I thank the Deputy Leader for the comments at the beginning of the Order of Business. They are welcome. I propose an amendment to the Order of Business that after statements, instead of finishing at 1.30 p.m., we have statements from An Taoiseach or the next available senior Minister to update the House on the flotilla and send a message to the families at home who, I am sure, are extremely concerned for their family members. As each day goes by in Gaza, the whole world becomes more broken. Every person is impacted…

It is very much a kidnapping. The activists are in international waters. They have been taken from international waters.

Kidnapped-----

If somebody came in here and kidnapped me from the Chamber with no charges or without me committing any crime, that would be kidnapping.

They have been kidnapped in international waters. Israel does not own international waters and the Senator has just used a genocide in Gaza to make political points. Shame on him.

He is anywhere up to a week behind.

Yes.

I thank the Leader and the Minister of State for facilitating the discussion and adding this to the schedule today. It is extremely important that we can communicate clearly and be transparent, especially for all of the families who want to know what is going to happen, how their family members are going to be protected and what actions our Government will take to ensure the safe return of their loved ones. In the Chamber today, we are joined by some of those family members. We have Tracey Douglas, whose father is …

A legal observer boat does not go all the way. It looks for human rights violations to a certain point.

I want to again draw attention to the Global Sumud Flotilla, which is entering its most critical 24 hours on its journey to break the illegal siege of Gaza. Over the past 24 hours, I have been thinking about some of the commentary that has come from some of the countries who have shown support but called it an exclusion zone, saying that the global sumud is entering an exclusion zone, and giving some sort of credence or formal recognition that Israel has some unknown right to create an exclusion zone. There is no e…

It will be minuscule in comparison to Senator McDowell's. I agree with Senator McDowell's points on discretion. I had some further thoughts about a case from about ten years ago in the UK, which has a similar criminal justice system to ours. I was also thinking about the media or somebody else saying that something happened and they were held liable and brought to court for defamation. I do not think we have seen any precedence in law yet here in Ireland in relation to this, but in the UK, about ten years ago, the …

Today, I find this Commencement matter a little difficult to think about. Before I came into the Chamber, I got word that one of the families I reference in this have not heard from their three children in Gaza since I met them last week. That mother is Bushra. I met her and her son Mohammed this day last week. There are currently ten families still awaiting reunification with their children and siblings. I met this young boy last week who had lost his leg in an Israeli airstrike and lost his father in that same ai…

We must be very clear on the exact steps. An article published in The Irish Times yesterday insinuated that no one would be medically evacuated if they did not have a surviving parent to care for them. This is inaccurate. Bushra's three children did not have a surviving parent to evacuate with them. On aiding them on the other side, I do not know how to even begin to imagine a scenario where we try to co-ordinate the evacuation of three children on the other side, which means we need to identify an advocate or anot…

I join my colleagues in relation to what happened to the Global Sumud. It is really concerning that there is not more uproar about the targeting of civilian boats in European waters off the coast of Crete. We are meant to be part of a European Union that is supposed to be underpinned by the principles not only of peace but also international law. It is not acceptable that we would allow and accept in international waters, especially in European waters, that drones can target and damage boats and drop chemicals on 5…

I wish to speak about a number of different Palestinian groups. Some have been spoken about already. I am talking about the members of the Palestinian GAA team in relation to their trip to Ireland, but also in relation to the Lajee choir group. Currently, they have had to cancel their trip to Ireland, a trip they were very much looking forward to. The word from Tel Aviv is that what seems to have happened is that the application forms are just sitting here in Ireland. The visa applications are basically sitting on …

I thank the Minister and I broadly welcome the commission and the Minister’s statement. It feels as though we are having the same conversation over and over again, which is incredibly difficult because language, processes and talk and the way we have to then package it, for example, in a commission or the steps we need to take, never fully feel like they match the reality of the situation of people's lives. It is as though we take either an academic language or political understanding and we layer on our own ways o…

Some of my amendments were ruled out of order, which I kind of expected, but this amendment is similar in nature to Sinn Féin's amendment, one that I will be supporting. It relates to a report on the provision of supports to bereaved children. For as long as I have been elected, and prior to that, I have spoken about how single parents are viewed in the country historically. We had a referendum last year in which we debated mothers and Article 14.1, yet we are still talking about the protection of children being ba…

I thank the Minister. It is also worth noting that in the next term, there will be a piece of legislation that has taken me five or six years to draft because it became so complicated and just kept getting bigger and bigger. It is the child maintenance legislation which would be placed within Revenue rather than an independent agency, which we have seen potentially would not work in terms of which Department would be responsible. We have spent five years developing it and it would actually the place the voluntary m…

Yes.

No, it is okay; I fully expected it. I am okay on this occasion.