Ged Nash
Louth · Labour Party · Ireland
“However, it is a rich country that has a problem understanding that it is now sustainably rich. Those of us in opposition will, of course, say that this country needs to do better, and it can.”
“On the one hand, it is legitimate for an Opposition party to critique the economic model day in, day out. I do it myself all of the time, and we all know that Ireland can do better. However, at the same time, is that kind of critique helping to persuade those whom we need to persuade into a new Ireland? I am not so sure that it is.”
“There will be fiscal and financial implications for this State in that transition. There is an obligation on us, insofar as we can, to properly interrogate and consider those implications and to be upfront about them.”
“No, it did not, but let us not exaggerate its impact on the Irish economy. It is good and it had an impact, but was there a causal relationship? I am not so sure. The jury is out on that. However, is the Good Friday Agreement a good thing and good for our economy? Of course, it is. Did the guns fall silent in the North?”
“We are not good at describing what those accommodations will be or what that relationship with the UK will be, whether economically, socially, politically, culturally or otherwise. It is a relationship that will have to be maintained. It will look very different as we approach a new Ireland.”
“That was a very different prospect when the vast majority, if not all, of East German citizens wanted to become part of a united German polity. As we know, that is not the case on this island. We need to be careful about how we approach that.”
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“We could be doing much more with the resources we have to generate the kind of change environmentally, socially and from an employment of view in this country that many of us in the House believe ought to occur. In the context of Deputy Farrell's chairing of the Oireachtas joint committee on finance, we will deal with procurement issues over the next period. It is very much on our work agenda because we all believe that improvements need to be made to how services and goods are procured in this State. We are not using all the opportunities provided to us to drive the kind of change we need. I have studied this area carefully over the years. A number of initiatives can be taken to improve the situation for everyone.”
“I congratulate my colleague Deputy Farrell for bringing this Bill forward. It is significant legislation. It very much aligns with the work that the Deputy has done since she entered this Chamber in 2020. She is very much focused on the question of public procurement and driving economic and social change through the development of responsible public procurement systems. It is quite extraordinary when we consider that €22 billion of taxpayers' money, generated by the hard work of Irish citizens, will be spent on public procurement this year. To put that in context, that comes in at approximately 20% of what we expect the State to spend next year. That is a significant amount of taxpayers' money.”
“Moving the threshold for deferrals of tax in line with inflation is also a welcome element of the Bill from the Labour Party's point of view. This is fair and we look forward to amending the legislation on Committee Stage when it appears before us.”
“The Government estimates that 96% of property owners will stay in their existing bands as a result of the Bill and it will yield an extra 8% in revenue over a period when property values have risen by one quarter. In my view, all of this means we have a missed opportunity to take a greater yield from those who will ultimately profit from the boom in property prices and use that extra revenue to give ordinary working people a well-earned break. There is some consolation in the Bill for working families and their struggles with the cost of living. The Labour Party welcomes the extension of the 9% VAT rate on energy bills but, at the same time, we continue to make the case for a greater tax take from the runaway profits of some of the energy companies that are still posting supernormal profits.”
“Property prices have had a greater proportional increase outside of Dublin, with more than 30% property price growth recorded in the Border, midlands and western regions. However, average property prices in Dublin for all types of residential properties also increased by 18%. While these increases will have little or no impact on the resources available to families simply living out their lives in an average family home with no desire to sell, they are a huge boon for those wealthy property owners and property flippers who see the property market as a ladder, with rungs on which to climb and, hopefully, seeing their asset appreciate always over time. While we need to protect the first group from major hikes in the local property tax, the second group does not need this protection and, in my view, can afford to contribute more.”
