Export Controls
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-16
============================================================

Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (SF), Cork South-Central

The Minister said there is no change in policy. I find that hard to gather when for five years in a row licences were approved for significant sums of money and in the past two years, they have not been. I welcome that. The Minister said there has not been a policy change. I would say there has been and I welcome it. It is the right thing to do.
However, drilling into what the Minister said, the policy of the EU broadly speaking - appropriately - is that goods primarily used for civilian uses that could potentially be used for military uses, require a double check. They come back to the relevant agency in the state. That state then decides whether it is appropriate and whether the state is confident the end user will be civilian and will use it for a civilian purpose or for a military purpose. The end user here was the Israel Defense Forces, IDF, and the Israel Ministry of Defense in the context of tens of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of children, being killed. The Department was asked to sign off on this licence and it did. It did so three times to a value of €20 million in 2024. Why did it do so?

---

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/2026-06-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:50+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-16