Post European Council Meeting: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-22
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

The Israeli regime and the United States have rained down death and destruction on thousands of people in a criminal war they instigated in Iran and Lebanon. The Israeli regime has done that following nearly three years of a genocidal slaughter against the Palestinian people. It continues to allow illegal settlers to run amok, terrorising Palestinians on the West Bank. It is now going to introduce a law to execute Palestinians who are resisting an illegal occupation of their land. There are reports in the past week of animals being used to rape Palestinian prisoners under the Israeli authorities. Against that background, the European Union fails to suspend the EU trade association agreement, the special trade status this regime gets. Despite the fact the Government was forced to raise that issue to call for a re-examination of this thing, it continues to allow the US military to go through Shannon Airport. Flights go through our airspace facilitating the US military machine, which is involved with this regime, committing these crimes. It refuses to pass the occupied territories Bill. It refuses to call for a boycott against the football match that Ireland are playing with Israel despite even UN experts saying we should not be playing football with teams involved in illegal occupation and genocide.
In the Taoiseach's speech, the only group whose disarmament he called for was Hezbollah. It was not the Israeli regime, which refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty, NPT, and is in the dock for genocide, but Hezbollah. I wish to give a brief history lesson. Before the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, which was investigated by a former Irish foreign affairs Minister, Seán MacBride, Hezbollah did not exist. That massacre was essentially orchestrated by the Israelis and Lebanese Phalange fascist forces. At the time, it was deemed by Seán MacBride and the UN to be a genocidal massacre. It was only in the aftermath of that genocidal massacre by Israel and its allies that Hezbollah came into existence. It was a response to the terrorism of the Israeli state, yet we still refuse to sanction that state. We treat it as normal when it is clearly a terrorist state.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-22