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

I am one of the people who believes Leo Varadkar should not have gone to meet Joe Biden. Biden has said on several occasions throughout his career the following words: “If there were not an Israel, we'd have to invent one”. In those words, he revealed the true nature of the relationship between the United States and the crimes that Israel has committed against the Palestinian people for decades - apartheid, ethnic cleansing, ongoing brutal murderous occupation and the denial of the most basic rights. However, Israel's crimes have reached a new level of genocide. The International Court of Justice has said there is a plausible genocide; to most people it is clear that there is a genocide with the whole population brought to the brink of famine. What does Joe Biden do in the face of this? He gives Israel a massive increase in aid to produce more weapons, missiles and bombs to kill more innocent Palestinians and to escalate and sustain the genocide.

My question to the Taoiseach is this. Will we call Joe Biden and the US Government out for that? The simple truth is that this horror - this massacre and genocide - could not happen without US weapons, bullets, missiles and money. Joe Biden pretty much acknowledged that when he said, “If there were not an Israel, we'd have to invent one.”

In other words, America is doing it for its own selfish, strategic interests. He has made that clear. He actually described Israel as the best investment the United States every made. They are doing it for their own selfish, strategic interests and we are seeing a slaughter result from that. Should that not be called out? Should we not say publicly that this has to stop? Should we not tell Joe Biden not to arm this massacre and, for that matter, that we are not going to facilitate United States troops in Shannon Airport while he is complicit in a genocide?

See this speech in context