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Showing posts with label Occupied Territories BIll. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Occupied Territories BIll. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre ☠ The Dublin government, it seems, has finally moved to introduce legislation enacting the Occupied Territories Bill, indicating it will be in place before the parliamentary summer recess, when those who do very little good will take a holiday in which they will continue to do very little good.

Called the Israeli Settlements (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2026, it falls a long way short of what was both hoped for and needed by campaigners. Ellen Coyne in the Irish Times identified the core failing of what the government seeks to enact:

The Bill that Minister for Foreign Affairs Helen McEntee finally brought to Cabinet on Tuesday – after an extremely long delay – is one that arguably now carries more emblematic relevance than practical power . . . At the moment, the proposed legislation would only ban the trade of physical goods between Ireland and the illegally occupied Israeli settlements. Most estimations are that this is an almost negligible amount, which would result in a very weak economic sanction of Israel. The trade of services, which is harder to quantify, is believed to be a much higher figure.

No one should feel guilty for believing on the strength of this Bill that Profit Before Palestinians is the government's catchcry. 

In the Dail, stung by the trenchant opposition to the government's all lip no teeth Bill, a petulant Taoiseach accused People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett of virtue signalling when he called for the Bill to be 70% more expansive than what the government currently proposes. What Micheal Martin was actually doing with his labelling of Boyd Barrett was vice signalling. Instead of opting for what is, for sure, an authentic virtuous position the Fianna Fail leader has chosen to adopt one of vice to placate those international forces who show little concern for the Palestinian people. 

Senator Frances Black, who spoke to us only last week in the Barbican Centre, warned us on the night not to expect too much from this government. She did not mislead us. The Bill is effectively a damp squib from a government which, unlike Spain, is more deferential than defiant towards the forces that constitute the Western hegemonic power bloc. The senator said:

Government still haven’t given any coherent, detailed justification for this beyond short soundbites . . . When the Bill finally hits the floor of the Dáil in the coming weeks I will be working with all opposition parties to table amendments to include services . . . That has been my clear position since 2018 and I will do everything in my power to make it happen . . . The ban should be comprehensive and include all trade, both goods and services.

Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Fein leader, accused the government of “taking a wrecking ball” to the Occupied Territories Bill as originally proposed by Senator Black, claiming that it had only acted because it had been dragged into doing so. Endorsement of this position is to be found in a Pat Leahy piece for the Irish Times in which he candidly said that the government had been stalling the Bill.

McDonald went further in her stinging but justified rebuke:

This is your response, your approach after 14 Irish citizens on a humanitarian flotilla to Gaza were kidnapped, detained, and brutalised by Israeli forces.

Having watched the videos and images of Israeli Security minister, Ben Givr - in a manner than even Heinreich Himmler refrained from when inspecting prisoners in Nazi concentration camps - mock and degrade the flotilla detainees illegally captured by Israel, Mary Lou McDonold's barb carries potent resonance.

That the Bill has made any progress at all is down to what the Irish Times has described:

the Irish public have started to treat the Bill as a metric of whether or not the Government is doing enough to either oppose Israel or support the people of Palestine.

This is where it sits: the powerful in this society whether in government or the FAI are comfortable doing as little as they can get away with. Our collective task in Drogheda Stands With Palestine, in conjunction with our colleagues throughout this society, is to hold their feet to the fire and make them as uncomfortable as possible while they replace real politics with gesture politics.  Perform the dance of deceit and vice signal as much as they want, we will be here to remind them and everybody else that vice is never a virtue, no matter how nicely it is dressed up.  Having watched the protest at the midweek Ireland-Qatar game, the phrase that leaps to mind when I observe the government's watery proposal is anyone for tennis? 

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The Soundbite Bill

Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭ International Law -  Is There Such A Thing?

In simple terms the answer to this question is categorically No! But as usual these matters and questions cannot be answered in words of one syllable, it is not a pub quiz. What we are never told is ‘international law’ is not, even accepting the vagaries of the concept, law as we would know it. The misleadingly termed ‘international law’ is in fact a system of rules and principles which are intended to govern relations, conduct, and interactions between sovereign states, as well as international organisations and certain individuals. The aims of these collective rules and principles are to promote global order, peace, and cooperation, and operate largely through international consensus. 

