Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State. Along with Senator Ó Murchú, I am comfortable with Government policy, both in recent times and for the past 26 years, going back to the Bahrain declaration made by the Minister of State's father, the late Mr. Brian Lenihan. Our policy has been informed by our experience of peacekeeping and the peace process, as well as by the entire history of dispossession and self-determination. I am glad the Government will not cut back on finance because that would be the wrong thing to do.

While the Gaza withdrawal earlier this year was a positive step, I am as uncomfortable as other Members with the tendency to create facts on the ground, using some of the tactics with which we would be familiar from the days of the old Stormont regime. If one is realistic, Hamas is unlikely to make unilateral ideological concessions and people who press it to so do should realise that this lacks realism.

In common with other Members, I condemn both suicide bombs and pre-emptive attacks. I saw a film recently apropos of the Munich massacre, which was simply entitled, "Munich". It showed the futility, from an Israeli perspective, of pursuing and murdering the various people who had been held responsible. While I empathise with the Palestinian people, some of the tactics used do not make their situation any better, and in some respects they may be going backwards.

There is a strong international responsibility in that many recent international conflicts, including Iraq, Afghanistan, the 11 September attack and so on, are directly or indirectly connected with the unresolved problems in the Middle East. Hence, this issue is of major importance to all in this country and everywhere else. While one might accept that the United States and Europe have somewhat different roles and may have different influence with different people, both must be active and more forceful in a constructive, rather than a punitive sense. We have lived with this situation for a long time without making much progress on the underlying factors.