‘Use Patrick’s Day White House visit to lobby for Gaza ceasefire’
GOVERNMENT ministers have said the St Patrick’s Day White House visit should to be used to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has faced calls to boycott the annual event in protest at the US support of Israel.
Yesterday, Justice Minister Helen McEntee said Ireland has an important diplomatic role to play in trying to bring about a ceasefire.
Refusing to attend, as the People Before Profit party has demanded, could have significant ramifications for years into the future, she warned.
Ms McEntee echoed Tánaiste Micheál Martin, who has said a boycott ‘doesn’t make sense’ and that Ireland should help to build international pressure on Israel’s allies, including the US.
‘We should absolutely engage not only with our partners in the US, but right across the world,’ Ms McEntee told Newstalk. ‘For Ireland’s part, the way that we can play a role here in trying to bring about a ceasefire is through engagement, it’s through our diplomatic channels. It’s the conversations that we have with those people – who are in power – and who will be able to help bring about this ceasefire.
‘So I don’t think cutting ourselves off, I don’t think expelling ambassadors, I don’t think refusing to talk to people is the right thing to do here because it Important role: Minister for Justice Helen McEntee actually doesn’t help.’ Ms McEntee said very few countries enjoyed anything like Ireland’s annual invitation to the White House. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty has defended his party’s decision to proceed with its St Patrick’s Day engagements in Washington. ‘We will never shirk from that responsibility,’ he told RTÉ. ‘When we have been in the United States, whether it was during the war in Iraq, whether it was in relation to other foreign policy differences that we would have – and many of them that we have with America – we always will raise the issues of those who we feel are being persecuted across the world and we’ll do that again this year, and I would call on the Irish Government to do the same.’
Sinn Féin faced criticism from Irish pro-Palestinian activists for not boycotting the visit.
The SDLP announced it will not attend the St Patrick’s Day events in the White House in protest at the situation in Gaza. Party leader Colum Eastwood said he could not attend celebratory events at the White House while the civilian population in Gaza ‘lives in constant fear of eradication’.
He accused the US administration of having an ‘atrocious’ response to the conflict.
Mr Eastwood said the scale and intensity of violence could not be justified and called on the US to become an advocate for a ceasefire.
He said his party would send a delegation to Washington to ‘engage with senior lawmakers, Irish Americans and Palestinian Americans to make the case for an end to violence’.
‘Lives in constant fear of eradication’