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

All my active political life, I have been campaigning against antisemitism and racism and campaigning to remind people of the horrors of the Holocaust. When David Irving, the Nazi apologist, came to meetings in this country to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, I was the organiser of the protests against it. I arranged for Jewish Auschwitz survivors to tour this country, to speak on national television and to speak about the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people. It is precisely because we must remember the horror that the Holocaust was, and say "Never again", that we must not put any impediment in the way of calling out other instances of dehumanisation, racism, apartheid and genocide, particularly when those guilty of genocidal crimes, as Israel is now, and in the dock in the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice for genocide and crimes against humanity, are using the memory of the Holocaust to legitimise its crimes against the Palestinians.

In that context, we have the adoption by the Government, without any notification, of the IHRA definition, which it knows is controversial and which says, for example, that it is antisemitic to describe the Israeli state project as a racist state project. It says that in the guidelines. Many Jewish Holocaust survivors have condemned that definition because it is loaded in favour of the state of Israel and yet the Government decided to adopt it without any proper debate about the context.

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