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

I will be sharing time with Deputies Shane Ross, Paul Murphy and Michael Fitzmaurice.

I have a quiz for the Minister of State. Which dangerous political force in the Middle East is in favour of beheading, summary execution and the indiscriminate killing of civilians? One answer is "ISIS" but the other is "Israel". That is now official. This week, the Israeli foreign Minister called for Palestinian Arabs who are not loyal to the state of Israel to be beheaded. He said: "[T]hose against us, it cannot be helped, we must lift up an axe and behead them". He went on to say that political prisoners on the Palestinian side involved with what he calls terrorism against Israel should be executed. In Israel, a person can be executed on the word of one Israeli soldier, and 99% of those prosecuted for terrorist acts against the Israeli state are convicted. We are talking about a dangerous rogue state which, in the past week or two, has done everything it can to scupper even tentative reconciliation between the West and the Iranian state.

Why does our Government and the European Union continue to buy arms from Israel and sell military components to them, conferring favoured economic status on the State of Israel? For example, why has Ireland bought €14.7 million worth of weapons from the Israel Defence Forces when its foreign Minister believes that political opponents should be beheaded? Israel has unleashed the most appalling assault on the people of Gaza three times in the last decade, with the most recent destroying 20% of the houses in the area. Such has been the destruction of the infrastructure of Gaza that new microbes and infections are developing that doctors have never seen before and that they cannot treat because antibiotics cannot deal with them. There is absolute barbarism ongoing in Gaza, yet we are doing business with those people. We would not do business with ISIS, so why are we doing it with Israel? There are people outside the gates of Parliament today calling for an end to economic trade, and particularly military trade, with Israel. I ask the Minister of State to raise the issue at the European Council.

In that context, I cannot help hitting back at the unbelievable hypocrisy of Fianna Fáil, which should get off the flipping stage. Its members spoke about people supporting warmongers and accused those of us who raise questions about Europe's role in the Ukraine as somehow being supporters of Russia. I say to Deputy Ó Fearghaíl that I was outside the Russian Embassy in 1989 when the people of Russia overthrew the Stalinist regime, supporting the revolution. I have attended protests supporting Pussy Riot and other people who have been victims of Putin's regime, and I have never seen a Fianna Fáil Minister, Deputy or flag in attendance. I am 100% on the side of Russian people who want to overthrow the oligarchic and autocratic regime of Vladimir Putin. That does not excuse European military manipulation in the Ukraine, which is stirring up conflict in the region.

The militarist intentions of Europe were further underlined by Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker's comments about a European army, which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael argued would never come about. The President of the European Commission has now openly called for such an army, and officials have reiterated that point. I hope we will stand up against that. Let us be consistent in opposing war, rogue states, beheadings, summary executions and trade with rogue states. We must be consistent across the board.

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