Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left)
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105. To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the steps he will take to discourage economic links with illegal Israeli settlements due to the deteriorating human rights situation for communities on the ground in the West Bank. [37687/14]

Charles Flanagan (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)
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The European Union applies a sanction to settlement goods in that they are excluded from the lower tariffs applied to goods from Israel (and many other countries), and administrative measures to implement this distinction are periodically reviewed.

More recently, in 2013, the EU published guidelines to ensure that any EU research funding received by universities or other institutions in Israel, under joint cooperation programmes, could not be spent in the Occupied Territory, that is, in settlements.

In May of this year, my Department published, in common with many other EU partners, advice to citizens and businesses warning them against investing in, or commercial transactions with, settlements.

For further measures, I have called at EU level for the speedy issuance of guidelines on the labelling of settlement goods, to assist consumers in distinguishing them from Israeli produce. This measure was put aside last year when direct negotiations on an overall political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict commenced, and should now be brought forward again.

I have called for a broad discussion in the EU of what our policy on the Middle East Peace Process should be, and active measures to further discourage links with settlements should form part of that. Ultimately, consideration should be given to whether settlement goods should be simply excluded from the EU market.