Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I will. It is on the selling of Israeli war bonds. I think the Central Bank response to the concerns raised about its facilitating the sale of bonds that are being clearly sold as war bonds and supporting the Israeli military action in Gaza and so on is that there is nothing it can do about it because it relates to the framework of what it has and has not remit over at EU level. I think that is more or less the bank's response. Do the commitments of the European Union on issues like human rights, trade agreements with Israel which have human rights clauses and domestic and international legal obligations to things like the Genocide Convention, to which this country is a signatory, not have some impact on Central Bank policy on facilitating the sale of products such as these? If not, it seems there is literally no morality or ethical framework to the facilitation or non-facilitation of certain financial products. That seems pretty horrendous, if it is the case. Are there no ethical or moral limits to what a bank can facilitate in the sale of financial products that may have gross consequences for human rights, the killing of people, genocide, breaches of international law, war crimes and crimes against humanity?