Industrial Development (Amendment) and Miscellaneous Provisions Bill 2026: Report Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-30
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

The Minister of State will have a more difficult time explaining the deletion of section 8. Let us take him at face value and say that these things are not connected. What, then, is the problem with our amendments? If the Government is talking about giving the IDA powers, for example, to set up DACs for purely benign purposes that have nothing to do with the arms industry or the military sector, why would it have a problem with our amendments? The Minister of State said there is no connection, so why does he not just accept them and we would all be happy? Nobody has a problem with the IDA or Enterprise Ireland providing grants - I do have problems with DACs on another level but we will set that aside for today - or in supporting the development of companies that are engaged in environmental research or other areas of research that are non-military and not related to the defence sector and the areas that we are concerned about that might impinge on our neutrality. The reason the Government does not want to accept the amendments is that there is another agenda. It is to do with ReArm Europe. We will talk more about that. It was alluded to there by Deputy Gibney.
The €800 billion is a big pot on money that Ireland wants to move in on and seize potential benefits from, but it means contributing to an industry that visits death and destruction on people, and has done very recently. The Government was caught out in its involvement in that when arms companies in Ireland and the Israeli military itself got dual-use technology from this country, which was almost certainly used to kill Palestinian people during a genocidal massacre. I do not see why the Government would have a problem with our amendments if what the Minister of State said is true. When we look at the rest of the Bill, in particular what we will be discussing in a minute, the Government is engaged in a stealth manoeuvre here.

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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