Labour bill seeks to ban Central Bank from approving Israeli war bond sales
Labour's Duncan Smith will introduce his Occupying Power (Securities and Handling of Settlement Goods) Bill 2025 to the Dáil, which would stop the Central Bank from giving information on the sale of bonds from countries which are deemed to be occupying powers.
The Central Bank last month came under mounting pressure to reject the prospectuses of Israeli bonds, which are largely being used to fund the country's war efforts in Gaza, though it has argued because Ireland's central bank is designated as the competent authority to approve prospectuses for Israeli bonds sold in the EU, it has no legal authority to do so.
Third-country issuers of bonds must choose the central bank of a country within the EU as their home member state, a choice which is up to that country and not the chosen home member state.
Before 2021, Britain was the EU home member state for Israel, but following its exit from the bloc, Ireland was chosen by Israel as the new home member state. The Central Bank of Ireland approved the first prospectuses for the bond issuance programme in 2021, with the currently approved prospectus due to expire on September 1, 2025.
Mr Smith said he was not satisfied with the Government's rejection of a Social Democrats motion, supported by Sinn Féin, Labour, and People Before Profit-Solidarity, which also called on the coalition to advise the bank that "by acting as the enabling cog in Israel's fund-raising machine in the EU, it is putting the State at risk of a charge of complicity in genocide".
"We're not satisfied with the minister's responses to this in the Dáil. We feel that there is a mechanism to ban this practice to stop us selling war bonds for an occupying power. With pre-legislative scrutiny of the Occupied Territories Bill nearing an end and recognition of Palestine, there is more we can do.
"We can, through primary legislation, ban this practice and show more solidarity to the people of Palestine. We're going to keep the pressure on."
In the bill's explanatory memorandum, it says the governor of the Central Bank Gabriel Makhlouf has told the Oireachtas finance committee the bank itself has no discretion in the matter and it could only refuse to approve a prospectus for the issue of Israeli bonds if there was a legal basis under either EU or national law.
The bill would also seek to protect workers who refuse to handle goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements.
The memo says "both Ireland and the European Union as a whole are agreed that Israeli civilian settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible".
The bill would make dismissal of a staff member who refused to handle the goods an unfair act under employment law.
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