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

Politics, two-state solutions, one-state solutions, engagement - blah, blah, blah - we are talking about children. These are innocent children who are in prison; who are being killed, maimed or shot, who do not have proper schools and who cannot sleep because of fear of Israeli assaults. This goes beyond any of that other stuff. The world set aside politics when it came to the treatment of children in the past few weeks in the US and said we are not accepting this. The same has to happen with Israel. We have had 22 years of engagement with Israel since the Oslo Accords and its treatment of children and denial of rights has got worse, not better. Engagement has not worked.

I have a simple question for the Tánaiste. Was the world right to boycott apartheid-era South Africa? Is there a time when it is right to boycott an apartheid state? If it was right and if Nelson Mandela, the world, the Dunnes Stores strikers and this country were right to do it in the case of South Africa, how is it not right to do it to a state that is behaving in a worse fashion than apartheid-era South Africa? As even Nelson Mandela's grandson says that Israeli apartheid is worse than that practised in South Africa, should we not heed his call, as someone who knows, to at least boycott the Eurovision Song Contest?

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