Richard Boyd Barrett
Dún Laoghaire · People Before Profit-Solidarity · Ireland
“It is absolutely incredible that about 50% to 57% of all professional artists in this country live on or below the poverty line - three times the level of poverty in Irish society generally.”
“On a global level, the consumption of electricity by data centres is due to go up elevenfold by 2030. They are hoovering up the water resources and electricity resources of the planet. There will not be much human creativity, art or music if we have no water and no energy. That is what is going on with these people.”
“St. Joseph's Centre in Shankill is the largest care home dedicated solely to dementia care in the country. SIPTU members feel compelled to take industrial action tomorrow because of the failure of St. John of God's to recognise the work and duties that they do.”
“These people actually want to replace human beings and human creativity with AI. That would literally be the road to disaster for humanity. Some people think about AI as if it is cutting edge and the most advanced thing possible, but AI is like the Neanderthal.”
“Against that background, we are seeing these billionaires who run AI looking to steal en masse all of the artistic and creative output of humanity and to profit from it. The artists rightly are asking what the Government is going to do to prevent them making a bad situation for most artists and performers even worse.”
“I thank Deputy Ó Snodaigh for bringing this motion forward. As Deputy Paul Murphy indicated, People Before Profit is very happy to support and commend all the artists, organisations, musicians and so on who are campaigning to bring this forward.”
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“The agenda is to get involved in a European militarisation project and align Ireland with the western empire that arms Israel and is up to its teeth in warmongering. After the disasters of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we should not trust the Government. We should hold onto the triple lock and retain that tradition of neutrality that goes back to our revolutionary, anti-imperialist roots.”
“Do I trust our Government when we look at current events? I want to speak up for the 14 Irish people upholding our tradition of neutrality on the Global Sumud Flotilla who have been kidnapped by Israel in international waters. Europe does nothing about this rogue state that is guilty of genocide, apartheid and flouting every bit of international law. It is now kidnapping Irish people and imprisoning them because they are trying to uphold international law. What does the Irish Government do with the Israeli state that is doing all of this? We have increased our trade with it. We approved €20 million in licences to export dual-use goods to the Israeli military that is carrying out genocide and kidnapping Irish citizens. I, therefore, do not trust the Government.”
“That same American empire today, led by Donald Trump, is telling Europe that it must spend more on weapons. Donald Trump is goading. Should we listen to his goading that Europe has to militarise, play its part in NATO and spend more on weapons rather than health, housing and education? I say "No". Defending our neutrality means not listening to his goading or involving ourselves in a project of militarisation in Europe, which is alarmingly reminiscent of the build-up to previous world wars, with geopolitical jockeying and a militarisation of big powers across the globe as they try to carve out spheres of influence. We should not be involved in that. The triple lock is precisely about ensuring that we do not get involved in wars where empires are clashing and that we do not take sides with empires. We oppose empire.”
“No, because it has already shredded it in doing exactly what Connolly, Markievicz, Pearse and Wolfe Tone did not want us to do, namely, become a staging ground for empires engaged in wars, most notably Shannon Airport. Millions of US troops transited through Shannon Airport while they prosecuted a criminal war in Iraq that claimed the lives of 1 million people. That was a war for oil, led by the US and the UK, that destabilised the whole Middle East. There would be no Al-Qaeda or half of these other groups were it not for that disastrous, criminal war based on lies about weapons of mass destruction. We allowed millions of US troops to go through Shannon Airport because the Irish Government and the political establishment wanted to align themselves with the American empire.”
“That radical, anti-imperialist notion of neutrality was then taken forward by James Connolly, Pádraig Pearse and Constance Markievicz when they set up the Irish Neutrality League in 1914 when the First World War broke out. That was another war between empires in which people tried to argue that Ireland was obliged to support the British empire in an inter-imperialist slaughter that claimed the lives of 14 million people. Tens of thousands of working-class Irish people, who were economically conscripted, were slaughtered in that war. This proud, anti-imperialist tradition is integrally tied up with who we are as a country in opposing empires. Do I trust the Irish Government with our neutrality?”
“I thank Deputy Stanley for bringing forward this important motion on protecting our neutrality. As the Deputy's motion alludes to, the origin of Irish neutrality lies with Theobald Wolfe Tone, one of Ireland’s greatest revolutionaries. He developed the concept of Irish neutrality in 1790 in the context of a debate in the Irish Parliament about whether Ireland should, essentially, back Britain. It was obliged to back Britain in an impending war with Spain. Wolfe Tone argued that it was, essentially, a betrayal of our struggle for autonomy and against empire to be in any way a staging ground for empires in wars. That is where neutrality came from.”
