© Niall Carson/PA Wire/Zuma PressIrish FM Simon Coveney • Legal advisor Seamus Woulfe
Ireland's foreign minister Simon Coveney may have misled his fellow lawmakers during a debate on forbidding goods from Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank. Coveney has been the
key obstacle to introducing such a ban.
Two of the three parties forming Ireland's new government have supported the
Occupied Territories Bill - as the legislation banning settlement imports is called. Yet Coveney
vetoed its inclusion in the program for the new coalition.
The bill had previously been approved by a majority in both houses of Ireland's parliament, the Oireachtas. Despite how the bill had won such broad support,
Coveney and his colleagues in the right-wing Fine Gael party prevented it from coming into effect.Coveney remains foreign minister in the new government, a post he has held since 2017. Last year Coveney made a
statement against the legislation when it
came before the Dáil, the lower house in the national parliament.
He alleged then that the Occupied Territories Bill was at odds with European Union law and if it was implemented Ireland "would be exposed to potentially very significant fines." Penalties imposed by the EU could be as high as "tens of millions of euros" per year, he said.
Coveney claimed that Seamus Woulfe, then Ireland's attorney general, had "confirmed clearly that passage of the bill would put Ireland in breach of EU law and would expose Ireland to legal action by the European Commission." But, Woulfe's advice was not as clear cut as Coveney suggested.
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