Mr. Brendan McNamara:

I thank the Deputy for his questions and ask him to forgive me if I forget some of them.

We are greatly heartened by the support we have always been shown by the Department through successive Governments. The support it has offered at the United Nations in the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly has been tremendous. The Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade is well versed in the situation and has been very supportive.

The opportunity to meet the committee is useful in that it shows the Iranian Government and the Bahá'í community in Ireland and Iran that this Parliament is concerned about minority rights and those who are suffering persecution in Iran. That is a positive and important statement for our Parliamentarians to make.

The Deputy asked whether the Bahá'í faith's connection with Israel was a factor. The founder of the Bahá'í faith was exiled from his native Iran to what was then Palestine under the Ottomans in the middle 1800s. Consequently, the world centre for the Bahá'í faith has grown around his resting place. That is the connection the Bahá'í community developed since before the foundation of the state of Israel. However, Iran is the land where the faith was born. Bahá'ú'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í faith, was Iranian and the majority of the Bahá'í community were located there at a particular time, but the faith has since spread to every part of the world. In the early 1990s the Iranian Government made efforts to extend its persecution of the Bahá'í community by influencing other countries with which it was doing business to bring repressive measures to bear on their native populations. A document that came to light at the human rights commission which was the precursor for the Human Rights Council outlined in detail a blueprint for repression against the Bahá'í community. One of the proposals involved the blocking of the Bahá'í community internationally. In other words, Iran would use its influence in the way I have described. However, I do not think its efforts in this regard have been particularly successful. The Bahá'í community faces certain difficulties in other countries but not to the same extent as in Iran. That has traditionally been the case in Muslim countries partly because the Bahá'í faith dates from after Islam, which may help to answer the question of why it is singled out. There is a teaching in Islam that nothing after it can happen. Most Muslims take the same view as we do of live and let live when it comes to people with different beliefs, but, unfortunately, a small core of extreme Muslims who are now in control in places such as Iran believe they should do everything in their power to exterminate religious communities that have appeared since the birth of Islam.