Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail)

All sides of the House will support the first and second bullet points of the Labour Party motion but beyond that there is divergence, certainly with me on this side of the House. When I first began to study the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship since 1948, my initial sympathies were overwhelmingly with the Israeli people. Then the pendulum swung towards the plight of the Palestinian people, born out of our own history of persecution and dispossession. I swallowed my concerns about the use of terrorism as a political weapon. I could not condemn it in Ireland while supporting it in the Middle East. I swallowed it in the context of an overall peace agreement which was initiated by a Fatah movement which, in common with Arab states in the region, pledged to obliterate what many of them to this day call "the Jewish entity".

Like most of the political class in Ireland, I turned a blind eye to the IRA-trained Fatah movement and the IRA-trained Fatah fighters, who carried out frequent attacks on the real Óglaigh na hÉireann, wearing the blue helmet of the United Nations in south Lebanon during the 1980s and 1990s. That is a historical fact. Today we are faced with a new set of complexities, in the form of an Israeli Administration determined to settle the Palestinian question unilaterally, using its enormous military might——