I thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this comprehensive motion. Football is very important and I certainly do not want to be stopping any sport but there are other things that are more important. It is important that the slaughter that we have witnessed in Palestine, not just in the past two or three years, but going back over generations, is stopped. Medics, journalists, families and children have been killed; it is absolute genocide. The strangulation of normal life in the West Bank, ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and now Lebanon, all of southern Lebanon, almost a quarter of the territory, are war crimes. People in Israel who support it are as guilty as their government. I do not care what religion anybody is. Whether they are Jewish, Catholic, Protestant or whatever I am not interested. That is not issue here. The issue is whether people support the genocide of their government and the people in Israel who do so share some of this blame. Many Israeli people do not support it and many Jews I have met do not support it, which is good but over 75,000 people have died in Gaza since October 2023. With the aerial bombardments, starvation, disease and people buried under rubble, what people have seen is horrendous. Since the October 2025 ceasefire, 947 Palestinians have been killed with over 3,000 injured. To rub salt into the wounds, the treatment of the flotilla, including the 13 Irish citizens, was fingers up to the international community. Israel is not a normal state. Israel is a terrorist state and should be treated as such. FIFA and UEFA banned Russia and there have international bans on Yugoslavia as well. Is what Israel has done to Palestinians not the same? I note that well over 90% of FAI members voted to instruct the association to call on UEFA to suspend Israel and that should have happened. There is growing support across the country for the match not to go ahead. Ordinary people, who normally would not think too much about politics or what is going on in the world, are horrified by what they have seen through the good work that has been done by journalists - those who have been left alive to actually witness it - in Gaza who have brought that information to us on a daily basis. People may say that it is tokenistic or whatever but back in 1984 when the women in Dunnes Stores took the small step of not handling South African fruit, it mushroomed and ballooned into the boycott of the apartheid regime. This has the potential to do the same thing. We must send a powerful message to the Israeli Government and the Israeli people who support it. Its genocide is not acceptable. As I have said, there are some things more important than sport. Irish people want action and here is the opportunity. I welcome the measure taken by RTÉ to boycott the Eurovision, which was good. I welcome to measure by the Government to ban the two Israeli ministers, the security minister and the finance minister, but it should go further than that. Israel needs to be ostracised in total until it makes amends for what it has done to the Palestinian people.

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