There is no police force to uphold this so-called ‘international law’ and in recent years more and more countries have broken these unenforceable rules and principles. These countries include the USA, Israel, The United Kingdom, Russia, China and arguably in recent weeks Ukraine by bombing Russian civilian targets. The Ukrainians could be given a certain amount of latitude for their actions given the fact Russia has been blasting the fuck out of their cities over the last four years! The country who afford less consideration by the day for these principles is Israel. They may be following the lead given by Trump in the US who has made it clear he “cares nothing” for ‘international law’ meaning, as far as Tel Aviv are concerned, they too can do what the fuck they please in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank.

On 7th October 2023 Hamas attacked Israel under strange circumstances. Where were the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) when these incursions over the border happened? Conspicuous by their absence that is for sure but absent where? The attacks by Hamas should be condemned by all because it was civilians and civilians only who were targeted resulting in 1,195 Israeli and foreign nationals losing their lives and 251 being kidnapped. Not one military institution or economic centre was reportedly hit which if the attack was an act of war, Guerrilla War, then the prime targets should have been military, economic, political, and financial institutions. Because none of the targets included such institutions the attacks must be condemned. 

An Israeli response was expected and given the level of intelligence and the capabilities of Israeli special forces such a response could have been carried out with minimal Palestinian civilian casualties. The Israeli government in the Knesset decided against such a logical step which, if done clinically, could have taken out the Hamas leadership easily. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu decided to flatten the entire Gaza Strip, murdering up to now 72,000 + Palestinians. To carry out these acts of genocide the IDF used ordnance supplied by the USA and the UK. 

The hypocrites in Westminster condemned the Israeli attacks on civilians while at the same time allowing arms manufacturers to make a fortune through the sale of weapons to Israel. Should anybody question the British government they immediately fall behind the wall of ‘Israels right to defend herself’ which is the same line the Parliamentary opposition pedal. If pushed a little further by having it pointed out that Israeli actions are far greater than anything needed in self-defence they quickly run for their next line of cover, the 7th October Hamas attacks. 

However wrong the Hamas attacks may have been the Israeli actions in response have been, at best, well over the top and at worst an act of genocide in the same league, but perhaps for now a lower division, to the genocide enacted on Jewish people by the Nazis. Having turned Gaza into something akin to the Warsaw Ghetto all that is missing are the Death Camps and Netanyahu can be spoke of in the same breath as Himmler. The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is slowly turning global sympathies for the Jews over the Holocaust into anti-Semitic hate. I really hope that does not happen - the global neo-Nazis launching a hate campaign against Jewish people under the guise of supporting the Palestinians, support which should not be welcomed.

Aid has been denied the beleaguered Palestinians by the Israelis and any group who attempts to get assistance to the beleaguered people, food, medical supplies including baby formula, are physically prevented from doing so. On 19th May the Global Sumud Flotilla of unarmed civilian craft on its way to deliver aid to Gaza was intercepted and boarded by the IDF in international waters. This was a clear act of piracy - Bluebeard could not have given a more impressive performance and he was a Cutthroat Pirate - and against ‘international law’ and the ‘law of the sea’, equally unenforceable. 

The activists from the flotilla who were taken to a port in Israel have suffered similar treatment to that suffered by Jewish people before the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Footage was posted on social media of captured activists being mistreated by Israeli soldiers. In one clip of the social media post shared on X, owned by Elon Musk, a masked soldier grabs a woman’s hair and pushes her violently towards the ground. The 37 second video was shared on X by Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Givr, who shouts: “Welcome to Israel! We are in charge here! We are the landlords and that is right” (Irish Daily Mirror 21st May). 

The actions of the National Security Minister caused Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, to express his disgust; to state he was “appalled at this shocking behaviour of Minister Ben-Givr towards illegally held members of the flotilla” (ibid). Of the 420 activists from the Flotilla 15 are Irish and it is believed the woman having her hair pulled and forced to the ground is Irish. Ben-Givr went on to say of the activists; “they came here full of pride like big heroes. Look at them now”. The Minister of National Security also intimated he wanted the activists given to him for the “terrorist prison”! Even the crook in charge in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was uneasy with Ben-Givr’s behaviour and what it might do to Israel's image. He was not concerned with the wellbeing of the activist’s held hostage by Ben-Givr only the damage to Israels image! There have been reports of sexual assaults on women and various acts of violence by the IDF soldiers on activists. Some of the activists have since been flown to Istanbul in Turkey and relative safety.

