Industrial Development (Amendment) and Miscellaneous Provisions Bill 2026: Report Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-30 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire I move amendment No.1: In page 5, between lines 32 and 33, to insert the following: “(3) A consultancy grant shall not be made for the engagement of consultants to provide advice or studies in respect of any activity of military relevance.” There are a series of amendments from myself and Deputy Gibney in this area. On the Second Stage debate, the Minister said that this Bill has no implications for our neutrality, but it has serious implications for our neutrality. My understanding of our neutrality is that we do not support or promote the arms industry. My understanding, and the view of most people in this country, is that our neutrality comes from opposition to war, militarism and empire. The Irish Neutrality League, set up by Connolly, Pearse and Markievicz, was set up in 1914 at the outset of the First World War because the people who went on to fight for the liberation of this country, in some cases laying down their lives to do so, opposed the slaughter of the First World War and militarism. They did not want to be involved with imperial blocks that sent young working-class people in their millions out to be slaughtered. That is what our neutrality is about. In an apparently innocuous Bill about industrial development, and who could be against that, the Government is actually trying to integrate us more and promote more Irish involvement in the arms industry. We will get on to section 8, the part that deletes the requirement for the Government to be notified if the IDA or Enterprise Ireland promote or support companies engaged in the area of military and defence. It removes oversight of that area, which was not even discussed when pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill was done. That was sneaked in at the last minute and is going to remove oversight of involvement of Irish companies and State agencies in the promotion of the arms industry. We should not be involved in promoting that. It was very clear when we rang the alarm bells about this - quite honestly this all could have been missed because the Government was engaged in a sleight of hand but luckily it was rumbled - that the Minister gave away the truth when he talked about small and medium enterprise in this country, whatever small indicates in this context, essentially getting in on the benefits of European defence expenditure. This is the European arms industry, which is being ratcheted up in a very big way and, crucially, is implicated in the horrors we have seen visited on the Palestinian people during the genocide. He referenced things like drone technology as an area we want to get into. In case the Minister does not know, but of course he does, drone and digital technology and all that kind of stuff are absolutely central to the genocide in Gaza. It is absolutely central to what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people, to the modern warfare in what is happening between Ukraine and Russia, and the war in the Middle East started by Trump and so on. This is about us trying to cash in on a deadly industry that is about killing and murdering people using the most modern technology: AI, digital technology, drones and so on. We should not be promoting that. We should be promoting industries that are good for humanity and move us in the opposite direction from militarism, war, arms spending and so on, rather than further integrating into it. I do not know if the article from The Currency has been mentioned but I quote it extensively. It was published earlier in the year and showed that in 2023 and 2024, millions of dual-use exports were sent to Israel and to the Israeli military from this country in the midst of a genocide. More recently, The Currency produced a new article showing that in the same two years, €28 million worth of dual-use technology - in other words technology that can be used by the military - was sent to Israeli defence and security companies. In other words, these are armed companies which produce the hardware and digital software and so on and so forth that the Israeli military uses, as we speak, to commit the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I do not know if that more recent article has even been discussed in here yet. The dual-use exports were not just going to the Israeli military, they were also going to Israeli security and defence companies. Fair play to The Currency . What is excellent in the article is that it states that officials in the Department were warning the Government that end users were going to use them for military means in Israel. For example, from the FOI stuff I got back, officials were advising the Minister and the Department that the end user had direct ties to the Israeli defence industry, and there risk-register profile entry stated that it was believed the end user is at risk of diverting these dual-use goods to potential military-end uses. That was ignored. The officials could see where this stuff was going and that it could be implicated in the horrific crimes of genocide. It would appear the Government decided it did not want to know because we can benefit and that we want to move into and profit from this expanding area that involves killing people. I accept that after 2024, because of the uproar over the genocide and the pressure exercised on the Government, things began to change, but I do not trust the disposition of this Government. Look at its failure to impose economic sanctions. We are still doing €3 billion or €4 billion worth of trade with the Israeli regime, which is engaged in genocide. Do I trust the Government when it will now not even be notified about this stuff? No, I do not. That is why I moved these amendments and I am sure others will say they are doing it for similar reasons. We should not be engaging in and expanding our involvement in the deadly arms industry. --- 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