“Serious, lasting damage is being done to children and families who are particularly badly hit by this homelessness and eviction crisis. The Government should be ashamed of itself.”
“However, there are beneficiaries from this, and they are precisely the 50,000 or so people who own between three and ten properties, another few thousand who own between ten and 20 and a few hundred who own hundreds of properties. These people are making an absolute fortune. The worse the housing crisis is, the more homeless people there are. The more desperate people are, the more valuable their property assets are. The more they can charge, the more profit they make. It is difficult not to conclude that this is the interest the Government is serving. It is absolutely shameful that this is the case but I cannot see any other explanation for what it is doing when we are seeing the acceleration of the number of people who are homeless and the children and families being traumatised by it.”
“It is a very sick development in an already disastrous housing crisis with record levels of homelessness and eviction that landlords are evicting people in order to get up to the market level, on the ground that their tenants are overcrowded because those tenants may have another child or there are too many kids in a bedroom or whatever. That is now a ground to evict people. Landlords are evicting people on that basis, and I am having to deal with them. It is disgraceful, but it was an entirely predictable consequence of what the Government did. The Government could not but know that the consequence of what it did by allowing the reset of rents on the basis of market levels was going to make an already dire situation worse.”
“It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Government does not want to solve the housing crisis, and that it is serving the interests of people who profit from it. The worse it gets, the more those people profit. Why do I say that? The consequence of the changes around the rents in resetting them and allowing rent increases up to market levels has been an absolute disaster. For example, in my experience, one thing that was allowed and has started to happen, which I warned would happen when the legislation came in, is that as well as people being evicted on the ground of sale, which of course has been happening on a massive scale - it is the major reason people get evicted - they are being evicted on the ground that they are overcrowded.”
“The point is that we should have the legislation on marine protected areas, we should have the 30% necessary, and we should ensure that the most ecologically sensitive marine areas are protected before we let developers decide where they want, for profit reasons, to develop the offshore renewable energy which we absolutely need. I note that most of the rest of Europe does not put offshore wind at anything like the proximity being proposed on the east coast. They put it 20 km, 30 km and up to 60 km off the coast in these sensitive areas, not 10 km as is proposed here. We need to understand that biodiversity is critical, as is the protection of sensitive marine protected areas, and it should not be the poor relation when we talk about protecting our environment.”
“Groups like the South East Coastal Protection Alliance say there has been significant damage to the marine environment and marine biodiversity off Arklow from the wind farm off the Arklow bank. Now there has to be decommissioning after 20 years, another important factor. The turbines have to be decommissioned after 20 years and then built again on a bigger scale, when there is already significant evidence of damage to marine biodiversity. Ultimately, this can undermine the climate imperative for which renewable energy is being developed in the first place, namely, to prevent damage to the wider climate, as these environments are particularly important for carbon capture. They are potentially being seriously damaged.”
“They have chosen sites that are likely the most ecologically sensitive from a biodiversity point of view, but that are cheaper and more profitable sites for the developers to develop offshore wind. Off the east coast, we have development at very close proximity to the shore, on sandbanks which are ecologically very sensitive as they are the spawning ground for shellfish and many species of fish. They also provide livelihoods for fishers off the east coast. The fishers estimate this involves, directly and indirectly, about 800 jobs. The developers have decided which sites should be selected, rather than us deciding which are the marine areas that need to be protected. This is a problem.”
“I am sharing time with Deputy O'Gorman. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the issue of biodiversity. There are a lot of aspects to it. One that is directly relevant to my own area is the issue of marine protected areas. I have raised this point many times. The Government has failed to adequately protect sensitive marine environments. The EU biodiversity strategy 2030 and the UN biodiversity framework require that 30% of our marine area should be protected. Currently, we are at less than 10%. In the meantime, there is another imperative, namely, the development of offshore wind, which is an absolute priority. There is a need to synchronise these two things in a way that doing one does not undermine the other. This has not happened. The private developers of offshore renewable wind have got to select sites.”
“The liberalisation of the energy markets across Europe was supposed to benefit consumers. The removal of the ESB’s not-for-profit mandate and the introduction of competition into the market actually resulted across Europe in a 40% increase in energy costs. In Ireland, however, the increase was 267%. What we actually got was competition that led to rampant profiteering by private energy companies. Prices for the consumer did not go down, but up. Is there a recognition that actually having the energy sector driven by profiteering companies has failed and that we need to bring the energy sector back into proper public ownership and run on a not-for-profit basis?”
