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

First, I wish to welcome the fact that we are discussing the situation on Palestine the day after the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. I commend Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, which voted to fly the Palestinian flag yesterday, following a motion proposed by Councillors Hugh Lewis and Melisa Halpin. I believe Galway City Council also flew the flag, as Dublin City Council has done before. That speaks to the enormous solidarity that exists in this country, historically, for the plight of the Palestinian people. There is a recognition of the persecution the Palestinian people have suffered - the oppression, the denial of rights, the displacement from their land, the status as exiles of millions of Palestinians, the cruel injustice, the colonialism and the apartheid laws that are so similar to the Irish Penal Laws that were imposed on the Catholic population here. We understand the plight of Palestine in a way few others can fully empathise with because it mirrors so closely our own history under colonial rule. In that context and on the day after the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, we have to say, and I do not mind admitting, that the Irish Government is better than most governments, at least in terms of the statements it makes about the mistreatment of the Palestinian people. However, the problem is that nothing ever changes.

I got involved in politics because of Palestine. I spent a year living there in 1987, the year of the first intifada. I was shocked to my core to see the endemic racism in the treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis. Israeli farmers on the farm I worked in regularly used to say things like the only good Arab is a dead Arab. That is how bad it was; it was absolutely rampant. Young Palestinians who I worked with, and who travelled for hours from refugee camps in Hebron, brought me to their refugee camp as the first intifada began in 1987. They showed me the caves where their families lived for two years after they had been forced by Israeli terror gangs out of their homes in 1947 and 1948, the year of the Nakba, when they had to live in caves until the UN came along and built refugee camps. They, their parents and grandparents have lived in those refugee camps ever since. It just goes on and nothing changes.

Six peaceful NGOs have been designated as terrorist organisations because the Israelis can just get away with it and nobody does anything about it. A nation state law was introduced a while ago which gives only the Jewish people the right to self-determination, which is an international right that people have and Palestinians have.

A siege of Gaza has been going on for years with the most inhumane conditions imposed on men, women and children in defiance of international law, yet nothing is done. Nothing has been done. Day in and day out there is administrative detention of Palestinian people and for their youth there is internment without trial. It goes on and nothing is done.

It is 25 years since the Oslo Accords and from day one Israel was breaching that agreement with further annexation of Palestinian territory, which was the little bit of Palestinian territory that was left under that absolutely miserable and humiliating deal. They could not even respect that deal. They go on with ethnic cleansing and in Jerusalem seizing territory and annexing territory and the world does nothing. Before that they occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and of course the horrible crime of the Nakba itself. Has anybody ever been to the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut? They are absolutely shocking. Three and four generations of Palestinians are living in the most disgusting and appalling conditions. Nothing is done. Even though under international law they have the right to return, nothing is done. We continue to entertain the nonsense that the State of Israel that does this is a normal state, which we should talk of as if it behaves in any kind of normal way when it clearly does not.

I ask the question honestly of the Minister: when are we going to do something? When do those crimes, which have been ongoing for decades and generations day in day out and ever getting worse, finally prompt action by the European Union to end the favoured trade status that Israel has, or to impose some kind of sanctions? Instead, we just get words. There is no action and the suffering of the Palestinians continues. I ask honestly of the Minister if there is ever going to be action to stem the tide of injustice, brutality and oppression the Palestinian people have to suffer.

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