Consular Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-28
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

The Minister of State, Deputy Feighan, is not the senior minister and he is just reading off the script, which is a bit frustrating given that there is somebody facing very serious charges in a court in Germany and is being treated in an absolutely disgraceful way for protesting against genocide. This is about genocide. Ireland and Germany and 153 other countries are signatories to the Genocide Convention. In case the Minister of State does not know what is in that convention, I will outline what we signed up to.
What we signed up to and what every signatory did, after the Holocaust, was to prevent even a suspicion of a possible genocide taking place, and to act to prevent it and to do all in our power. States have failed to do this, self-evidently. This is why Ireland eventually joined South Africa's case against the genocide. People have not prevented it because, of course, the genocide continues in Gaza.
Daniel, an Irish citizen, and other people acted to do what states have failed to do, to try to disrupt the ability of Elbit Systems in Germany to provide Israel with the weapons to commit a genocide. For this, the German Government is prosecuting them as if they were organised criminals. This is not just for property damage, protesting or public order offences but as organised criminals. It has brought them to a courthouse normally reserved for terrorists and people involved in organised crime. There are riot police all over the place. Restrictions are being imposed which their legal team says are completely abnormal. The judge will not even talk to the defence legal team about the conditions in the court and the conditions under which Daniel is being detained. This is not normal. To simply say we do not interfere is not good enough when an Irish citizen is being treated like this for protesting against a genocide, which the Irish Government even thinks may be a genocide and why it has joined the case. We are asking the Government to send monitors to the trial, to make a public statement in support of Daniel, and to say the way he is being treated by the German legal system is an absolute disgrace. That pressure can impact on the German Government.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:52+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-28