with someone for an hour, and give them the opportunity to talk – especially when it comes to things around Palestine.”

With so many projects on the go, it’s important, Ainle reflects, to take stock of the small moments. One of his highlights from his work at ACLAÍ Palestine is witnessing the progress of one older man who started training at the gym in 2022, after suffering a stroke.

“He was the first patient from Lajee Centre’s Community Health project that started training in the gym,” Ainle recalls. “His right hand side was very badly affected from the stroke, so he wasn’t able to walk to the gym – he had to get a taxi.

“That was three years ago,” he continues. “Now he’s improved his quality of life massively. He’s walking to the gym, and he’s set a great example for other people. He’s even helping to run the sessions. He’s showing other men of a similar age – and even younger than him – how to do exercises.

“To see that progress is amazing, especially when you’re working under challenging circumstances,” Ainle concludes. “You look for those moments – because they’re the things that keep you going.”

For more information, visit aclai.ie and follow @aclai_palestine on Instagram. You can donate directly at donorbox.org/aclaipalestine.

The Bohemian FC x KNEECAP jersey is available to purchase at Dalymount Park in Dublin today, December 17, until 7pm. Remaining shirts will be go online at 12pm on December 18.

The Rebel Matters Podcast is available to stream on rebelmatters.ie and the usual platforms (except Spotify).