Motion to stop sale of Israeli bonds expected to return to the Dáil as Minister rejects 'complicity'
SOCIAL DEMOCRATS TD Jennifer Whitmore said that she expects her party's motion to disallow the Irish Central Bank's facilitating of the sale of Israeli bonds to return to the Dáil floor 'very very soon'.
Whitmore made the comments on RTÉ's The Week in Politics this afternoon.
The motion, which was put forward by the Social Democrats and backed by Sinn Fein, People Before Profit, and the Labour Party,
was voted down on Wednesday
, 85 to 71 in the government's favour.
It followed a similar motion by Sinn Féin some weeks earlier, which had also narrowly been voted down. Government had refused Opposition calls to allow a free 'vote of conscience' on the matter, which would have allowed its TDs to vote how they wished rather than with their party.
Today, Whitmore said, 'I think [the motion] will be on the Dáil floor very, very soon. I mean, this is a huge issue for people.' She said she was unaware if the Labour Party would propose the motion once more.
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Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade, Fianna Fáil TD Thomas Byrne, was also present on the programme today. When it was put to him that Government has been accused of being 'complicit' in Israel's actions in Gaza, he denied the claim.
'I utterly reject this allegation of complicity. I think it's disgraceful,' Byrne said. He listed a number of Government actions taken to attempt to alleviate some of the suffering in Gaza, and highlighted that the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have both denounced Israel's actions in Gaza as a 'genocide'.
'There'll be vote after vote in the Dáil, not designed to help the people of Gaza, but rather to create division and sow confusion and cause chaos in our democracy,' Byrne said on the programme.
'It's that they [the Opposition] have no interest in what's going on in Gaza. The government has been really, really consistent. You're just to cause division in the Dáil, and that's why words are complicit are thrown around. It's division. It's division.'
Whitmore refuted this and said that she and her party simply want to see the Government take further action.
Later in the programme when the Occupied Territories Bill was raised, Byrne said that he hoped to see it passed before the end of the summer.
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