Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will offer a short comment on the commentary given over the weekend by Dana Erlich, the Israeli ambassador to Ireland.

It was out of order for her to criticise our President while at the same time rejecting outright any criticisms or questioning of how her state has conducted itself over the past fortnight. I am fully in agreement with anyone who has spoken this week and last week to condemn the awful, brutal and barbaric attack by Hamas on 7 October. I also believe the Israeli response was totally out of proportion. It would be one thing to dismantle the structures of Hamas, which is a blight on world peace, but so too is the IDF because those who are targeted and falling to bullets and under the rubble of missiles attacking buildings are the 2 million civilians of Gaza city, in particular 1 million children.

It is brutal, barbaric and medieval for the IDF to wage siege on a city where half of the population is aged under 18 and to deny them access to food, water and electricity. It was equally barbaric for it to order the evacuation of a hospital. Watching elderly, infirm and terminally ill people stumbling out of the door harked back to what we saw in the Bauman hospital in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941, when people were told to evacuate and many were dead within a matter of months. We have to learn from the lessons of history. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

I do not believe the Council of Europe speaks with a homogenous voice on this. I am glad that the Irish State and Ministers, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste have been quite outspoken in condemning what has happened over the past two weeks. What we need is peace, not flotillas of warships and a gathering of heavy war weaponry and machinery. We need a peace deal, but that must have central to its dialogue a cessation of the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

I want to speak about the ongoing war in Ukraine. The war that has just begun in the Middle East very much plays to the advantage of President Putin of Russia and takes the focus off his regime and what is happening there. Over the past number of months, I was very concerned that a number of EU heads of state have been working bilaterally on troop exchanges. I refer to troops who have been captured and are prisoners of war. There have been troop exchanges where the Russians and Ukrainians have, at various times, swapped 100 to 200 troops. At no time has anyone in the EU sought a return of the approximately 15,000 children who have been displaced by war and have found themselves on the Russian side of the war border. There is no talk of returning them to Ukraine. There have been protests in Kyiv and families have demanded that their children be brought back. It is a position the European Council has to take up robustly. Of course we want to see troops being repatriated, but surely our first concern must be for the children of war. The same applies to Gaza. Children must be returned to their families in Ukraine.

See this speech in context