Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-30
============================================================

Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

I will make a similar point. We are not seeing international humanitarian law being upheld in its spirit or its letter. There should be consequences for those who have engaged in breaches of international humanitarian law. The Minister of State said there are domestic measures but I do not know what domestic measures there are.
It has now been moved but when the football match was due to be happening, there were discussions about what screening would take place in relation to potential war crimes and breaches by those who would have been attending. There was not a sense of a satisfactory system being in place in Ireland to meet our obligations under the International Criminal Court in respect of investigating those potential breaches.
There is a concern of international law not being upheld. We sadly see it, even in Ireland, in the dilution of the occupied territories Bill, we see it in the continued failure to actually examine what is moving through Shannon Airport and we see it in the failure to investigate and properly step up to the fact that we have had a sevenfold increase in the export of military technologies from Ireland to Israel that maps directly onto the assault on Gaza, which is that dual-use goods have had a sevenfold expansion that directly maps on to that period of time. There is a huge question of the eyes wide shut approach to potential areas of complicity. This was a good faith attempt to try to ensure that we would be marking and having a proper standard in relation at least to this kind of activity.
I appreciate the Minister of State's point that the labelling of things as "terrorist" can move them outside the international humanitarian law framework but that is a concern we are going to come to a little bit later. If states have huge powers to label things potentially as terrorist and move them outside of the international humanitarian law framework, yet actions and war crimes by those who may be members of state militaries are not getting captured, are not getting properly sanctioned and are not getting dealt with systemically, we do create a danger of a two-tier system in terms of who is actually obliged to comply with laws or not, and who has the protections of international law and who does not. The Minister of State just made a point herself that there are question marks about some offences being labelled as terrorist and then being moved out of the protection of international humanitarian law. It is something I am sure we will come to on some of my later amendments.

---

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/seanad/2026-06-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:07+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-30