Frances Black (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I warmly welcome the ambassador of Bulgaria. I wish everybody well on this Bulgarian national day.

I was at an absolutely harrowing briefing this week on Yemen and what is happening there. I want to give a little bit of detail of the reality of what is happening. In the past seven years, 377,000 Yemeni people have died due to direct and indirect causes of war, 10,000 of whom are children. It is shocking. That is going on today. The director of the UN World Food Programme has stated that 400,000 Yemeni children are at risk of dying. This is absolutely devastating. There can be huge difficulty in accessing information as there are no foreign journalists on the ground in Yemen. The war has been extremely under-reported due to the media being prohibited from entering the country. At the very minimum, there needs to be an insistence by the international community to the Yemeni Government that media should be allowed into the country to report accurately on what is happening on the ground.

I learned at the briefing, which was unbelievably powerful, that very little humanitarian assistance has been provided to Yemen and its people due to blockades being imposed in 2016. The enforcement of the criminal blockade has prevented vital aid reaching 80% of the population who depend on it. As a result of this lack of assistance, 5 million Yemeni people are now on the brink of famine. In 2018, the UN warned that Yemen was facing the worst famine in the world for 100 years and predicted that 12 million to 13 million innocent civilians were at risk of dying from lack of food. I could go on. I feel that we need to urge the countries supporting such attacks to rethink their contribution to a war that has resulted in bringing this country to its knees. Some 86% of Saudi Arabia's weapons come from Britain and the US. We need to take a hard look at ourselves as a country and honestly look at what changes we can put in place to stop being implicated in this war. It is beyond time for political resolution to end this war.

The Government rightly called for sanctions against the brutal Putin regime within five days of the invasion of the Ukraine. We must ask whether the lives of Europeans are more valued than those of the people of Yemen and, indeed, Palestinians who are living under an apartheid regime.I ask the Leader for a debate in the coming weeks on the war in Yemen. It is essential that we investigate this in more detail. I support the call for this brutal war in Yemen to end now. There will be a march on 26 March from The Spire at 1 p.m. As stated by Martin Luther King and referenced in this Chamber the other day, which I will reiterate with regard to Yemen and Palestine, the ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence in that regard by the good people.