“They showed that for the LPT year 2025 to date, Revenue has engaged with more than 1.4 million property owners in respect of 2.02 million properties, representing a 97% return compliance rate, and €346 million has been collected to date. I will not argue for one minute that this form of taxation or any other form of taxation is popular but compliance is high and compliance is important. One of the reasons compliance is high is that the local property tax is collected by the Revenue Commissioners. Therein lies my argument for giving responsibility for the collection of the derelict sites levy to the Revenue Commissioners. According to the Central Statistics Office, property prices increased by a national average of 24% between November 2021 and March 2025.”
“At present, property developers and property owners who can afford to leave their sites derelict, whereby those sites appear on derelict site registers, are not taking the responsibility seriously. All too often, they are deliberately evasive when the bills hit the mat and they are simply not paying the levies. As I understand it, if the Revenue Commissioners were to collect properly all of the derelict site levies that would be available, the yield would amount to €24 million or €25 million. This is not an insignificant amount of money. The resources being collected at present are exceptionally small. The most recent figures for LPT were published by Revenue in April 2025.”
“We also believe we should be providing more revenue-raising powers and more discretion to local authorities to raise revenue along the lines, for example, of proposed tourist levies, a better way of collecting vacant and derelict site taxes and increasing the discretionary level of the local property tax. While we are looking at local authority finances, the resources generated and raised from the imposition and collection of derelict site levies ought to be improved. One way of doing this would be to pursue an approach I have been proposing for many years, which is to give the powers that local authorities have at present to collect revenue from derelict sites levies to the Revenue Commissioners. The Revenue Commissioners would then be obliged to funnel those resources directly back to the local authorities.”
“We also have to be careful that the core yield of the tax is not undermined to such a degree that the extra discretion makes no real difference to the funding of local authorities. We should all aim to ensure that the financial independence of local authorities in Ireland is strengthened. A key principle of local government reform must be that councillors have greater control of their finances and more discretion for local priorities, alongside the power to raise revenue. We should also consider introducing a legal guarantee that all of the local property tax raised in a local authority is retained there, independent of other revenue streams, including from Government, and ensure that decisions of the local property tax are made at the same time as the annual council budget.”
“For this to mean anything, the Government parties, that is, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael need to tell their council members around the country to exercise this power positively for the betterment of their local authorities and the people they serve. It has been the experience across the country that, more often than not, representatives of Government parties in local authorities are not prepared to increase the property tax to provide additional resources to fund public services in an area or, in fact, want to reduce the local property tax. Too many times, this has led Labour Party councillors, working with Green Party, independent or Social Democrats councillors, to argue against this situation.”
“The local property tax is an opportunity to address that balance and use the increased yield from those with abundant resources to give working people a break, whether by using the resources we have to reduce the cost of living and invest more in public services or, over time, reduce the proportion of tax that working people pay. A second and equally important issue we have to keep an eye on when we look to reform the local property tax is the funding of our local authorities. The Labour Party welcomes the broadening in the Bill of the discretion available to local authorities in the setting of the local property tax from 15% to 25%. This was a commitment we made in our election manifesto late last year. However, this expansion of local authority discretion, as I understand it from the remarks of the Minister, will be delayed until 2027.”
“The Labour Party's issue with the Bill is with how it operates at the higher end of the scale, where there is scope for even higher yields from wealthy property owners with a demonstrably greater ability to pay. Property values go all the way up to €1.75 million before they are taxed on their actual value. Even then, the same rate is applied as any other property for the first €1.05 million of that total value. The remainder is taxed at 0.25% and 0.3%. It is fair to say that people in that category with very large assets at the high end of the spectrum are also likely to be cash rich. Wealthy asset holders get away lightly in our tax regime comparatively, while ordinary working people carry a significant load.”
“The commission recommended that the overall yield from wealth and capital taxes, including property, land, capital acquisition and capital gains taxes, should increase materially as a proportion of overall tax revenues. Herein lies our issue with the Bill. We agree that working families in average family homes who are already being impacted by the cost-of-living crisis should be saved from very large hikes in their local property taxes as a consequence of rising property prices. We absolutely get the point. While the ability to pay must always be at the forefront of any tax raising system, it is clear that this country does poorly in terms of taxes on fixed assets and capital. The Bill will not do a huge amount to improve that record.”
