Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I heard what the Tánaiste stated regarding potential challenges to the Bill. However, he is aware that the Attorney General regularly provides a written list of potential challenges against the State for breaches of European law. It is a regular part and feature of government and should not prevent us pursuing what is right in this case.

Most Deputies belong to parties that are represented in Brussels and Strasbourg. I will undertake to share a copy of the Bill with my colleagues in the Party of European Socialists and ask them to support this initiative at European level and, indeed, in their home parliaments across Europe. If the law is incomplete or has unintended consequences, those can be addressed. If nothing else, this Parliament is taking an important stand on the issue of the economic exploitation of any unlawfully occupied territory.

Such economic exploitation of occupied territory is an issue that resonates with Ireland’s history. Last Monday, we remembered the Democratic Programme written by the then leader of the Labour Party, Tom Johnson, and which is recorded as one of the first documents to be placed before the First Dáil. Two excerpts from it are directly relevant to this matter. One hundred years ago this week, Johnson wrote “we declare that the Nation’s sovereignty extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation’s soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation”. Our declaration of independence from the British Empire required the nascent Irish State to wrest control of the economy, including the soil and natural resources of the territory of Ireland. There could not be meaningful independence if the economy was excessively under foreign control. That is true for any territory, nation or nascent country if its resources are bled or removed from it before it has a chance to come to full existence. The Democratic Programme further states “while undertaking the organisation of the Nation’s trade, import and export, it shall be the duty of the Republic to prevent the shipment from Ireland of food and other necessaries until the wants of the Irish people are fully satisfied and the future provided for.” All Members know that shipments of corn farmed for absentee landlords continued to leave Ireland during the Great Famine of 1845-49, which left a million dead and caused two million to leave Ireland in the space of ten years. Economist Cormac Ó Gráda calculated that in 1845 alone, more than 26 million bushels of grain were exported from a starving Ireland to England. Research by Christine Kinealy of the University of Liverpool shows that nearly 4,000 vessels carrying food left Ireland for England in 1847, at the height of the Famine.

We know from World Bank studies and other analyses that the occupation of the territories of Palestine has had a great cost for the people of Palestine and to their economy. The UN Conference on Trade and Development went so far as to state that “fifty years of occupation have driven the Palestinian economy into de-development and poverty”. Political leaders in Palestine obviously need to do far more to improve their governance. However, Ireland and this Parliament has a long history of standing with them. The least we can do now is to ensure that economic gains from illegal occupation are not paid for with Irish money. We must support the Bill and its aims and encourage our sister parties throughout Europe to do the same.

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