Taoiseach's Meetings and Engagements Dail Éireann — 2026-06-30 ============================================================ Ruth Coppinger (PBP), Dublin West I am going to go on because I am not having my time cut short. The Taoiseach now seems to find and be able to separate out reasons why he should do these things. The latest is that he says sport and politics should not mix, and he has said that in relation to the Irish team playing Israel. Yet four of his MEPs obviously do think sport and politics mix because they have signed a complaint about Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, and the farce of a World Cup that is being held right now, where a Somali referee was turned away, the Iranian team had to go to Mexico and three other teams were refused entry into the country and had to locate elsewhere because of the travel bans. The US is descending towards fascism. That is the reality of it. I do not know if the Taoiseach has any regrets about his visit. Nobody has any issue with him meeting the diaspora - we are all in favour of that - but there is an issue with normalising somebody like Donald Trump in the current climate. --- 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/2026-06-30/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:06+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-30