Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I have two questions. Is the Government's approach to the issue of human rights in Qatar and the Gulf States generally not a very serious abdication of the sort of ethical foreign policy that a State such as this should have? For a neutral State which is associated with opposing tyrannical regimes, imperial regimes and so on it is not good enough to say that we will hive off the issue of human rights to some UN committee, and then we will go off and talk about business and money. That is not an ethical approach to dealing with these regimes. The ethical approach is to ask whether it is acceptable to do business with despotic, brutal, vile, undemocratic regimes that trample on human rights and exploit workers in the vilest way. Should we do business with such states? We should not as it does not represent an ethical foreign policy and we want to live in an ethical world where trade is done with people who respect human rights.

On the specific issue of the World Cup, even FIFA's awarding of the World Cup to Qatar is mired in a corruption scandal because one of the senior FIFA figures has had to resign after it was discovered that he asked for €2 million from a leading Qatari figure who also had to step back from FIFA over the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar. Since then FIFA has now referred the matter of whether Qatar should be allowed to host the World Cup to its ethics committee. If it is good enough for FIFA to seriously question whether the World Cup should be hosted by Qatar, surely it is good enough for the Taoiseach to say that unless Qatar does something about the appalling conditions faced by migrant workers in its country it should be stripped of hosting the World Cup when everybody else is seriously debating that issue.

Did the Taoiseach discuss in his visit to the Gulf States, or is there any discussion more generally, over what is going on in Egypt where 549 people have-----

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