Paul Hosford

So it will be interesting to see if they can get it over the line before the dollar rises at the end of July.

Yeah, the government has always kind of cautioned that going that far or services will be legally restricted.

really difficult is what the Taoiseach has kind of intimated, that this is just, it would have been kind of too widespread or too, I suppose, too onerous or legally complex to do that.

I think when you look at what the bill does, realistically it's going to ban about €400,000 worth of trade, which is not a massive amount, but I suppose the principle of it is what

Francis Black was working towards when she introduced this first in 2018.

It's important to remember that this bill has been knocking around for eight years.

Yeah, well, I don't think that this, I think these two things are kind of separate in a lot of ways, where the government sees the EU Association Agreement and the EU's preferential treatment of Israel as a trading partner and the Irish, I suppose, the Irish treatment of goods from the occupied territories as two separate things.

There's no indication that Ireland will not ask the EU for

an examination of that association agreement Micheál Martin wrote to the European Commission last week, asking for that to be on the agenda at an EU summit next month.

And I don't think that the Irish government is going to, I suppose, come back or pull back from that position.

I think they will definitely want to keep it on the agenda.

Micheál Martin's been very clear that he would like to see the EU and the EU27, particularly

acting concert on this and work as one.

And I just don't know if that's possible at an EU leadership level, but it is something that they will continue to push for.