“The commission was clear on the local property tax. It called the local property tax a well-functioning tax, the yield from which should be increased materially. The commission also recommended that tax incentives should not be used in order to stimulate the supply of housing, another thing this Government seems to have contrasting views on. I am reassured by comments made by the Minister in previous months that tax incentives in respect of the supply of housing are something that ought not to be considered. I hope that is something he will follow through on. We remember all too well the impact such forms of incentives, as they were described, had on our economy and banking system. They led, for example, to the financial crash.”
“The commission recommended that the yield from capital gains tax, capital acquisitions tax and taxes on land and property should be substantially increased. The commission also recommended a site value tax be applied to all land not subject to the local property tax. This measure was also in the Labour Party's election manifesto, but it is one this Government is yet to move on. A site value tax as a replacement for the outdated system of commercial rates ought to be up for consideration. The commercial rates system is full of inequities and is, quite frankly, an anachronism in the context of a modern economy. The idea of a site value tax would, of course, require detailed consultation on the design and modelling of the interaction with the local property tax and residential zoned land tax.”
“I am always struck by the uneasy alliance of the far left, Sinn Féin and parties which describe themselves as being on the right in Irish politics, such as the likes of Independent Ireland, where people seem to agree that property taxes are something that should be abolished but rarely make sound proposals in terms of how we should replace the several hundred million euro on which we rely every year to run our local services. It speaks to the heart of the report published a couple of short years ago by the Commission on Taxation and Welfare. It said that taxation from property and wealth is low and should increase. We know that some of the most significant forms of wealth in this country are held in property.”
“The Labour Party will amend the Bill on Committee Stage. I can assure the House that we will not amend it on the basis that we want to see what is a modest charge on properties abolished. It is extraordinary that every time we debate the principle of the property tax in this House there are parties who purport to be on the left in Irish politics which say they oppose it. They oppose it for their own reasons, and I respect that. In my view, parties are not entitled to refer to themselves as a social democratic or socialist party if they do not agree with the principles of taxes on assets. This is a modest charge. Few people like paying tax, but people are compliant. They understand the necessity of the tax and it is now an embedded feature of our political and tax-raising systems in this country.”
“As a State, we have, at least by the unconscionably low international standards that obtain at the moment, shown leadership in response to the devastation in Gaza and the genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people. We have been pioneers. Let us continue to be. Let us accept this motion and, as colleagues in the Social Democrats said earlier, provide all TDs in this House with the opportunity to vote with their conscience. Let us do the right thing this evening.”
“He will say that the term for the current prospectus will come to an end in September of this year. Regardless of what happens today, the Central Bank has a decision to take in the next three to four months. We can decide to enact emergency legislation to stop this now and challenge the State of Israel to see us in the international courts, courts which, by the way, Israel now routinely decides not to recognise at all. Let us challenge Israel to do that. As we move beyond this motion, in the next three to four months, will the Government indicate its view to the Central Bank and remind it of its legal and moral obligations? What thresholds will the Government expect it to use? What criteria will it apply to a decision it may have to make to renew the Israeli prospectus as it comes to an end?”
“The charter states the Union is founded on the indivisible and universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity and is based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law. This all speaks for itself. That we have not yet imposed any form of sanction on Israel is unconscionable. I accept, and we all understand, that Ireland is doing all it can to build coalitions in that regard. Yet, as the House knows, we have the power to restrict access to financial services. These arguments have been well rehearsed in recent weeks. In other words, there are opportunities to develop and enact legislation to restrict and stop the Central Bank's role in this. The Governor of the Central Bank will appear before the finance committee today.”
