Shane Curley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am not a history teacher, but a few years ago I had the opportunity to teach the concept of genocide as part of third year history. The example we used at the time was the Srebrenica massacre in the former Yugoslavia. It was a hard thing to teach, to show videos of documentaries of people visiting mass graves that included their parents and their siblings. That was tough. That is the future for the current people of Gaza. They will visit mass graves in years to come, visit their relatives and look back on an horrific massacre. I fear for what will be contained in the history books. Senator Higgins talked about the future history books. I fear for the future in these history books. We can all agree that Europe will not be on the right side of history in this. We need to make sure Ireland is. We have the chance to do that. We all agree that bombing hospitals, flattening primary schools during school hours and starving women and children to death is genocide. We all agree on that. That will be in the history books. There is nothing antisemitic about calling that out.

With our own history in Ireland, we know what it is like to be brutally oppressed. We must do all we can to stop it now. Ireland's role in the future will be how to stop this from happening again. Right now, we need to get Europe to come to the table with regard to bringing in huge economic sanctions against Israel. Money talks. Money will talk in this and stop Israel from carrying on what it is doing.

Ireland has another role. As I said, I taught students about the Srebrenica massacre. Two people, Ratko Mladi and Slobodan Miloševi, the former currently in jail and the latter who died in jail, faced the consequences of what they did. I believe that people like Benjamin Netanyahu need to face their war crimes in years to come in The Hague. The first thing we can do is campaign for proper justice for what has happened. The second thing we can do is along the same lines. In our own country we saw what happened when brutal oppression drove people to extremes. Right now we have one country armed to the teeth by the USA and another country that does not even have an airport. We need to create equality where people have a chance at life so that they can actually achieve economic prosperity and be normal human beings. That is how to stop this from happening again, by stopping people from being driven to extremes, which they were. Hamas is a terrorist organization. We all agree on that. It has been driven to extremes by constant oppression for years since 1948. Whether we agree or not on the formation of Israel, Hamas and the people of Palestine have been driven to extremes. That is why we saw what we saw on 7 October. It was wrong, but that is why we saw it.