Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Is the Deputy happy enough? Does anybody else want to come in? I have a couple of points in terms of the criminal justice (violation of EU restrictive measures) Bill. I am not sure if our guests would be in a position to comment. Another member mentioned that Mr. Bruen ended on the phrase regarding the consistency of application of sanctions. The difficulty when we are dealing with EU restrictive measures is that they are anything but consistent. It looks very interesting, and I encourage people to have a look at the map of EU sanctioned states, not necessarily for the countries that are on it - there are a lot of them, in fairness - but related to conflicts and human rights abuses all over the globe. In fact, some go back decades, as was alluded to, and include restrictions on China dating back to the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. However, the truth is that we are watching an equivalent of Tiananmen Square happen every single day in Gaza and there are no restrictions or sanctions at all. We saw the EU Foreign Affairs Council today dancing around the head of a pin, and it looks like once again there will be no sanctions applied. I do not know whether our guests can comment, but I think most people would accept that the concept and the principle of EU sanctions is undermined by the fact that they are not applied consistently.