Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will not be shocked if a huge number of Deputies concentrate in whatever short time they have for speeches before the EU Council meeting on the importance that needs to be given to Gaza at this time.

The fact is Gaza is facing obliteration. We have not had the courage we would like from EU leaders. We have all been, at best, deeply unhappy and, at times, deeply shamed by the disgraceful greenlighting by some world leaders, including Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. It is utterly unacceptable. I accept the Irish Government has been one of the voices for pushback. President von der Leyen is not on her own. The likes of Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron and many others have Israel’s back. They problem is they have Israel’s back following an absolutely barbarous act by Hamas but do not have the Palestinian people’s back when they are dealing with absolute slaughter. We all quote numbers here from time to time. We are talking about 5,791 dead Palestinians. I am fairly sure that is an old figure and there is now a considerably higher number of Palestinians dead, a considerable amount of whom are children.

We have seen the Israelis play their cancel game. We saw the action taken by the Israel ambassador about comments from the President, Michael D. Higgins, which the vast majority of people in any street in Ireland would be in agreement with. I would find it difficult to go around this House or any other building in this city or across Ireland without finding a considerable amount of people who agree with almost everything António Guterres said. Once again, the weapon of cancellation has been introduced by the Israelis from a point of view of not dealing with the reality, which is that they have been engaged in colonial-settler seizure of lands, mass annexation and maintaining an apartheid state, and have kept people in absolute poverty and desperate circumstances, be they in the West Bank or Gaza, for many years. For many Palestinians, this nightmare has been right through from 1948. The world has not offered any solutions.

I accept we will not necessarily get agreement at EU Council. We should push for recognition of what has happened, which is absolute slaughter and UN agencies stating dwindling fuel supplies could force them to stop aid operations. We need one voice. We need it to call for immediate ceasefire, to release of hostages and for humanitarian aid. Long term, we need a roadmap to peace. I know that is what the Irish people want. If we are not going to get agreement at Council level, we need to continue bravely. Sometimes you need to take the first step. The world’s humanity will back that. The Irish people certainly will. That I what we need to see. I would like to see much more from the EU Council but we need to see much more from the Government.

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