Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

President Trump actually announced his intention to unleash hell on Gaza over the weekend.

Ireland does not have a lot of power globally. However, we do have the power not to give President Trump a photo op on an important day for Ireland globally and not to normalise what he is doing. Does the Taoiseach agree that what President Trump is proposing for Gaza is ethnic cleansing and that it would amount to a war crime? If he does agree and if he goes on St. Patrick's Day for a business-as-usual, traditional trip, he will be normalising President Trump and what he is doing.

He is has demonstrated the preparedness of the oligarchs that he has put into power to sacrifice the world and the people in it for profit and to take away the right of the Palestinian people to their traditional homeland. For what? For grubby profit, for real estate, for himself and for the people he represents who will tread over the blood and bones of the children and people of Gaza.

Trump has declared war on the Palestinian people, and I have yet to hear the Taoiseach or the Cabinet make any condemnation of that whatsoever. When President Trump, the most powerful leader of the most powerful capitalist country in the world, announces a policy based on debased morals, that is war on human rights and democracy. It is not the normal business as usual.

Is this an era when the Taoiseach can turn a blind eye? Is it an era when he can ignore the plight of the Palestinian people and the holocaust they are facing? The Taoiseach could go to the US, build links and show solidarity with those who are facing Trump's terror, namely the trans community that is being erased, the undocumented who are being deported in handcuffs - the brown ones, for starters – and the workers and students having their jobs and education slashed by the unelected oligarch Musk. The Taoiseach knows the famous poem "First They Came". I have not heard him utter any condemnation or show solidarity. I ask him to take a leaf out of the book of Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, who called out Trump publicly to his face.

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