Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)

We are introducing this Bill today because the Government has failed to put its money where its mouth is. On Palestine and Gaza, it is all talk and no action. Sanctions by Ireland on Israel would make a real difference because, shamefully, Ireland is now the world's second largest importer of Israeli goods. During the genocide of the past two years, trade between Ireland and apartheid Israel has exploded from €198 million in 2020 to €3.24 billion in 2024. These are not consumer goods. If they were consumer goods, then the Irish people who have stood steadfast with Palestine, marched week after week and taken direct action would have boycotted these goods. Over €3 billion, or 92%, of this trade is in so-called electronic integrated circuits and micro-assemblies. An excellent investigation by Uplift into Ireland's trade with Israel finds that it is most likely funnelled from Intel's facilities in Israel through Ireland via transfer pricing for tax benefits. There we have it. Just like with the Central Bank's shameful facilitation in the selling of Israeli war bonds, Ireland's complicity in genocide is due to our role as a tax haven for international finance and US multinationals.

The same report provides numerous other examples of this disgusting complicity. One is that Israel's Unit 8200 uses Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, with data stored in the Netherlands and Ireland, for a mass surveillance system that collects recordings of millions of Palestinian phone calls, daily information used to prepare air strikes. This is information held in Ireland in our data centres. UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese said that US multinationals were embedded in an economy of genocide, and so are we.

The Uplift reports says that the benefits of foreign direct investment, FDI, revenue are achieved at the cost of direct complicity in genocide and human rights violations. These are the wages of FDI, the political and moral price Ireland is being asked to pay for its economic prosperity.

A US secretary of state once said that the deaths of half a million children in Iraq was a price worth paying for US objectives. Our Government is making the same genocidal choice. By refusing to implement sanctions on Israel, it is deciding for all of us that the price is worth it. It is selling our souls for US investment. This Bill would put an end to that by imposing comprehensive sanctions on the State of Israel. It is the minimum we should be doing under the Genocide Convention and it should be done now.

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