Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Earlier today during Questions on Promised Legislation, I took the unusual step of actually asking about legislation that was promised. It was promised by the Taoiseach, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Micheál Martin, last November, when he told members of the Oireachtas foreign affairs committee that it would be a first priority of a new government to enact the occupied territories Bill. The same person was the leader of the then Fianna Fáil Government when they introduced Second Stage of the same legislation in Dáil Éireann in 2019, yet here we stand again today, with promises unmet, equivocation, lost words and mealy-mouthed excuses.

In the five years I was previously in Dáil Éireann, there was a time when we would not say the word "apartheid" when referring to Gaza and Palestine. We questioned whether Israel would bomb a hospital, and then it bombed every hospital and then it bombed every university. Now this morning we woke up to talk of ethnic cleansing. The President of the United States and the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu stood on a stage and said that is exactly what they are going to do - the Riviera of the Middle East, and still we say nothing and are literally talking jobs. Those tyrants do not recognise any sort of weakness; it is about strength and the projection of their own confidence onto the world stage. There will come a time when we will all have to account for what we did. We are equivocating, we are meek, and all the while there is a people within this world, whom we have a connection with through our own struggles for freedom, who are being obliterated. All that the Opposition, including ourselves the Social Democrats, and Sinn Féin in bringing forward its motion tonight, is asking is asking the Government parties to do what they promised and do what they stood in front of the Irish people and said for the causes that we understand, yet we stand here and act like we are superior. That is not diplomacy; that is a failure of diplomacy.

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