Simon Harris is a master of spin. He pretends to oppose Israeli actions in Palestine. So, he goes to an EU meeting and talks tough. The EU, he says, will need to review the EU-Med trade agreement. But he knows that the EU will never do anything about this.
So, he gets it both ways. He has expressed his concern – but has actually done nothing.
It is the same with the Occupied Territories Bill. He has taken up a point that Richard Boyd Barrett TD has repeatedly made that the International Criminal Court’s judgement of Israel for genocide has changed the legal context.
He now says he is seeking new legal advice from the Attorney General, and maybe the Dáil will pass the Occupied Territories Bill. But there is a catch. The Dáil is about to be dissolved, so there is no chance the Occupied Territories Bill will be passed in its lifetime.
Meanwhile, the gap between rhetoric and action remains.
The Governor of the Central Bank, Gabriel Makhlouf, appeared before the Dáil Finance Committee and made a startling revelation.
Israel, he said, had moved its war bonds prospectus from the UK to Ireland to allow the sale of the products in the EU. In other words, Ireland is now the main centre for trade in Israeli war bonds.
A war bond is like an IOU note which is used to raise funds for Israel’s war effort. But why is Ireland facilitating this trade?
Makhlouf explained that the law required him to scrutinise these bonds for approval. But who makes the law? None other than the same Simon Harris and his Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Green Party colleagues.
If Harris had the slightest sense of outrage beyond his PR concern, he would immediately come to the Dáil with a change in the law to stop the sale of war bonds that are being used to inflict genocide on the people of Gaza. He will do none of this. To quote Shakespeare he prefers to do ‘all sound and fury, signifying nothing.’
