Banning the trade of services based in Palestinian territories illegally occupied by Israel would potentially “damage Ireland more than anybody else”, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said.
The Fianna Fáil leader was speaking ahead of a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning, where the long-awaited Bill, formally entitled Israeli Settlements (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2026, was finally due to be agreed by Government.
It will give effect to the commitment set out in the Programme for Government to progress legislation to prohibit the importation of goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Helen McMcEntee said she hopes the Bill will be in place by the Dáil’s summer break.
Once the Bill is enacted and commenced, the importation of goods originating in the settlements into Ireland will be an offence under section 14 of the Customs Act 2015.
But the legislation will only include a ban on the trade of goods and not services.
Speaking on Tuesday on his way into the Cabinet meeting, Martin told journalists that “fundamentally, it’s not implementable in terms of services”.
“Secondly, our strong legal advice is in the negative also. And thirdly, I mean it would perhaps potentially damage Ireland more than anybody else. In terms of potential impacts on US multinationals based here and back in America, but more fundamentally, it’s just simply not implementable. And I think we need to be realistic and need to be honest with people in respect of what we can achieve via this legislation,” he said.
Martin said the Bill was “a further initiative in a long line of decisions that the Irish Government has taken”, and that Ireland has been “very consistent in opposing Israeli policy in the occupied territories”.
Tánaiste Simon Harris said he was pleased to see the Bill being brought forward and that Ireland would now be one of the “very first countries in the European Union to pass primary legislation in relation to banning trade with the occupied Palestinian territories”.
“Being very honest, though, the most effective action that we can see is at a European level,” he said.
He added: “I think the impact [of the Bill] is important in terms of values. I hope it inspires and encourages other countries to do more too, but if we really want to exert maximum pressure here to end the horrors that have taken place in Gaza, and to respect international law, Europe must do more.
“If Europe was to take, at an EU level, the actions that we’re taking at a domestic level, the impact would be very, very significant, and I think that’s where our focus should be.”
McEntee said the Government wanted to bring forward “legislation that can be implementable, that we can bring into effect as soon as possible. And that’s exactly what I’ll be proposing here today”.
McEntee also confirmed she will be bringing forward legislation in the coming weeks that is designed to unravel the ‘triple lock’, the mechanism under which the Government, the Dáil and the UN Security Council all need to approve the deployment of more than 12 Irish troops on missions abroad.
Independent senator Frances Black, who first introduced a version of the Occupied Territories Bill in 2018, said what the Government had agreed this week “was essentially a partial ban on trade with the illegal Israeli settlements.”
“It omits the majority of Irish trade, in intangible services like tech and IT, and greatly undermines the scope of the legislation. Government still haven’t given any coherent, detailed justification for this beyond short soundbites,” Black said.
She said when the Bill “finally hits the floor of the Dáil in the coming weeks I will be working with all Opposition parties to table amendments to include services. That has been my clear position since 2018 and I will do everything in my power to make it happen”.
Labour, the Social Democrats, the Green Party and People Before Profit have all raised concerns about the omission of services from the Bill.
Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman said he thinks including services in the bill would be worth the economic cost that Ireland could face from the US in response.
O’Gorman said the Government’s issue with including services was “not a legal issue, this is a political call.”
“And the political call is we can annoy the Trump administration a little bit by including goods, but not that next little bit by including services. I don’t accept that argument. The Trump administration will not like this Bill, whether it includes services or not. If we pass a Bill just on goods, the Trump administration will cause trouble over that. But there does come a time where we have to decide whether the values that we articulate as a country, we stand behind them,” O’Gorman said.
He said the view of the International Court of Justice was that trade with the occupied territories was illegal. “And I believe Ireland should follow through on that,” he said.