Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

If you walk down Henry Street in Dublin, just outside Dunnes Stores you will find two plaques. The plaques are inscribed with the names of 11 courageous Dunnes Stores workers who went on strike in 1984 and took to the picket lines in protest against the company's handling of goods from apartheid South Africa. For more than two and a half years, Mary Manning and her colleagues sustained their inspirational stand. It was a stand which directly led to the then Government introducing a ban on the importation of goods from South Africa. The heroic protest of the Dunnes Stores workers is often acknowledged as one of the international campaigns that contributed directly to the ending of the apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela said that hearing of the workers' protest helped to sustain him while he was imprisoned. On his visit to Ireland following his release in 1990, Mandela said that because of the workers' campaign, millions of South Africans saw that "ordinary people far away from the crucible of apartheid cared for our freedom". Today that crucible of apartheid is found in Palestine, in the brutality inflicted on its people by the colonising, occupying, dehumanising and criminal Israeli regime. The crescendo of this cruel apartheid is the genocide perpetrated against the children, women and men of Gaza. For 15 months now, the ordinary people of Ireland have stood resolutely and unwaveringly on the side of human rights, justice and the rule of international law. They have stood up for the Palestinian people. They have marched and called for an end to the genocide, to the occupation and to Israel's apartheid.

The ordinary people of Ireland stand once again on the right side of history and they call on their Government to stand on that side of the line by enacting the occupied territories Bill, which would ban the trading of goods and services into Ireland from Palestinian lands that have been colonised, occupied and illegally settled by Israel. Not only is it a legal response to Israel's brutal crimes but it chimes directly with the values of the Irish people. The idea that the Government would now move to replace the Bill with a watered down version, a counterfeit Bill that enfeebles legislation, would represent a stunning betrayal of the Palestinian people.

Let us be clear. The cradle of Israel's apartheid system and genocide in Gaza is the impunity gifted to it by the international community for decades. It has been given carte blanche to commit war crimes and human rights violations at will, and to tear asunder international law without ever facing sanction or accountability.

Worse still, the words of support and common cause to the genocidal Netanyahu regime and the arming of Israel by the United States, Britain and others in Europe is an obscenity.

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