Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to express my sympathy to all of those Palestinian families who have suffered the loss of loved ones following the violence surrounding yesterday’s event. At a number of meetings of the Business Committee in recent weeks, Deputy Boyd Barrett was wanting to have this discussion and was predicting this to happen. How are we in such certainty? It is an anniversary, obviously, and it was expected.

While the media has claimed this protest is a result of the embassy's move to Jerusalem, I do not believe it is. It is because this week celebrates the 70th anniversary of Israel, which Palestinians call Nakba, meaning catastrophic in Arabic. They organise protests on this date every single year as day follows night. A clear pattern has emerged here. It is not as simplistic as people might like to say. These protests had been planned for weeks and had been urged on by the leadership of Hamas. We are well aware of that and were told it when we were looking for a debate on it. As Jason Greenblatt has written in The Jerusalem Post, many blame Israel, Egypt and-or the Palestinian Authority for the situation in Gaza. Too few, however, focus their criticism on Hamas, which has been the de facto ruling entity of Gaza for a decade.

We know a fair bit ourselves about conflicts and fighting over territories and land. We need to have a more in-depth look at this and we cannot just come down on one side. I have no truck with the Israelis, good, bad or indifferent. We cannot, however, come down on one side so blatantly without having a full, deep and greater understanding of what is happening there.

As Greenblatt notes, we need to get real about this. Hamas and its enablers, such as Iran, are squarely to blame for the desperate situation in Gaza. Hamas has consistently put its own destructive priorities above those of Gaza’s weary and increasingly desperate population. The people we must sympathise and empathise with are the ordinary population who are trying to eke out a living and have some modicum of peace and dignity in their lives and they have not got it. How would they when this is going on and bigger powers are involved, pulling the strings and changing the situation?

As David Keyes, a former spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister, has noted, Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization. It openly declares its goal of destroying Israel and killing every Jew and every American. That is quite obvious. Over recent weeks, Hamas has tried to overrun Israel’s border to kill innocent people.

See this speech in context