On board one of the ships boarded was Dr Margaret Connolly, the sister of Twenty-Six-County President, Catherine Connolly. A GP, she was acting as a medic for the flotilla. When an SOS was sent to Greece from the flotilla the Greeks did fuck all to come to their assistance so afraid they must have been of the Israelis, backed by Trump. There was, rightly so, outrage in the Dail as Tanaiste, Simon Harris, continuously referenced ‘international law’ and Israel's breach of it. Dr Connolly’s husband, Declan, also on TV referred to this “clear breach of international law by Israel”. 

It is true but the Dail, both government and opposition, know ‘international law’ is a figment of the imagination, it cannot be enforced. Perhaps the only country who could police this labyrinth of principles and agreements between states is the United States and they, like Israel, are the biggest criminals when it comes the breaking this illusive ‘international law’. 

All the parties in the Dail are crying about Israel's breach of these laws including the laws of the sea but what exactly are they going to do about it? The twenty-six-county administration do not want to upset the US, Israel's mates, because the government claim if they upset Trump, it will cost jobs. Of course this is bollocks because the US giants who base themselves in the Twenty-Six-Counties do so because profits are high, corporation tax low, and trade unionism virtually non-existent in the private sector. They are not interested who is in the White House or whether Dail Eireann is hitting back at Israel, providing the profits keep rolling in.

So, international law cannot be enforced because, among many reasons like whether it exists, those who may police such law are guilty themselves of breaking said law. The government in the Dail should stop harping on about ‘international law’ because they are starting to look foolish, fucking stupid in fact. They might as well talk of the laws of Narnia,wasting hours of Dail time speaking how to enforce this law in a land which does not exist! 

The Twenty-Six-County government could, if they wanted to, do something which has nothing to do with fairyland international law. They could, and should, enact the Occupied Territories Bill in its entirety and do it now. Not the diluted version which only includes banning trade in goods with illegal Israeli settlements. The Bill does not include trade in services and unless it does when it becomes an Act it will be far less effective in hitting Israel. Most trade with these settlements involves services which account for nearly ‘70% of trade volume’ and this 70% will not be included in the OTB. Trading in goods, leaving aside services, with Israeli occupied territories constitutes a minor fraction of the overall economic relationship amounting to around €685,000 annually. The excuses policymakers come up with for not including services in the OTB is the ‘complexity of monitoring and enforcing bans on digital service’s’. How difficult and complex can such a ban on services, digital or otherwise, be? On an average modern mobile phone, nothing too complicated, an unwanted text can be blocked so surely, with all the technology at their disposal, banning trade in services with Israeli occupied territories cannot be that difficult for those good and true people of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael! Or could the real reason be that profits in trading in services requires little labour and carry huge profits. Better to blame Israel's breach of ‘international law’ and hope nobody asks awkward questions, outside the Dail, about banning trade in services as part of the OTB which is toothless without these inclusions.

Israel must surely be brought to task over their actions in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Will they be tried for war crimes as were Goering and his gang at Nuremburg after the Second World War, and rightly so, for Nazi genocide against the Jewish people? The allies after the war allowed many leading Nazis after those at Nuremburg were tried and sentenced, to escape. In some cases the USA even gave them highly paid employment, wrote off their murderous past, and even made them heroes. Wernher von Braun was such an activist, scientist, and former Nazi party member who, despite his past, would be of use to the USA. Clause barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, was another brutal former SS man who escaped French justice for years courtesy of the USA. Given the track record of the US and UK in this department it would not be unreasonable to expect Netanyahu and his modern butchers to also walk free. It would be unwise to hold your breath waiting a different outcome, you may die of asphyxiation!!
     
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.
I

International Law

Anthony McIntyre ☠ On Monday last Development Perspectives hosted a talk in Drogheda's The Barbican, compered by Bobby McCormack.


The purpose of the event was to press for the passing of the Occupied Territories Bill which the Dublin government has dragged its feet on, in addition to the parallel tardiness the government has been culpable for in relation to substantial domestic matters of housing and health. 

The two main speakers were Senator Frances Black, who who was the first Irish parliamentarian to press for  legislation that would bring into law the Occupied Territories Bill, and Faten Alsourani, a Palestinian Lawyer who grew up in Gaza and lost family members to Israeli violence.

The government at least is consistent in both its domestic and foreign policy in that it simply fails to act or does so at such a snail's pace that the benefits trickle down very slowly.


The government go-slow approach to the Occupied Territories Bill is characterised by delaying and deferring to such an extent that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that derailment of the Bill is the real purpose. Since Frances Black first launched her bid to have legislation enacted, the government has behaved more like a committee as characterised by Fred Allen:

a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done. 