“On Sunday in Ardboe, thousands of people marched to save Lough Neagh from environmental disaster due to the extreme eutrophication of the waters of Lough Neagh. The protest saw fishermen, swimmers, trade union activists, environmentalists and many more squarely put the blame on all of the major parties in Stormont for failing to prevent the greenlighting of factory farms that are polluting Lough Neagh. They also point to the private ownership of Lough Neagh by Lord Shaftesbury and the failure to protect the precious biodiversity of Lough Neagh. Does the Taoiseach have any comment on that?”
“Why is the Government going to vote against the sanctions Bill tomorrow night when the flotilla organisers, and I would say the majority of people in this country, are saying we should impose sanctions on this state for the crimes it has committed?”
“As I said to the Taoiseach earlier on, I am getting reports from the flotilla organisers that Israel is shooting rubber bullets at boats that have Irish citizens on them, who have not yet been kidnapped by this rogue regime. There would be uproar if Russia kidnapped people on the open seas, for example. There were sanctions immediately when it invaded Ukraine. There would be outrage. The Government has not imposed a single sanction on the State of Israel despite, genocide, apartheid and now the seizure, again, of Irish citizens. This is a regime that tortures people, according to the UN special rapporteur and widespread reports. There are grave concerns for our citizens. What crime does Israel have to commit before we will impose sanctions?”
“As we speak, flotilla organisers are reporting that the Israeli military is shooting rubber bullets at one of the last boats that has not yet been kidnapped by Israel, which has an Irish citizen on it. The Government has indicated that it will vote tomorrow against the Bill we have put forward calling for sanctions against the state that is doing this.”
“Then there is Shannon Airport and the US military, which is up to its neck in complicity with Israel, providing it with all the weapons - weapons allowed to go through Irish airspace by the Irish Government. We are up to our necks in complicity. That is why we are doing nothing. I ask the Government to pull back. We have an obligation, as a former colony, to stand with people suffering this sort of genocidal horror and colonial oppression. I ask the Minister of State to end the complicity and not to stand up and say "Not agreed". Do the right thing.”
“I have not mentioned Daniel Tatlow-Devally, an Irish citizen who has been imprisoned since, I think, last September and treated as if he is a terrorist because he took direct action against Elbit Systems, the main provider of weapons from Germany to Israel to allow it to commit the crimes we have seen in Gaza and elsewhere. He is being treated like a terrorist, and his family are begging the Irish Government to send observers to the trial, which is a show trial, a travesty and a disgrace. The doublespeak is clear. The Government will not send an observer. It will not call for a boycott of the football match, and we discovered this week that €20 million worth of technology licences have been approved by the Irish Government and are going to the Israeli military, which is carrying out all these atrocities.”
“The worst act of violence they committed was to throw stones at the Israeli military, the fourth most powerful military in the world, and they were brutally shot down and beaten down. As for armed resistance, the development of Hamas even as an armed wing did not happen until years after that. It was the brutality of the regime. It was not willing to give an inch on the brutal system of apartheid. The Israeli regime had made it clear; it wanted to further expand the borders of Israel. It wants to drive the Palestinians out. The intent of the regime is genocidal. Are we going to do anything about that? If we do not, it is not going to stop. What the Government is saying is that we cannot do it unless the European Union says it is okay. We know Germany, as we speak, is a major provider of arms to the regime committing this genocidal horror.”
“I am not saying there is not a minority of people in Israel who are opposed but the opinion polls are clear. The vast majority of people in the Israeli state support what the Israeli regime is doing, and it always has. I lived there. The reason the Minister of State has to put up with me in this House is because I went there. I was not political; I went there when I was 18 years of age and I stumbled into the first Palestinian intifada. I was horrified. When I was there, there was no armed resistance by Palestinians. They were young people protesting against the apartheid regime and against the fact that they had been living in refugee camps all of their lives. Their families had been driven out in 1948, and they were protesting on the streets.”
“The Government draws a distinction between the occupied territories and says, "Oh, we accept that is wrong". To trade with an occupied territory most certainly is wrong. It is prohibited under international law. Who directs the brutal, illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however? The State of Israel directs it. Who directed the illegal siege of Gaza that has gone on for 17 years, which leads them to even kidnap people bringing humanitarian aid from this country and around the world on the high seas and in international waters? Who directs that? The Israeli state directs it. Who directs the bombardment of Lebanon and the reoccupation of southern Lebanon? The Israeli state does it and successive Israeli governments - not just this one - have done it. They have been doing it since 1948. Every single Israeli Government has done it.”
