I lend my support to the condolences as well, particularly to Senator Craughwell.

Over the past few days, and throughout August, we had consistent attacks on the International Criminal Court, ICC, by Trump's Administration, most recently with the plan to have sweeping sanctions against the entire court. It is an incredibly troubling escalation and attack on our international justice mechanisms. They are effectively aiming to dismantle the systems and the institutions of international law and take a sledgehammer to the whole concept of a rules-based order. These new measures would severely undermine the work of the court with the ICC president, who is already under sanction, warning that they could jeopardise the court's very existence.

ICC officials have warned that court-wide sanctions would disrupt things like IT, insurance, empowering investigators and routine transactions such as paying US-based employees. This constitutes yet another egregious overreach and naked attack on international law from the Trump Administration. In July, Marco Rubio explicitly set out the intent to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate. We have already seen how the Trump Administration has weaponised sanctions against individuals, including several of the court’s judges. These sanctions were retaliatory measures for the ICC’s work regarding the actions of US personnel in Afghanistan and, indeed, the issuance of the arrest warrant against Netanyahu for the genocide in Gaza. We have to stand up to this. We have to stand up to these attempts to undermine our international systems.

The Taoiseach and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy McEntee are attending the UN General Assembly this week. I call on both of them to take actual action to draw a line under these attacks from the US and through our European Presidency role, introduce a blocking statute to protect EU citizens who are under sanctions by the US. We have been calling for this for a while. It does not seem like anything is being done to push this forward. This is crucial to stopping the tide of the impact of these sanctions. Otherwise, there is no accountability for international war crimes, the heinous genocide in Gaza or those committed historically in places like Rwanda, Sierra Leon or Kosovo. We are saying it does not matter anymore. That is what Trump is trying to do because he himself is trying to hide from accountability and justice. It is urgent and crucial that in the next three or four months, while we retain the Presidency of the EU, we really push for the EU blocking mechanism to be put in place and, more broadly, call the US's actions out very clearly to the Government.