What is happening in Gaza is genocide, not by my reckoning, but by the reckoning of countless human rights experts around the world. It is also totemic for what has happened in Yemen and continues to happen in Sudan. You may think skipping a Big Mac as an act of boycott is tokenistic and vacuous. But it’s not about you, it’s about the children.

I understand that nobody wants to be told by a newspaper column what to do, but sometimes we find things complicated that are actually quite simple. Our lives are busy, but that’s no excuse for us not to be informed, and once informed, make conscientious decisions on how we can set an example.

Children love McDonalds. They love the salt, the sugar, and the non-biodegradable plastic their Happy Meals come in. Those god-forsaken toys that never make it outside of the backseat of your car. They also love what the marketing people have sold us for decades — the sense of occasion. Happy, united families sitting together and enjoying fast food. It’s just as tasty in theory as it is in practice.

Even more reason to take pause and explain to them it’s no longer an option.

They’ll scream, of course, and your Saturdays may be a little bit longer as a result, but the louder they scream the more confident you should be that whatever reason you give them for not going to McDonald's, it will stay with them until adulthood. Kids are smarter than you think. 

Yes, they can spend hours attempting to pick up puddles in playgrounds, but if you tell them — “No, we are not going to McDonalds anymore. Why? We are boycotting it because McDonald's has supported the Israeli army in their murder of Palestinian children in Gaza. Children like you” — you might just be amazed what keywords stick in their minds. Words like ‘Gaza’, and ‘Palestinian’, and ‘Israeli army’, and ‘children’, and ‘murder’. And ‘boycott.’

Why boycott?

Just to be clear, the reason there’s been a call to boycott McDonald's since October 7 is because the brand’s Israel franchises donated meals and beverages to IDF personnel committing the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and promoted this extremely provocative and racist form of complicity on their social media channels.

McDonald’s — by virtue of its failure to denounce the actions of its Israel franchises — has become synonymous with acts of mass murder.

IDF snipers eat free double cheeseburgers while they pick off starving Palestinian children through their telescopic sights. Then they tweet about it. Again, not that hard to understand.

Since the turn of the century, we have become rather ambivalent to acts of boycott in Ireland, which is ironic, given we are the country that gave the word to the world. Many of us sneered with cynical suspicion at the ‘hippies’ and ‘crusties’ in open-toed sandals who set up their makeshift stalls on Shop Street in Galway and Patricks Street in Cork, inoffensively handing out fliers informing us how we could actively object to the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people down through the decades.

In hindsight, that suspicion was born more out of snobbery than some moral superiority. The accusation always seemed to be that these people were bandwagoning.

It’s time we revisited that assertion. Given that so many people today are genuinely crippled with despair at what’s occurring in Gaza, it’s time that we acknowledge that those who manned those stalls and handed out those fliers did so out of a compassion and empathy absent in so many of us.

It’s taken a modern-day horror to awaken the inner activist in many ‘ordinary’ people. We shouldn’t ignore whatever horror stirs inside our souls when we see children - already orphaned- starving to death.

It starts with small things. Small things like these. Small things like telling your child there’s no McDonalds this weekend. Explaining to them their tiny sacrifice matters to kids their age in Rafah and Jabalia, even if they may not live to learn of it.

Your children may not thank you now, but society might, because in 20 years when that child is a teacher, nurse, doctor, politician, or journalist, they’ll remember why they boycotted something. Those things never leave you.