“The genocidal horror does not improve, and being nice to Israel does not make it a little better. It gets worse and is emboldened by the impunity it enjoys. We are now at a point where there is no crime, horror, obscenity or atrocity that the Israeli regime is not willing to commit blatantly and flagrantly and to crow about the commission of these crimes. Some of the stuff is just beyond belief. I refer to some of the statements these people have made. To give the Minister of State some examples, in February 2025, the deputy speaker of the Knesset said that all adults in Gaza should be killed. He described all Palestinians as scum. Imagine if the Leas-Cheann Comhairle said that about any group. What would we think? That is what the Leas-Cheann Comhairle of the Knesset said about Palestinians. This is not a normal regime.”
“It will not stop its genocidal campaign against them, its illegal occupation of their land and the brutal siege of Gaza. Millions of Palestinians live in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and all across the Middle East, whose forebears were driven out in the act of ethnic cleansing in 1948 known as the Nakba, the 78th anniversary of which is this year. The State of Israel will not stop committing the crimes it has been committing since 1948 unless it is stopped. That is clear. Surely, it is clear. It will not stop unless it is stopped. If we continue to treat it as a normal state, why would it stop? All the evidence suggests the opposite. All the evidence is that if you allow it to act with impunity, it becomes emboldened. It goes further, and what it does gets worse.”
“Despite all the 15 or 20 pages of the Minister's speech, and all the crocodile tears, the Minister of State is, I assume, going to say "Not agreed". If the Government does not say that, we moved forward towards the imposition of sanctions. We have set out that we believe it is clear, from the ICJ rulings in previous cases and from the case law around genocide, that all signatories of the Genocide Convention have an obligation to act to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, the worst crime a state or anybody can commit. It has been committed, and the Irish Government has said - it took a while, but eventually - that it believes it has been committed and yet, it is refusing its obligations to do what is in its power to impose those sanctions. Let us be absolutely clear. Israel will not stop killing Palestinians.”
“There was a bit of the Minister's speech that was designed to make it look as if the Government is concerned and cares, but the bottom line, as has already been said, is that the Government will "not be supporting the Bill in its current form". It is not too late; if the Government is saying that the Bill needs a few amendments, the Minister of State should not call the vote now. The senior Minister has left because, at the end of this, the Cathaoirleach Gníomhach will ask if this Bill to impose economic sanctions and break off economic, trade and finance relations with the State of Israel because of its involvement in genocide, apartheid and multiple breaches of international law and human rights is agreed. Second Stage will be agreed unless the Minister of State says "Not agreed". That is what is going to happen.”
“Normally, as stated, senior Ministers do not come in for these Thursday debates. The Minister came in because of the pressure that people are exerting on the Government. This Government is under pressure. I want to again thank Senator Frances Black, who also sat through all of this debate, and she has sat through a lot over the past ten years or so listening to promises about how the Government was going to progress her Bill, and it never happens. I do not know. Deputy Paul Murphy and I were debating whether the Government is ever going to pass it or whether it will just pass it and then dilute it to such a point that it will have no impact. That is the space we are in. The Government's tactic does seem to be to speak out of both sides of its mouth.”
“I thank the people in the Gallery for sitting through all of that, particularly the comments of those in government. One thing I think they should know is that the senior Minister does not normally come in to take these Thursday debates. The reason she did is because the people in the Gallery are here and because there will, I hope, be tens of thousands of people on the streets again on Saturday, as there have been month in, month out for the past three years as a result of the slaughter being visited on the Palestinian people. After what they have heard today, I hope people will also mobilise next Wednesday outside the gates of the Dáil when the vote on this Bill is due to take place. We should not give up on exerting the kind of pressure that brought the Minister in here.”
“Now, however, I will because in 1935, Éamon de Valera instigated sanctions against Italy because it was engaged in a genocidal assault that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Ethiopians. His Government imposed sanctions because it felt it was Ireland's duty as a former colony to impose sanctions on Italy for committing genocide against people in Africa. Surely this Government can do as well as Eamon de Valera and impose sanctions on the genocidal State of Israel.”
