Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I have to come back on two very obvious, almost glaring, contradictions in what the Minister of State has just said. Both he and the Tánaiste are at pains to create this equivalence by all of the time going on about 7 October and what Israel is doing without, by the way, ever once condemning Israel. There are two pieces that I am going to pull out from what the Minister of State has just said, the first of which is on the hostages.

The Minister of State thinks that under no circumstances should hostages be taken and that it is a terrible thing. There is a lie circulating at the moment, in the lead-up to the ceasefire, and it goes like this: the Palestinians who will be released in the coming hours are convicted terrorists in prison because they tried to murder Israelis, and the Israelis who will be freed are innocent civilians being held hostage by terrorists. Women and minors are being released from prison, where they have been held without charge, without trial, in internment, for God knows how long - for as long as the Israelis want to hold onto them, at their pleasure. That is who is being released for the hostages that Hamas is about to free.

The lie is already sinking in. The Minister of State has almost been guilty of it because he condemns the taking of hostages. When did he condemn the fact that thousands of children and women have been taken hostage by the Israeli state because they fired a stone or dared to stand up to the IDF when their homes were being pulled apart by settlers? Never.

The second issue I want the Minister of State to take on is settler violence. He talked about how awful the settler violence in the West Bank is, and he said it should not happen and that anyone who knows about it should report it. Watch the videos. Watch the news. It is being overseen constantly by the forces of the IDF. They hold back the Palestinians, often arrest and imprison them and sometimes shoot them, and they hold them back to allow the settler violence to take place. They have been the ones gunning down children and innocent people on the streets of Ramallah and across the West Bank. I do not know what planet the Minister of State is living on but I know that these are serious debates that we are having here. We are not messing.

Although all of our motion is important, a serious issue that I want to touch on is the question of Shannon. US troops have been going through Shannon frequently. US warplanes land there but, as has been pointed out, we never use the opportunity to examine those planes or run tests on them to see what is being transported. However, we do know that US military aid has sustained the Israeli state since its foundation and it has passed over billions and billions of dollars, to the tune of $4 billion a year now and rising. The Israeli state would not be able to drop the bombs on the schools, hospitals and refugee camps, smash up people's homes and annihilate the Palestinian people were it not that every bomb and bullet has “US” written all over it. That is another good reason why we should determine that we do not allow Shannon Airport to be used by the biggest army in the world without any discretion whatsoever. It does not care what it does to achieve its geopolitical ends. It will go in and murder and butcher in a barbarous way and assist the Israelis in doing so, and it continues to assist them.

In the course of this tragic last few weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, I have noticed one or two things that have gone under the radar. One of them is not disconnected from the ambition of the industrial-military complex, which is best represented by the US and Israeli armed forces. That is the discovery of 122 trillion cu. m of natural gas and $453 billion worth of oil in the Gaza Sea. On 29 October, the Israeli Government dished out 12 exploration licenses to six different companies, including BP, an Italian company and several US companies, to explore for gas and oil in the Gaza Sea. Of course, the people of Gaza will never benefit from the energy, or the profits and income that come from it, but nobody should benefit from it. What terrifies me is that the geopolitical empire best represented by the US and Israel contemplates going underground and extracting that level of fossil fuel while we are facing the terrifying consequence of the potential of climate change. That, linked with the multiple crises that we are facing in this world today, has really prompted people to be on the side of the Palestinians and to come out against leaders like Micheál Martin, Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden - Genocide Joe, they call him now – because they do not know how to handle the crises we are facing in the world. They are making them worse and they are doing so for geopolitical interests that back up the butchers of Gaza. That is why this motion is important on all its levels, including the question of the use of Shannon.

In the meantime, we are left with serious questions. For example, how do we help families whose people are being butchered in Gaza and who work and live here as Irish citizens? What do we say to a Lord Mayor who invites the Israeli ambassador over to the Mansion House on the day we are supposed to be marking international solidarity with the people of Palestine? Where are your heads at? Can we please get a leadership in this country that will shape how the Irish people feel and reflect it across the world?

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