Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I would like to think we have been one of the most if not the most active country on this matter at the UN Security Council and within the EU. What we understand happened yesterday will increase even more the need for international intervention here. A crowded market seems to have been targeted with an air strike, and where we think up to 60 people have been killed, with hundreds of people injured. There seems to be evidence that ambulances travelling to the scene from a nearby hospital were deliberately prevented from getting there for a period. These are really worrying accounts of what may well turn out to be war crimes and undoubted breaches of international and humanitarian law.

The challenge is first to get a ceasefire and, second, to get humanitarian assistance to people who need it. Third, we need to ensure we have a credible reporting mechanism that is independent and accepted internationally when it comes to establishing facts on the ground. Fourth, the Eritrean troops in Ethiopia and Tigray should go home and not be there. They are either invited to be there or they have invaded; it is one or the other but, either way, they should not be there. Both the Ethiopian and Eritrean Governments have confirmed at UN level that those troops will return to Eritrea but that does not seem to have happened.

We must work with the Ethiopian Government and insist on shining a light on atrocities if and when they are happening. We are trying to get that balance right. I will visit Ethiopia and, I hope, the Tigray region in a few weeks.

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