Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2026: Report and Final Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-07
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Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (SF), Cork South-Central

The Minister of State said he did not want to rehearse all the points of the last point. The key bit, however, is that we are looking for something new. We are looking for an explanation. Ultimately, we have not gotten that explanation as to the clear legal basis we cannot proceed. I believe a satisfactory basis exists within the treaties for a public policy exemption. It is the same type of public policy exemption that we are looking for here. I do not see any reason we cannot do that. The Minister of State, the Minister, Deputy McEntee, or any of the other Ministers, including the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste in their public commentary, have not made it clear as to why we cannot do that. That is why it seems obvious to me that this is a political decision.
Picking up on the point Deputy Gibney made, Article 23.9 of the Constitution commits Ireland to accepting the principle of international law, “... as its rule of conduct in its relations with other States.”. We have a situation where the Department of foreign affairs - the Minister of State and the Minister, Deputy McEntee - is bringing in this legislation in full knowledge of what the Department itself accepted that the only reasonable reading of the 2024 ICJ advisory opinion is that a complete prohibition on trade with Israeli settlements is required. The Government, by implication, has said that it is moving towards compliance or partial compliance. Therefore, it is not ultimately compliant with the decision. If we are to be consistent with Article 23.9 of the Constitution, we should be implementing this in full.
There are so many contradictions with the position of the Government. On the one hand, the Government is saying that it was able to act only because of the ICJ decision, although I am not sure that is the case. We could have acted anyway. Yet, that very ICJ decision calls for a ban on goods and services. The Government is saying "No" to imposing a ban on services even though the whole basis of us moving forward was the ICJ decision. There is this contradiction of saying that we can interfere in trade with EU countries, with a public policy exemption, but we cannot do so with non-EU jurisdictions. Another contradiction is saying that the Spanish have done it by using a broad degree of language and so forth but we cannot do likewise. Ultimately, Spain is over the line. It can be done.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-07