“The Central Bank is independent in the carrying-out of its functions. However, when a senior member of the Government recognises that the state whose prospectus is approved here is engaged in genocide, we have a greater responsibility. I and others would argue that all State agencies have a role beyond a narrow technical and Jesuitical interpretation of laws and an obligation to tick a box. The preamble to the EU prospectus governing this space states: This Regulation respects the fundamental rights and observes the principles recognised in particular by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Therefore, this Regulation should be interpreted and applied in accordance with those rights and principles.”
“It is not a responsibility the Central Bank asked for, I assume, but it is one it and, by extension, we, as Irish citizens and Members of the House, have. Ireland is now the home country for Israeli bonds in terms of the prospectus. The explanations as to why we cannot introduce legislation to change that reality seem, to the many of us who are desperate to see accountability and an end to the ethnic cleansing, like a mere detail in the face of a bonfire of international laws and norms. It is ironic in the extreme, although this is no time for irony, that Israel sees Ireland as a country that is not fit to host its ambassador, yet it conveniently uses our Central Bank, our financial regulator, to approve its bond packages for investors who want to invest in the State of Israel. That is, frankly, perverse.”
“It is uncomfortable for the Government, the leadership of the Central Bank, the citizens of Ireland and all of us in this House to comprehend that our financial services regulator, the Central Bank, is, whatever way we interpret it, a critical cog in the wheel funding the Israeli state, which is carrying out a deliberate starvation policy of children and mass murder of citizens in the open prison that is Gaza. The far-right Israeli regime makes no bones about it. Dani Naveh, the CEO of Israel Bonds, the organisation that sells these bonds, has admitted publicly that the resources generated from the sale of these bonds are funding what he called the military operations in Gaza. The fact that Ireland was saddled with operating the Israeli bonds prospectus is another perverse outworking of Brexit.”
“I will be sharing time with my colleague Deputy Lawlor. We are in an incredible situation in this country and in the Middle East at present. For the first time, two weeks ago, in response to a Labour Party motion and a Sinn Féin Bill two weeks ago on Israeli bonds, a significant statement was made by senior Government representatives in this House. Finally, a senior Government figure in the State said unequivocally that Israel is carrying out a genocide against the people of Gaza. The Genocide Convention, dare I explain again, makes it crystal clear that where genocide is suspected or claimed, there is a moral and legal obligation for a state to make good on its utterances, to bring that to its logical and practical conclusion and to take that claim further.”
“I welcome Government TDs not opposing it. I wish to work with the Government to get this to Committee Stage and nuance and finesse it because if we do, and if we succeed in getting it enacted, we will empower the CCPC to do more. I accept there is legislation empowering the CCPC that could be better used and applied to regulate the sector, but there is no legislation anywhere that for example, compels supermarkets to share information that they need to share with our regulators if our regulators are to be respected and empowered. I accept that improvements can be made and I want to do that. If we enact something like this, the consumers of Ireland will thank us for it, and so will all the decent businesses.”
“There are questions around wages, collective bargaining and ensuring workers gain more from their productivity, but there is also a significant role for the State with regard to regulating markets. We have seen trammelled and record profits from large corporations in recent years. There have been examples of enormous profit taking. That is an inequality. The distance between working people and those who run these major corporations has grown, and there has been a multiplier effect. We see CEOs of corporations who used to earn 20 or 30 times what someone on the factory floor would make, earn 300, 400 or 500 times that amount. That encourages the rise of populism and creates the political problems we now have in the world. There is a job for Government to do regarding smart and proportionate regulation. That is what this Bill is about.”
“These are businesses that comply with the law, employ people fairly and do their business fairly. Good and proportionate regulation weeds out the cowboy operators and sends a message that we will not tolerate how they operate. When there is greater transparency around pricing structures and the operation of a large sector like this that is so important to our everyday needs, it encourages better behaviour and practice and it weeds out that bad practice. There are debates on going throughout the world, and I am always attracted to the writings of Mr. Robert Reich, a US academic, economist and former labour secretary under President Bill Clinton. As I did earlier, he talks about how it is not always the job of the State to resource people to deal with the increased cost of living.”