“Despite this, we have allowed three and a half years of this genocide, although, as we all know, there have been decades of ethnic cleansing. The entire Israeli state has been based from the beginning on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. There have been decades of ethnic cleansing and decades of illegal occupation and annexation of Palestinian territory. For 20 years now, there has been a siege of Gaza, which is a collective punishment of its people and which, according to the UN had, even before October 2023, reduced it to a state of permanent humanitarian crisis. And then there is what has happened since. There have been no sanctions despite our obligations. It is criminal. I will finish with something I said earlier. I never, ever quote Éamon de Valera because I have nothing good to say about him.”
“I will not have time to quote it but the judgment goes on to state that even if a state does not think it will have a massive impact, it should do anything in its power to try to deter, prevent or impact on the capacity of the state committing the genocide. It also states that such action should be taken. Despite that, this State has not imposed a single sanction. Not one. Spain and Slovenia have. Other European states are still sending the Israelis arms and weapons and it is just deplorable. These are signatories to the Genocide Convention, which was put together, let us remind ourselves, after the Holocaust on the basis that "Never again" meant not just that we would punish a genocide after the fact but that we would try to ensure it never happens again.”
“It states: ...a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available to it means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harbouring specific intent ... [to commit genocide] it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit. Thus, even if there is a suspicion of genocide the signatories to the Genocide Convention are supposed to act.”
“In the case of 2024, this was after South Africa had already initiated the case before the ICJ in respect of the genocide, which the Government later joined, although it had to be pushed to do so. We already had a ruling from the ICJ in January 2024 to the effect there was a plausible case of genocide being committed against the Palestinian people. Following that, the Government granted licences to export dual-use technology to the Israeli military that is carrying out the genocidal massacre. That is absolutely appalling. I will conclude by reminding the Government what our obligations are under the Genocide Convention. I want to quote the ICJ ruling on the Bosnian genocide.”
“This week, because of a fight by The Currency , which, according to the journalist Niall Sargent took 12 months, we discovered that in 2024 the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment approved licences to the value of €20 million for exports from this country to the Israeli military. That was a surge in the value of such exports in the previous year, €12 million, when the genocidal assault on Gaza began. In the years before that, it was only €1 million, although that is too much, or €85,000 in another year. In 2023, however, when the genocidal assault on Gaza began, the figure jumped. In 2024, it went up to €20 million. This is the Government signing off on licences to allow exports of goods to the Israeli military while it was committing these crimes.”
“There was the failure to pass Senator Black’s Bill, which was instigated in 2018. How many times did we stand up in this House and how many times did people take to the streets - long before 2023 - to plead with successive Governments to impose sanctions? How many times did we plead with those in government to raise the EU-Israel association agreement? This grants favoured trade status and is effectively associate membership of the European Union. Israel still enjoys this after the genocide and horror that has been imposed on the people of Gaza and there has been not a single, solitary sanction. I will be interested to hear what the Minister is going to say about the next matter I am about to raise. I do not know if people are aware of it, but it is absolutely shocking.”
“Human Rights Watch accuses some states of actively supporting Israel's violations by supplying it with arms, equipment and other tools to perpetrate crimes under international law and providing diplomatic cover, including at the United Nations Security Council, to shield it from accountability. It states that by doing so, these states have completely failed the Palestinian people and only exacerbated Palestinians' lived experience as people with lesser rights and inferior status to Jewish Israelis. That was just one human rights organisation in 2021. How prophetic are its words. Decades of impunity have been granted by the international community, by the UN Security Council and by this country. That impunity has now led to the horror we have seen over the past three years.”
“I could quote many human rights organisations but I will just quote one because the impunity granted to Israel is what has led us to the genocidal horror we have seen. This was documented by many organisations, but I will cite one, namely Human Rights Watch, and a report it produced in 2021. The report in question states that for over seven decades, the international community has stood by as Israel has been given free rein to dispossess, segregate, control, oppress and dominate Palestinians. It also states that the international community has contributed to undermining the international legal order and has emboldened Israel to continue to perpetrating crimes with impunity.”
“We see the attacks on Iran. This is a death machine. It is obvious that is the case, and that the people presiding over it are criminals. Netanyahu, Gallant, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir are sick, sick people. When the minister of a government gets a present of a noose for his birthday to celebrate their plan to execute Palestinians, and they celebrate that for their birthday, you understand you are dealing with sick, depraved people. This is the mentality that is driving the Israeli State. Of course, all of this predates the current events. What we have seen in the past three years is the logical conclusion of the genocidal character of the Israeli State but its crimes predate the events of October 2023. I want to quote something written in 2021.”