In addition to the two speakers Drogheda Stands With Palestine featured centrally. While Bobby McCormack chaired the event wearing his Development Perspectives hat, his keffiyeh, metaphorically, was also very much on display through his association with Drogheda Stands With Palestine. Additionally, the hall was electrified by the contributions of our very own Alan Kelly and Siobhan Newman who were both invited onto the stage to address the audience. Like Bobby, they have given both selflessly and tirelessly of their time in pursuit of a Free Palestine. The night's proceedings were concluded when yet another DSWP activist, Margaret McConnon played guitar and sang alongside Siobhan Newman. 


Disappointingly, there was only one of the Louth TDs in attendance - Ged Nash of the Labour Party who has never stopped short of typifying Israeli policy for what it is - genocide. While the Sinn Fein TD, Joanna Byrne, was not present she received huge praise for the positions she has taken up - and at cost to herself when she was ousted as co-chair of Drogheda United Football Club for calling on the Irish soccer team to boycott the upcoming match against Israel - and no one in the audience was left uncertain as to what side of the fence she is on when it comes to Palestine's Israeli problem.

At one point during the Q&A I took the opportunity to raise my concerns about the policy of the Irish Writers Union which lamentably failed at its recent AGM to support the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel,. That seemed to me to be the wholesale abdication of responsibility on the part of writers to their besieged and brutalised colleagues in the Occupied Territories. I made the point that despite very persuasive arguments presented by Kevin Doyle and Sally Rooney, the governing committee opted to side with Alan Shatter and abandon the Palestinians. It was a theme Frances Black took up when she again addressed the audience. She was aghast at how a writers union could fail so abysmally, and was wholly supportive of the efforts of those within the union to have the matter revisited. 

Since the Barbican event, Helen McEntee has announced that the government intends to make progress on the Bill within the next fortnight. While this has been given a guarded welcome by Frances Black, she made it very clear at the Barbican that government promises are plentiful, actions much less so. The one message Helen McEntee and her government colleagues needs to hear is stop waffling and just do it.  

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Just Do it

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 18-July-2025.

Photo: Trócaire, internet.

The saga of the Occupied Territories Bill (OTB) has been dragging on for years now. It was first put forward by Senator Frances Black in 2018 and was approved by both houses of the Oireachtas (parliament) but never enacted. The Irish capitalist class that is resolutely on the side of the Israelis, despite the illusions of many and the odd PR stunt, dragged its heels on the issue, even boasting that it had effectively blocked it. Simon Coveney who was the Minister for Foreign Affairs at the time said during a visit to the Zionist state in 2019 that:

We don’t believe that it is legally sound because trade issues are EU competence as opposed to national competence in Ireland. And because we don’t believe it’s legally sound we have effectively blocked the legislation from moving through parliament as it normally would . . . 
It’s essentially frozen in the process and it isn’t making progress. And I don’t expect that it will make progress, either, unless the government supports it, and the government won’t be supporting it.[1]

This came as no surprise to anyone paying attention. Ireland is not an independent capitalist state; it is what Marxists term a neo-colony with 88% of all corporate tax paid by foreign companies and just three companies accounting for 38% of all corporate tax. Foreign corporate tax in turn represents 29% of the total tax take in the country.[2] It is entirely dependent on the US and also the British state. Many months prior to Coveney’s boast, the then Taoiseach (prime minister), Leo Varadkar had written a grovelling letter to Joe Biden to apologise for the behaviour of Irish politicians who had voted for the bill. In it he stated:

The Government has consistently and strongly opposed the Bill on both political and legal grounds and will continue to do so… Can I take the opportunity to reiterate my deep appreciation for the strong bonds of friendship between Ireland and the US, including our growing and mutually economic ties.[3]

There is no world in which the Irish state will stand up to the US. It won’t stop US planes shipping arms to Israel through Shannon Airport, just like it allowed the US to use the airport during the Iraq war. Putting the OTB to parliament was not a bad idea, believing that is how we would achieve something concrete was.

They are now attempting to water it down further and exclude services from its remit, limiting it to only goods. IBEC (the Irish Business and Economic Confederation) came out with a statement that it would harm the Irish economy to enact the bill, whilst paradoxically accepting that trade in goods with Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank only amounted to €240,000.[4] On the radio the government reminded us that we are a trading nation, as if any of us thought that everything we buy in the country was made here and we exported nothing. The reason they can make these statements of course, is because of the limited scope of the bill itself and the intentions of those pushing for its enactment. The Irish government was at great pains to say that it would only apply to the territories occupied in 1967 and not to Israel itself i.e. not to the territories occupied in 1948 during the Nakba and the foundation of the Zionist state.

