Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Of course we do not pursue a trade-at-any-cost policy. Part of my job and the job of the Minister for Finance is to sign off on sanctions. Regularly on my desk are statutory instruments that impose trade sanctions and investment sanctions on various countries. The Deputy would not always have been the most supportive of them, quite frankly, such as those we introduced against Russia in 2014 after its illegal invasion and occupation of Crimea. The Deputy would not be particularly supportive of the trade sanctions against Venezuela where democracy has been ended. I hope the Deputy can confirm that she does support the sanctions against Venezuela.

The Deputy misrepresented what I said on the death penalty. Obviously there is not an equivalence between the US and Saudi Arabia in this regard. We see plenty of human rights reports about the use of the death penalty in the United States, which is wrong. I would like to know whether the Deputy's party leader and party raise it on trips to the United States and whether she has documentary evidence of this. The truth is that most non-democratic governments in the world do not have very good human rights records. This applies to China, the Middle East, Palestine, many Arab countries and a lot of Africa. If it is Sinn Féin's policy that we should not do trade missions to those parts of the world it should say so because people whose jobs and businesses may be jeopardised need to know.

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