“Nobody is saying the State should take out a large hammer and decide to make all kinds of interventions, which never worked in the past, and pretend they will work now. As I said, this is a modest proposal. I am open to introducing amendments which would fine-tune and streamline legislation, and address some of the apparent inconsistencies that may be inherent in the Bill. The Government understands the principle and what it is we are trying to achieve. For example, it is absolutely right that we make a distinction between SMEs and larger corporations. The Minister is entirely right that when it comes to competition, consumer law and prices throughout the economy, when competition law and consumer law are not working the way they were intended, good businesses are impacted.”
“As I said earlier, we cannot say definitively there is not a form of price-gouging occasionally going on in the Irish supermarket sector if we do not have access to all the information to allow us to make that determination. The CCPC simply does not have that information. This modest proposition seeks a way in which we can do that in order to bring greater transparency to the Irish supermarket sector. We hope this will lead to greater fairness for Irish consumers, who have been stiffed at the checkout. A number of years ago I likened the trip to the supermarket to do the weekly shop to being as welcome as a visit to the dentist. It was and still is very difficult for people. It is becoming as expensive as a trip to the dentist also. That goes to show that the cost of accessing services, more generally, is increasing.”
“That goes back to the potential for abuse of a dominant position. We will never get the full picture in terms of the operation of the Irish retail groceries trade if there is no obligation on those involved to publish and share their profits, in a way that respects commercial sensitivity. Nobody is expecting any operator to simply come out and say this is what they are doing, and they are entitled themselves. The supermarket sector in Ireland and elsewhere is composed of different corporate models. We still have some independently owned businesses. We have international businesses and multinational corporations that are traded on the stock market and so on. We have different company formations and we need to take account of that.”
“I thank the Minister of State for his response. Both he and I live in the real world. Who we are and where we come from insists we do. We shop in the same places and in the same supermarkets and we see what is going on. We are connected into that and the concerns of the working families we all represent. The Bill itself is a modest proposal. I am not suggesting and never did at any point, despite the public clamour a couple of years ago, that we should, for example, introduce price controls, because they have inadvertent consequences. Grocery price orders went out a long number of years ago and for very good reason. One of the reasons at the time was because it was supposed to usher in competition, but we know, compared with analogous EU states, we have very limited competition in the supermarket sector here.”
“That is a good thing but I believe, especially given the fact we are entering into a very uncertain period with potential tariffs and so on, it is really important that the CCPC is empowered to stand up for consumers. We should use this legislation to empower it to do just that and to make our supermarkets honest.”
“This Bill would amend the Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2014 and address this fundamental problem while arming the regulator with real enforcement powers to bring giant retailers to heel and ensure more transparency and fair pricing at the checkout. It would allow the CCPC to undertake a deep study and analysis of the costs large retailers incur, the profits they take and the prices they set, giving us a much clearer insight into how supermarkets in this country operate and what their pricing structures are. It would bring the kind of transparency to this market that has been sorely missed for far too long. I hope we can make progress on bringing this legislation to Committee Stage for further interrogation. I understand that on Tuesday, Cabinet decided not to oppose this legislation.”
“This Bill seeks to bring greater transparency to the structure of the large supermarket businesses in Ireland and the sector more generally and to end the secrecy on pricing and profit margins. It is in the interest of consumers and competition. When we published this Bill two years ago, the then Minister for enterprise, Simon Coveney, said he would take steps that would lead to big supermarket players publishing their profits and being compelled to make the prices they charge their customers clearer. Since 2023, that Government and its new iteration has taken a vow of silence on this issue. There is nothing in the programme for Government that commits to an initiative like this. Nothing has happened.”