If you accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel or if you are one of those liberals still prattling on about a Two State Solution then all of this makes sense. It could have even been argued when it was first proposed that it was a stepping stone to a wider boycott of Israel, not that any of them said that.

Events have overtaken our liberal friends and they shudder at the consequences. There is no longer any case to be made for a bill that limits business dealings with modern Zionist invasions of the West Bank. Francesca Albanese in her recent report made it abundantly clear that many companies doing business with Israel are profiting from or contributing to the genocide.[5] Now is not the time for half measures. Israel, just like the Nazis is carrying out a genocide. Asking for a boycott of goods from the Warsaw Ghetto, rather than Nazi Germany would have seemed stupid at the time and actual calls for a boycott of the Nazis were portrayed as anti-German. Some Jewish organisations opposed the boycott and the US government response to violence against German Jews was that the:

U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull issued a mild statement to the American ambassador to Berlin complaining that “unfortunate incidents have indeed occurred and the whole world joins in regretting them.” He expressed his personal belief, however, that the reports of anti-Jewish violence were probably exaggerated.[6]

We know how this ended. The Nazis in the face of the timorous and timid response from the US and other western powers would eventually enclose Jews in ghettos, then camps and then push six million of them through the ovens. Now is not the time to repeat history but to be bold and decisive. Now it is equally ridiculous to meekly petition, those who grovelled to Genocide Joe in 2019, to restrict goods from the West Bank.

In the midst of a genocide there is only one option on the table: a complete and total severance of all trade, military and diplomatic ties with Israel. There are no “settlements” without the Nazis in Tel Aviv, without the Israeli military, without the companies that keep Israel going. Total isolation of the entire regime is needed. Not an orange, not a single electronic component, not a kilobyte of software. Such isolation should continue not just till the acts of genocide have ceased. They will cease when the repugnant reality that Israel has run out of Palestinians to murder comes to pass. Israel should be isolated until all those involved have been tried, had all their assets confiscated, given lengthy prison sentences or hung until dead, depending on the actual degree of participation. This is not an outrageous proposal, it is what was theoretically done at Nuremberg, though many of the businessmen were given back their assets after a number of years and only a handful of Nazis got the actual death penalty and most never saw the inside of a jail. No such leniency should be shown to the Zionists.

Those campaigning on the OTB will never make such a call. They will continue to petition the government. They do have another weapon to hand in fighting the Nazis in Tel Aviv, but they won’t call for that either. The Irish Council of Trade Unions denounced the government’s handling of the OTB and called on the Oireachtas to reject the “business lobby scaremongering” and to pass the OTB.[7] Of course, the unions don’t need to persuade the Zionists who dominate the coalition parties, they could just have told their members in 2018 to refuse to handle all products coming from the Occupied Territories, or indeed the entire Zionist state and that would have settled it. They would have to organise that and back all their members who engaged in such boycotts. But under no circumstances will the fat cat bureaucrats ever confront the government over this issue. If they are not prepared to fight for decent wages, a proper health system, public housing etc. all of which directly affect their members, less still will they fight for Palestinians. They are traitors to their class and also betrayers of the Palestinian people, despite all their lofty statements.

The OTB was a nice propaganda measure whose time has passed. It is, in the midst of a genocide, no longer fit for purpose, neither is a solidarity movement which limits itself to half measures. We need to be bolder.

References

[1] The Times of Israel (03/12/2019) Visiting Israel, Irish FM says he’s open for ‘new thinking’ on peace process. Raphael Ahren. 

[2] Reuters (30/04/2025) Ireland’s reliance on foreign multinational taxes grew in 2024. 

[3] The Irish Times (22/03/2019) Economics should not trump ethics when it comes to Occupied Territories Bill. Suzanne Mulligan.

[4] The Irish Times (17/07/2025) ‘No real evidence’ Occupied Territories Bill would cost Ireland dearly, Amnesty Chief says. Colm Keena & Mark Henessy. 

[5] UN (2025) From economy of occupation to economy of genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. Francesca Albanese. 

[6] Feldberg, M. (n/d) U.S. Policy During World War II: The Anti-Nazi Boycott. Jewish Virtual Library. 

[7] ICTU (17/07/2025) Oireachtas must reject business lobby scaremongering and pass the Occupied Territories Bill. 

