First, I commend my colleague, Deputy Gibney, on today’s Private Members’ motion and for her strength of advocacy on Palestine. The Israel-Ireland match should not go ahead. This is not a normal sporting fixture. It is a fixture involving a state that is carrying out genocide in Gaza, maintaining an ethno-supremist system of apartheid and accelerating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and now southern Lebanon. The Government wants credit for recognising the State of Palestine. I welcomed that recognition, as I welcomed other acts of solidarity it has taken. Those actions, however, cannot be treated as sufficient when Gaza has been almost entirely destroyed, much of its population murdered or permanently disabled, destruction and mass murder continue despite the so-called ceasefire and while the facts on the ground in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza increasingly make any meaningful, viable Palestinian State close to impossible. Illegal settlement expansion and settler violence, property destruction and theft, military occupation and forced displacement are the machinery by which Palestine is being dismantled in real time. This is why the Government’s ban on Israeli Ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, from travelling to Ireland was such weak and empty tokenism. These insular tribalist extremists are about as likely to visit Mars as they are to take a trip to Ireland. This is cynical gesture politics aimed at two men who are never coming here. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich may be among the most grotesque versions of Israeli colonial criminality but they are not an aberration. They are the logical outcome of a state being granted total impunity by our closest international allies, the US, UK and EU, to mass murder, terrorise, starve, displace and plunder a defenceless civilian population. The Government now says it cannot act but history says otherwise. In 1999, Ireland was due to host Yugoslavia at Lansdowne Road while atrocities were being committed in Kosovo. UEFA refused to postpone the fixture. The then Government did not shrug its shoulders and hide behind the sporting authorities. It refused entry visas to the Yugoslav squad and the match did not proceed. When the political will existed, an Irish Government used the powers available to it to prevent normal sporting relations with a state engaged in mass atrocities.

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