Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Historians have delved into the documentation on what happened.

For example, in July 1915 the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Snr., said "a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion." He was referring to the horrible crimes being committed against the Armenian people. Also, in the year 2000, almost 20 years ago, 126 scholars worldwide, including renowned people such as Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, historian Yehuda Bauer and sociologist Irving Horowitz, published a statement in The New York Timesaffirming that, from their studies, the "Armenian genocide is an incontestable historical fact". As I said, surely we should be the most conscious of this, given the behaviour of Lord John Russell and his Government and the treatment of the ancestors of those of us in this House in those seven years during which more than 1 million people were starved to death and well over 1 million had to emigrate. We are so conscious of what happened in the former Yugoslavia, the awful events and attacks on the Jewish people, what happened in the Holocaust and what happened in Rwanda. Surely we, perhaps more than most nations, should be most acutely aware of this. The Minister should bring forward such a motion. If I, or colleagues and I, brought it forward, would the Minister support it?

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