“Insofar as it could, it sought to address the question of potential price gouging in supermarkets. I welcomed that assessment, which it published around this time two years ago. It made some very peculiar affirmations, though, that I dispute. I dispute them for a couple of reasons. Principally, it said that no evidence of price gouging of customers by large multiples was evident in the Irish market. I posed this question to it then and I repeat it now: how can you definitively rule this out when nobody - no agency and the public more generally - has any access whatsoever to reliable information on profit margins and profits more generally in the Irish grocery trade and supermarket sector? At best, I thought it was unwise for the CCPC to make that claim without the information it needed to make a definitive judgment.”
“Two years on the from the initiation of this Bill, the case for its enactment and for more tools to be made available to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, CCPC, is still strong. We know that pricing structures in the grocery trade are complex. We understand that. The retail trade is complex. It is hard to definitively rule out the possibility of price gouging among major retailers - keeping prices high for so long with a slow rate of decline. In response to the Labour Party's advocacy and campaigning two years ago on the impact of high grocery prices on Irish consumers, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission decided, at the request of the then Minister for enterprise, Simon Coveney, to initiative a form of a desktop analysis on grocery prices in this country.”
“In short, the question of potential abuse of dominant positions in marketplaces is actually at the heart of what this Bill seeks to address. Two years on from the height of the grocery price inflation spike, the cost of the basics is still extremely high. To give some examples, we have noticed ourselves from our weekly shopping that the price of a 1 Ib of butter is on average €4.69 at the moment. That is a 26% rise in a year, according to the Central Statistics Office. Kantar, the grocery price consultancy well known across the world, said price inflation in supermarkets is double what it was last year. What is the practical effect of this? All of this means a typical family will need to earn an extra €4,000 before tax to merely stand still when it comes to the price of a weekly shop.”
“The one thing Government parties repeatedly seem to be ideologically incapable of doing is to make regulatory interventions to bring major corporations to heel - normal kinds of interventions you would see in a regulated market economy, even if there are arguments that might suggest the potential for the abuse of dominant positions in market places, especially where weak or limited competition is not working in the best interest of the consumer. This is where competition and consumer protection law aligns. We are not good at protecting the interests of the consumer in this country. All of the evidence over the years has shown that. Competition and consumer protection law are intertwined. You cannot have one without the other.”
“The answer from Government during the early days of the cost-of-living crisis - note that I say "early days" because we are still in a cost-of-living crisis - was to bring in a series of much-trumpeted one off payments, some of which were famously untargeted and universal in nature. It then slavishly repeated that over and over again for longer than was capable of being justified. Throwing money at a problem is not always the solution.”
“It was energy costs a couple of years ago; it is now tariffs sneaked in under the cover of circumstances that are beyond most people's control. A repeat of what we saw in 2023 is likely to be on the cards and we are still living with the very real consequences of that period for working families across this country. The cost-of-living crisis has not gone. It was elevated in 2023 but there is a permanent cost-of-living crisis across this country, especially for those who are on low, middle and fixed incomes. Of course, high grocery prices affect those on low and fixed incomes most adversely.”
“He said that "while some global pressures may ease, others, such as climate change, labour costs, and geopolitical uncertainty, are likely to persist." He further said that "global volatility means that significant price drops were unlikely in the short term." That is an interesting prediction for a number of different reasons. With elevated grocery prices now sticky, my fear, and the fear of my Labour Party colleagues, is that the threat of a tariff war between the European Union and the US, and the disruption that would create in global trade, while having a real impact on the cost of doing business, will end up giving some large, dominant corporations carte blanche to usher in a new wave of price hikes at the supermarket and lay the blame at the door of tariffs.”
“Two years on from the start of the cost-of-living crisis, the price of the every day goods on which we all rely and the services on which we depend are still high. Input costs have come down, stabilised or plateaued. The pace of underlying inflation has slowed but the cost of the weekly shop in the last 12 months has shot up by 5%. Wage growth this year is expected to average 3.66% so the hard-earned euro in your pocket is expected to stretch ever further. The UCC economist, Oliver Browne, writing on the RTÉ website recently, said he holds out little prospect of grocery prices falling anytime soon.”