“Because of the resistance of black South Africans and the solidarity of people across the world, it was finally acknowledged that an apartheid regime like South Africa had no right to exist and be treated as a normal state, and that regime had to be dismantled. Surely, we are beyond the point now where that is clear about the Israeli regime. We have seen in the past three years the genocidal slaughter of more than 75,000 people in Gaza, the levelling of Gaza, the destruction of all the schools, most of the housing, the infrastructure, the hospitals and the mass murder of men, women and children. That continues despite the claim that there is a ceasefire. While all of that is going on, we see the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. We see again the assaults and reoccupation of parts of Lebanon and the mass murder of Lebanese people.”
“We are morally and legally obliged to impose sanctions and we need to end the treatment of Israel as a normal state and recognise that it is a rogue pariah state. If that were not clear before the events of the past three years, it is surely obvious now. The Israeli regime is not a normal regime. It has revealed itself in the past three years as a depraved murder machine hell-bent on a genocidal campaign of annihilation and mass murder against the Palestinian people. That is what it is. Such a regime in our view has no place in the community of civilised nations and in the international community and should be isolated economically and in every other way as happened with apartheid South Africa.”
“Our Bill is saying that under the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute against apartheid, international law generally and our commitment to international law and human rights we have an obligation to impose sanctions on the State of Israel because it is in violation of those legal commitments. We are asking, if this Bill is passed, which we hope the Government will agreed to, is that we should all break off all economic, trade and financial relations with the State of Israel because of the crimes we believe it is guilty of. They are genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment of Palestinian people and the systematic, ongoing, decades long violation of the most basic human and civil rights of the Palestinian people.”
“I give special thanks to Senator Frances Black who is also here and of course has been campaigning to get her Bill passed, looking for sanctions on trade with the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. The Government promised in the programme for Government it would be implemented but it still has not implemented it. We will probably talk about it more. However, despite the commitments given by the Government, there is a clear statement that it is now diluting that Bill. Many of us frankly have doubts that it has any intention of passing it at all despite the promise in the programme for Government that it would do so.”
“I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." I start by welcoming the many people who have come into the Gallery this evening to observe this debate. They are people who have been marching and protesting in some cases for decades or many years. Members of the Palestinian community are here to observe this and see how the Government is going to respond to it. I commend the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and other groups like Sadaka, which are here and have been campaigning for many years on the issue of solidarity with Palestine against the crimes being committed against the people of Palestine by the Israeli regime. Although this Bill was proposed by People Before Profit, I thank Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, the Social Democrats and, hopefully, others, who have already pledged support for this Bill.”
“All has been submitted to the ICJ. This is what they were doing. They were saying they were going to do it and our Government approved a surge in licences for the military machine that was carrying out these atrocities against the Palestinian people. It is absolutely shameful. I will conclude on this. I have made the point, but I feel the need to sound the alarm bells about this. In the context of all that, we now have a Bill, not flagged in advance, with a section in it that seeks to reduce the obligations on State agencies to notify the Government when they are supporting companies that are engaged in the production of technology in this area. That is very bad.”
“This is very much in the public domain. Members of the ruling party, Likud, made public statements calling for - I am now reading from Sadaka's document on the genocidal intent - a Nakba against the Palestinian people and talked about "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth". The Prime Minister, Netanyahu, referred to the Palestinians as "Amalek". This is a well known biblical reference which refers to the Hebrew Bible. The reference is to a certain part of the latter, which states: Now go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. That is what Netanyahu was referring to when he used the term "Amalek". There is a lot more evidence. I do not have it all in front of me.”
“Since the Ceann Comhairle mentioned that, it might be worth quoting them directly. For example, Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, that is, the minister in charge of the IDF, described the Palestinians in the context of the assault on Gaza as "human animals".”
“The defence minister who is presiding over the Israeli military, the so-called IDF - in reality, the occupation force - actually said that Israel was going to starve people and deny them the means to exist.”
“In the same week, we have a Bill doing this. Fair play to Niall Sargent from The Currency for chasing this story. It should be read. He says it took 12 months of battling to get this information. Why did he have to battle to get it? Because it is shameful. That is why. The Government should explain this stuff. Here is the lesson I draw from it, as if we did not have enough evidence with the US military going through Shannon Airport, overflights potentially carrying weapons, etc., to the State of Israel and the refusal of the State to impose even the most minimal sanctions on the Israel. The Government simultaneously pays lip service to its solidarity with the Palestinian people and approves licences for the Israeli military while the Israeli military slaughters men, women and, most horrendously of all, children, babies and infants.”