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Occupied Territories Bill 🪶Too Little, Too Late, If Ever

Anthony McIntyre  ☠ Alan Shatter is full of shit.

Earlier this week, his contribution to the Oireachtas committee tasked with scrutinising the Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill illustrated aptly that as the shit reached critical mass in his brain, there was no room for anything else, least of all compassion. 

The context he sought to manufacture was one driven by Israeli expansionist strategy and not by ethical considerations. Shatter, a former Justice Minister, point blank refused to acknowledge the stolen lands as Occupied territories. A clear demonstration that for Shatter context is alibi.

At first glance it might seem absurd that such a person should ever have served under the title of justice minister. But on further reflection a Fine Gael Justice Minister seems an oxymoron. Fine Gael justice ministers have been accused of many things but being just or caring don't figure amongst them.  Draconian is a cap that better fits their horrible heads. I am old enough to remember Paddy 'prisoners have no rights' Cooney. Now Palestinians have no rights, not even to the territory on which they live and die, murdered daily by the Israeli state practicing a Nazi-like savagery.

And before we hear the whines of ant-Semitism, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Shatter being Jewish. There is everything wrong with him being a Jewish supremacist Zionist who thinks some invented chosen people of a mythical desert god has the divinely ordained right to trample over the very real lives of actual flesh and blood people. These are sentient beings who feel pain and grief. They are not cartoon characters from biblical fairytales.

Shatter's description of the Occupied Territories Bill as resembling "the unenforced Father Ted-like provisions applicable to the import of condoms contained in the Health Family Planning Act 1980”, demeans and trivialises the victims of genocide.  

Things got even worse when Shatter descended into Kafkaesque farce with his claim that that the Bill is the “first initiative of any European government to enact legislation to intentionally boycott and discriminate against Jews since the defeat of Nazi Germany”.

Whatever misgivings might be raised about the effectiveness of the bill - even if it is symbolic as Shatter claims -  to compare it with Nazi Germany in the midst of a Nazi-like genocide being waged by Israel coupled with murderous assaults by the people the bill targets - those who live on the land stolen as part of Israel's Nazi-like policy of Lebensraum - is sheer effrontery. 

Pretending there is no genocide, rather than the bill, is aptly captured in Shatter's own words - although deliberately directed at the wrong target - “nothing more than fantasy politics and political theatre that does profound damage to the reputation of our state”. 

The Fine Gael TD, Brian Brennan, to his credit refused to let Shatter get away with his fantasy Zionism, stating:

How dare you come in here and make such statements – a Father Ted Bill? You speak to the people on the ground, listen to what they’ve got to say about this Bill. They knew everything about this Bill. I think the most important thing we should do is listen to people that matter most, people on the ground. They are asking us to continue to take the lead.

The Committee Chair, Fianna Fail's John Lahart reinforced the point in language that must have roasted the ears of Shatter, insisting that the Bill is driven by the:

descent by the Israeli government and the Israeli Defence Forces into the darkest of places that certainly motivates all members of this committee.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin weighed in on Shatter's false analogies, describing the language as:

shocking because of what we’re seeing in terms of the Israeli government’s announcement overnight where we’re, essentially, looking at a concentration camp idea in Gaza . . . I think former minister Shatter should perhaps focus on that a bit more and not just completely dismiss the appalling murder and killing of innocent children and civilians in Gaza, which has shocked the world.

What choice is there? Do we follow the lead of US foreign policy for the purposes of protecting our own economic interests? Irish concern at genocide has been dismissed by Trump's US ambassador to Israel as a sign that the Irish had fallen into a vat of Guinness.  

Fatin Al Tamimi,vice-chairwoman of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign urged the bill to be passed, arguing that:

Ireland, the world is watching. Please do your best to (do) the right thing, to pass this occupied territories Bill and give the Palestinians hope. When Ireland starts, everybody will follow on because it’s a legal obligation, it’s a moral obligation for all countries, including Ireland. It is important for Ireland to start, and then everybody will follow.

That sounds much more plausible than Shatter's vacuous claim that Ireland's reputation will be at stake. Even in the brutal world of power politics, its advocates in the realist school acknowledge the power that can come from robust diplomacy. 

And when we gather in thirty minutes time, as we do each Saturday in West Street, our purpose will be to press for that firm diplomacy and shatter the spurious logic of Alan Shatter and other apologists for Israeli horror.

Alan Shatter - big Chief Walking Eagle - so full of shit he can't fly. 

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Alan Shitter

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