Mark Ward (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I reiterate what my colleague Deputy Carthy has said about the exclusion from the Bill of militaries that are engaged in a genocide. This is wrong, and our amendments go towards correcting this. We can see what the IDF is doing daily. It is committing war crime after war crime. There is the mass displacement and the ethnic cleansing of the population of Gaza, using mass starvation as a weapon of war. There are countless dead, injured and missing children in Gaza at the hands of the IDF. This Bill does not prevent anyone from being recruited to the IDF or other genocidal armies. The Bill does not prevent people from Ireland from travelling to engage in the war crimes of the IDF or to join the IDF. I would hope that not many people would look to do that.

I want to share my experience of the IDF. In 2022, I took part in a sporting and cultural exchange in Palestine. We visited Ramallah and the greater West Bank. We were lucky enough. We had a Palestinian bus driver with us. The abuse that man got at every checkpoint we went through was absolutely inhumane. He was taken off the bus and searched. When we protested the treatment he was being subjected to, we had guns pointed directly at us and the IDF roaring at us. "There is no Palestine, only Israel," they roared at us as they pointed guns at us. One of the young men who was with us was a young boxer from Belfast. He got very nervous. He was smiling at them but smiling through his nerves more than anything else, and they subjected him to a reign of terror. After that, when we were leaving, because I had been on Palestinian television and documented my experience when I was over there, they stopped the bus about a mile or two from the airport in Israel just to make sure I was leaving the state. They then subjected me to treatment that pales into real insignificance compared with what the people of Gaza are experiencing, but this was pre-7 October and this was a group of Irish citizens visiting the West Bank with the support of the Irish consulate over there, and we were subjected to that from the IDF.

This amendment Deputy Carthy has put forward and the other amendments we are speaking on now are really relevant, and I would like to think we would be able to support them at this stage.