Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-30
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

Yesterday, the Taoiseach said he was not going to intervene in the Garvaghy Road-Drumcree stand-off, which is potentially set to escalate again this weekend. He dismissed suggestions that he should call on the British Government, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and, indeed, the PSNI to stop a triumphalist sectarian Orange Order march going down the Garvaghy Road. I ask him to reconsider that non-interventionist position. I want him to ask himself what kind of mentality or ideology would lead Orangemen to want to march through a mostly Catholic area, where they are not wanted and where that march is going to evoke the trauma and memories of more than 21 people being killed, including the Quinn children, Robert Hamill, Rosemary Nelson and many more. The answer is that it is an ideology and mentality of supremacism and the dehumanisation of one section of the population based on their religion.
I put it to the Taoiseach that it is a mentality and ideology very similar to the one on display from, and being led by, Yoseph Haddad, the mouthpiece for the Israeli regime, in the football stadium in Hungary, where he encouraged chants for the IDF, the people who are carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians, and taunting Irish players with racist abuse. It is a similar supremacist and dehumanising ideology and it leads to death and destruction. It is no coincidence that when I went up to Drumcree eight or nine days ago, before all this started, the community centre there was covered in banners in solidarity with Palestine. That is because the people of the Garvaghy Road understand the connection between the dehumanisation they suffer and how colonialism was based on dividing people on religious grounds, setting Catholic against Protestant just like the Zionist movement set Muslim against Christian and Jew, with all the horrific violence that has flowed from that.
It seems to me that as the leader of a country that has suffered colonialism, oppression and all of the divide-and-rule tactics that led to terrible things here, including the Penal Laws, the so-called Famine - in actuality, mass starvation of the population - and all of that, the Taoiseach has a responsibility to stand up against supremacism and the dehumanisation of a section of the population and to call for this march to be stopped because it is a sectarian, supremacist march. He might also intervene to stop Ireland's next match against Israel because we should not be playing against a regime guilty of genocide.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-30