Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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20. To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade if his attention has been drawn to the recently released UNCTAD report entitled The Palestinian Economy in East Jerusalem: Enduring Annexation, Isolation and Disintegration; which found that Israeli segregation policies have ensured that 82% of Palestinian children in east Jerusalem are living in poverty; and if he has discussed it with his European counterparts. [23230/13]

Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)
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The Palestinian community in East Jerusalem experience many of the personal and economic difficulties which are suffered by their compatriots elsewhere in the West Bank.

In addition, however, they experience complications and problems due to Israel's insistence that their home has been annexed to Israel while they have become not citizens of Israel but residents, whose residency status can be threatened in a number of ways. The Israeli and Palestinian populations of Jerusalem are treated very differently in administrative and legal terms. Israeli Government policy is explicitly aimed at reducing the Palestinian proportion of the population, leading in practice to measures which make life difficult for Palestinians and put them under pressure to leave and move elsewhere in the Occupied Territory. This substantial report, which my Department is studying with interest, will, I believe, be very helpful in supporting the case made by Ireland for some time that it is necessary to focus on the many practical difficulties which affect the lives of Palestinians and which are aimed - I regret to say deliberately - at pressurising them into abandoning their existing communities. The report details the very small proportion of state and municipal revenues spent proportionately in Palestinian communities in Jerusalem in welfare, education and health and the movement and other restrictions which greatly hinder daily life and economic activity for Palestinians. The Deputy correctly notes that a major result of this situation is a markedly higher level of poverty, including among children, in the Palestinian community. To extract just one indicator among many, it is reported that spending on education in Jewish communities in West Jerusalem is more than four times higher per capita than in Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem.

These are issues which Ireland has already been pressing, particularly at EU level, and I am sure that this important report will feed usefully into those discussions.