Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-30
============================================================

Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

The scale of horror visited on the Palestinians certainly is of a different order. I do not have time to go into the history but saying there is no connection means the Taoiseach needs to look back at the history. After subjugating people in Ireland, the leaders of the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries were sent straight to Palestine. In 1936, the Governor General of Jerusalem, when asked why he was backing Zionism, said it was because he wanted to create "a little loyal Jewish Ulster" in the Middle East. The British exported the model they had used to subjugate and divide Catholic and Protestant in Ireland to do the same in Palestine, with horrific consequences. By the way, it is no coincidence that DUP MP Carla Lockhart was standing out with masked men protesting against a Gaza peace march.
As for Jon Boutcher and the PSNI, how come he had already recruited 200 Scottish police officers last Monday or Tuesday week to come to the Garvaghy Road when, at the same time, he was telling the Parades Commission there would not be a public order consequence if the Orange Order march went down the Garvaghy Road? That suggests that Jon Boutcher misled the Parades Commission, with the consequences we are now facing of a stand-off. The Taoiseach needs to stand up against supremacism and an ideology that is about trying to drag the North back to violent conflict and he should speak up against the genocidal horror of the Israeli regime as well.

---

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