Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael)

I pay genuine tribute to Senator Black and her team for their extraordinarily great work, the consistency she has shown in her pioneering work and for staying with it. To use a sort of cliché one hears in politics, when it was neither profitable nor popular Senator Black was always with this. I say "Well done" on that.

What is happening in Gaza is, to use an appropriate term, an abomination. It is truly vile and wrong. That is a given. It is going to have generational effects by destroying and ruining lives and psychology. There will be intergenerational trauma and all of that. There stands a good chance that this will give rise to a new generation of radicalised suicide bombers, etc. It has all that kind of potential and some of that may yet come to the West. It is a shocking state of affairs.

My first question is to Senator Black. She is a colleague politician and has all the pragmatism and realism that goes with that. The real purpose of this legislation is to have a moral impact, to lead and to create momentum. As she and others have said, there is now the potential for that to develop. Another big consideration is getting radical change to, or ending, the trade deal between the EU and Israel until the illegal settlements now mushrooming in the West Bank stop. Given those are the objectives, what is the Senator's response to the genuine argument of people who say we should get it done immediately without hold-ups or legal complexity and that we should apply the legislation to goods alone? That would be simple. We could get that done and achieve it. What is the Senator's response?