Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

My position remains the same as I outlined in this House many times. Of course, I am going to discuss and engage with Government colleagues on this and the Government will obviously make its decision as a collective and present its legislation to the Oireachtas. I will dutifully debate that back and forth in this House. I need to allow that process to take its course. I have respect for the way the Government makes decisions.

While I reiterate my commitment to the legislation, I also remind people why we talked about the legislation in the first place - certainly why I did. I talked about using all the levers at our disposal to bring about a ceasefire. There is now a ceasefire. The ceasefire is very fragile. At EU level, I spoke about using all the levers at our disposal to help change the calculus, get Netanyahu to a ceasefire and end the genocide. We now have that fragile ceasefire but it is fragile, and as people have referenced, there have been incursions and moments of significant concern, even in the past few days. Therefore, it is right and proper that we are dynamic in how we continue to respond to this situation, but we now have aid flowing into Gaza, we have a peace plan that needs to be pursued, we have the hostages back in the arms of their loved ones, and we have the remains of deceased hostages being released and the rest need to be. We also need to get on to the very thorny and tricky issue of how one governs and reconstruct Gaza and bring about a two-state solution.

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