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

We intend to call a vote on this amendment so we will make sure we leave enough time to do so. Deputy Gibney prompted this thought. When I was in occupied Palestine in late 1987, during the first intifada, some young Palestinians the same age as me brought me to their home in a refugee camp near Hebron. There was no Hamas then. It did not appear until more than a decade later. In fact, there was no armed resistance from Palestinians at all. They were just young people being beaten and shot down by a regime that treated them as third-class citizens and dehumanised them in the most horrific way. They brought me to their home, through the barricades, with the Israeli military firing tear gas canisters. In the house, they showed me a tear gas canister and one of them told me to look at where it was made. It said, "Made in the USA." I was not involved in politics then, but in that moment my political education began. I started to see the relationship between what was being done to the Palestinians and the arms producers in the United States and western world providing the means to oppress people, which has led to all the horror we are seeing today.
These days, that horror is summed up by another person I met, a poet, Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian writer and literature teacher who taught Shakespeare. It was his anniversary recently because he was killed by the Israelis. How did they kill him? They phoned him beforehand and said they were going to murder him. As he did not want his friends and family to be killed, he left where he was and walked outside. Now, using digital technology, that is what they do. They phone people and tell them they are going to kill them and then they do so by firing missiles. He had to leave where he was so that the missile did not hit everybody else. Do we want the technology implicated in doing that to people to say, "Made in Ireland"? I say we do not.

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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