I thank Deputy Boyd Barrett and his colleagues for working on this and I thank Senator Black, who is here in the Chamber, for her continued work on legislation in this area, which is what we are here to discuss. The Minister's speech is, as others have said, hollow words compared to the lack of action of the Government. She talks about raising issues, she remains committed and she continues to have grave concerns. Some of the language is, "I condemn the law ... Ireland opposes... I am particularly concerned." These are all things that are not doing anything. They express a sentiment and I want to believe it. When she speaks these words, I want to believe the Minister and sometimes I do. Then I look at the actions or, specifically, the lack of actions and I cannot believe what she is saying. The people of Ireland who have campaigned so hard on this issue do not believe it either. I want to take two examples of actions the Government has taken - one of them was one of the very first actions it took and one of them is the most recent action. I do not think a lot of people remember this but on 16 January 2025 the Government announced it was endorsing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA, definition of antisemitism. It was one of the first things the Government did, as a Government, from its programme for Government. We do not talk about it much because I think people want to forget the fact this Government adopted it. What we have seen since then, 15 or 18 months later, is how that has been distanced from the people who drafted it in the first place and used in multiple jurisdictions to tackle activism, essentially, and criminalise activism in the name of the Palestinian people. That is what it has been used for. That was one of the Government's first actions. The Minister will appreciate, immediately, why we start to see distrust among everybody else in this House when the Government says it cares but that was its very first action as a Government. The most recent action, which multiple people have spoken about, is in regard to the Technion issue and the University of Galway links. Since taking office, this was one of the first times she had to deal with something that was pressing and had to be dealt with. Her response was to say that it is a university and, therefore, not a part of the state. She said she had legal advice, which we believe relates to contract law, which says action cannot be taken. Contract law is superseded, as the Minister will know, by international humanitarian law. That, to me, is a clear cut action. These are actions the Government has taken in the absence of taking what we should all be doing here, which is legislative action. The occupied territories Bill was sitting waiting for the Government. It promised an entire electorate it would deliver the occupied territories Bill immediately. When the Tánaiste was the Minister for foreign affairs about six months ago, he said it would be on Second Stage by November 2025 but I, and others, have been asking week after week: where oh where is the occupies territories Bill? The Minister will understand why trust on this issue is shredded and is on the floor because the Government has failed to do that and all we get are more and more messages about legal advice from the Attorney General and dropping services from the Bill, which no trade lawyer in the world thinks makes any sense. We do not have legislation to sanction Israel and that is what we need. There is one reference in the Minister's printed speech, on page 7, to which I want to refer. It reads: "In effect, this amounts to a boycott, divestment and sanctions approach with respect to Israel." I think there is a typo in the next line because it reads: "The Government does support that approach [I think the Minister means the Government does not support that approach] although we fully recognise the right of individuals and organisations to make their own decisions in this regard." My question to the Minister in response is: what does Israel have to do for this Government to support a boycott, divestment, sanctions, BDS, approach? What does it have to do? What atrocities has it not yet done to the people of Gaza and now of Lebanon? What? I just cannot think of any more atrocities that Israel must commit for this Government to actually sanction it. I will go back to the point I made again and again that this Government has squandered the will of this people. The Government talks about the European approach being the best way forward. I agree. It would be amazing if all of Europe agreed to this but we all know that is not happening today or tomorrow. I welcome the details the Minister gave about the progress she is making and I welcome the work she is doing in this space but we all know that is a horizon compared to what we can actually do here and now. There is no reason the Minister cannot pursue a twintrack programme on this. Look at what you can do with your European colleagues while you implement legislation here to sanction Israel. That is what we should be doing and what the Government should have been doing all along - it should have been goods and services all along. That is what this legislation offers the chance to do now. Other European countries have much more divided populations and much more complex legacies and histories regarding this issue. We do not have that because we know what it was like to be occupied by an imperialist force hundreds of years ago and for that reason, since the beginning of this genocide and for decades past, the solidarity we have had with the Palestinian cause is palpable and the Government has squandered it. Ireland should have been the first to recognise the State of Palestine. We should have been the first to introduce an occupied territories Bill. We should have been the first to comply with the ICJ ruling but we did none of those things. We were not the first in any of them. To me, this is a tradition and a piece of our people and I just cannot understand why the Government cannot see it. I want to quote from a recent book written by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian occupied territories. I reviewed this recently for The Irish Times and recommend everybody reads it. When I read this passage I honestly got goosebumps. She wrote: "It began in Ireland in 1984, when Mary Manning, a twenty-one-year-old supermarket cashier, in accordance with the directives of her union, refused to handle grapefruit from South Africa." When Manning, and her union representative, Karen Guerin, continued to refuse to handle any South African products, calling on the other workers to do the same, they were suspended and started a strike that was joined by eight other colleagues. The strike lasted almost three years until April 1987 and set off a chain reaction that led Ireland to become the first western country to impose a total ban on the import of South African goods, thanks to public pressure aroused by the courageous gesture of Mary and her colleagues. The ban remained in place until the end of the apartheid regime in 1994. Nelson Mandela himself recognised the value of their gesture in 1990 when he was awarded honorary citizenship of Dublin. On that occasion, Mandela declared that the strikers had shown South Africans that ordinary people, far from the scene, had played a pioneering role in their struggle against apartheid. This thought, he said, had also helped him to resist in prison but that is not all. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and invited the Irish protesters to attend the ceremony, the anti-apartheid movement that was born in Ireland was hit by a wave of support that fuelled growing opposition to apartheid making a decisive contribution to bringing down this system. I will read from one further paragraph from the next section. It read that to make them collapse, oppressive regimes must be struck at their hearts - that is, in their pockets, which is where they receive the proceeds of exploitation. This is the philosophy underpinning BDS, which undertakes to publicly expose international complicity, not only political but also economic, with the apartheid regime imposed by the State of Israel on the Palestinians. The apartheid analysis of the Palestinian situation, which Ingrid Jaradat Gassner helped to develop, has also been taken up and strengthened by various human rights associations. The reason I read this is that it cuts through the Minister's whole argument around waiting for Europe, not being the first, and that we cannot do it alone. That is exactly what this is. If we chose to boycott that FAI fixture, the Government would start to see that not only the people in the group that are selected with Israel, but the people who might be in the group that Israel would advance to, will start. It is the same domino effect. That is what leadership is. That is what Pedro Sánchez is demonstrating, by talking further action and by pushing this as far as he can. The Government hides behind sweet words. When I started in this Chamber, the then Deputy Catherine Connolly, now President of the State, used to say that all of the time. She talked about the Government's "sweet words" and it really struck me as a new TD. Eighteen months in, I know exactly what she means because I am drowned in the Government's sweet words. Every single week when we ask about the occupied territories Bill and the Government's lack of action on Gaza, on Palestine and on Lebanon, I am so sick of these sweet words. We need action and I echo everybody else in saying that we should have a vote of conscience on this next week where the Government TDs are allowed to vote on this according to their conscience. I have been tackled by a Government Minister, in fact, who once said to me how we are fanning online hatred against the Government because of our championing of the Palestinian cause. That is not us doing it. That is the people of Ireland seeing the inaction on these benches and coming at the Government online, so allow the Government TDs to vote.

Sentiment score: 0.04