“Philip Lane, warned that companies across Europe were using what became a gradual fall in input costs to boost their profits, perhaps keeping the prices of goods and services artificially high for longer than the market could justify instead of passing on lower prices to consumers. This form of profit taking at the expense of consumers has an apt term of its own, namely, greedflation. Professor Lane, who is a former Governor of the Irish Central Bank and, indeed, who worked in Trinity College, said the easing of some supply chain bottlenecks had not made its way into retail prices. This was despite producer prices decreasing strongly in the last while. He said this had enabled some firms to increase their profit margins.”
“There was also a clear suspicion, as we will recall, and not without foundation, that multinational corporations, including the big supermarket multiples around whose stores we push our trolleys each week, were using the cover provided by the energy cost crisis to push prices up even further, engaging in profiteering and, in some cases, posting inexplicably high super-normal profits. Indeed, in 2023, that radical left-wing hotbed, the European Central Bank, ECB, warned that large corporations were using the energy crisis to boost their margins. In 2023, the chief economist of the ECB, Mr.”
“I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." I will be sharing time with my colleague Deputy Bacik. I am pleased to speak on the Competition and Consumer Protection (Unfair Prices) Bill 2023. When I introduced this legislation on First Stage two years ago, the rate of inflation was at levels not seen in decades. A confluence of grim circumstances, some of which were the consequence of Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, saw the price of basic staples, such as bread, eggs, butter, pasta and so on, rise in price by close to 20% in some cases over a short period. Allied with post-pandemic supply chain problems, rising energy , transport and labour costs saw input costs more generally climb significantly. Pretty much all of those costs were passed on to hard-pressed customers doing their weekly shop.”
“Quite frankly, the ethnic cleansing and genocide that have been perpetrated by Israel are designed to obliterate the notion and the understood legal position of the aspiration for a two-state solution. At this point, the Tánaiste may not be in a position to be crystal clear about our priorities when chairing that working group but he might put on the record what function we will have, which working group we will be chairing, if he is aware, and what opportunities we can exploit and use to ensure there continues to be momentum behind the motion adopted in the House yesterday.”
“I absolutely would. A window is now opening because we have seen a step change in the UK, France and Canada over the past week or ten days in respect of their perspective on Gaza, the genocide, what is happening there and what needs to happen. We have also seen a step change in Germany, especially in our sister party of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, SDP. The Chancellor has made interesting remarks about the completely unacceptable behaviour of the Israeli regime and state. Ireland will be chairing one of the working groups at the two-state solution conference next month. In order for the two-state solution that this House and State officially support, we need a viable Palestinian state.”
“There will be an opportunity next month for us to continue to show courage and leadership in this space by doing exactly what the motion called for, that is, UN-backed and -administered aid immediately into Gaza, a ceasefire and the development of a UN-backed peacekeeping force.”
“It is important that the motion be implemented and that the will of the House be accepted by the Government and implemented at every opportunity. We have used the opportunity of the special General Assembly well. In recent times, we called for the upgrading of Palestine's status in the context of the UN General Assembly and the UN more generally, which is to be welcomed. Ireland has led the way internationally on Gaza. There are no two ways about it. This time last year, we took the decision to recognise the State of Palestine. Collectively, across the Chamber, our views were prescient in respect of the EU-Israel association agreement. Other countries are now starting to pay attention and are catching up with Ireland.”
“The Tánaiste will recall the House yesterday approved a motion developed by the Labour Party and formally supported by Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, the Green Party and others, mandating the Government to call for a special General Assembly of the United Nations to promote and instigate certain collective measures in respect of Gaza. Given the motion has effectively been adopted, how does the Government plan to implement it?”