Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-15 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland I understand there was a money message from the Taoiseach when the Bill was going through the Dáil. It is interesting to note what that message stated, "to authorise such payments out of moneys provided by the Oireachtas as are necessary to give effect to any Act of the present session to provide for compliance by the State with its international legal obligation, as identified by the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024". In fact, the money message states that any money that has to be paid out of public money in respect of this is authorised out of moneys provided by the Oireachtas. I want to say this in relation to the Standing Orders of this House. The original argument about money messages was all about whether something was a potential charge on the people, which is not the authorisation of moneys in the manner covered by the money message. Senator Stephenson mentioned something and I should have mentioned it earlier. Between the Second Stage debate on this Bill and today, the Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, has gone public. He has stated that they are now deploying a strategy internationally to dismantle the International Criminal Court. I ask the Minister, as Ireland's Minister for foreign affairs, to take this opportunity to roundly condemn this campaign which has been announced by the Secretary of State of the United States of America to bring about the dismantling of the International Criminal Court. The reason I think this is the opportunity to do it is that Ambassador Walsh is in the Phoenix Park announcing that this legislation is a stunt. That is insulting to Ireland. It is far worse than that. His boss, so to speak, in the American Administration is calling upon the 125 signatories of the Rome Statute to dismantle the International Criminal Court. I will not use any further example except to say that while 70,000 people and more, including 25,000 children, nearly all of whom are entirely innocent of anything, have been killed in Gaza without any condemnation from the United States of America, there was a time when Serbian generals sorted out over 7,000 Muslim men having overrun the UN-protected enclave in Srebrenica. They took them out and machine-gunned them into mass graves. The people who did that were brought before the International Court of Justice and condemned and imprisoned. If Ireland does not clearly state that there are to be consequences for people who do things like what Mladić, Milošević and Karadžić were brought to account for, if we are incapable as a State of publicly saying that what Secretary of State Rubio is now attempting to do, which is to dismantle the only instrument of international justice and the international rule of law that dealt with that without any objection from the Americans at the time - they were quite happy to see these men condemned - the only conclusion you can draw is that America proposes that war crimes of that kind go unpunished unless somebody in Washington does a snatch squad job on whoever it may be in Venezuela or fires a missile at whoever they may want to obliterate in Iran and that is to be international law and the rule of law internationally from now on. I am asking the Minister in this debate to take the opportunity to talk about what Secretary of State Rubio said about the ICC, which is mentioned in the title of this legislation and something Ireland supports, and that we condemn utterly and without reservation a plan by the Trump Administration articulated by Secretary of State Rubio to dismantle that court and, worse still, he said to use all economic pressure they can on states to secede from the Rome Statute. It is happy that the Hungarian change of regime in Budapest has stopped the proposed rejection of the International Criminal Court suggested by Viktor Orbán. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is a battle between good and evil. It is not just some lawyer's argument. If we cannot, as a State, say publicly to Rubio, "Hands off the International Criminal Court", when they were quite happy when the people who did the 7,000 murders in Srebrenica got their just desserts, but when there is any suggestion that what has happened in Gaza, with 70,000 innocent people killed by aerial bombardment and land bombardment and 25,000 children dead in the slaughter, they are quite happy to say now that the institution which has condemned that as genocide and called on all member states to cut off trade relations with the illegal occupation should itself be swept aside because it is inconvenient for American foreign policy, and if we are not capable of making a clear statement in public to Ambassador Walsh to bring back to Secretary of State Rubio and President Trump that Ireland utterly rejects that campaign, condemns it and stands by the International Criminal Court, we are a flaccid, weak democracy. --- 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/2026-07-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:16+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-15