Comments on violence in the Middle East by President Catherine Connolly are expected to increase pressure on the Government in advance of the St Patrick’s Day visit by Taoiseach Micheál Martin to the Oval Office in Washington, DC.
In a statement to mark International Women’s Day on Sunday, Connolly warned that “catastrophic consequences of violating the UN charter” could not be ignored, saying “the violations of international law we are witnessing are shocking and numbing”.
While she did not name the United States or Israel explicitly, she said what was being witnessed in the Middle East and beyond were not “political disputes” but rather were “deliberate assaults on international law”.
Connolly did not directly criticise the Government but said “we cannot afford inaction” and that assaults on international law must be named as such “without euphemism and without equivocation”, adding that “Ireland is uniquely positioned to do precisely that”.
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While sources in Áras an Uachtaráin strongly denied the statement was designed to put pressure on the Government, several Government figures said on Sunday that they believed it would prove awkward and could be raised during exchanges on the Taoiseach’s US visit.
Her comments were welcomed by Labour, People Before Profit, Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats, who have been calling on the Taoiseach to raise the matter in the White House. Connolly pointed to the State’s peacekeeping history, commitment to disarmament and Ireland’s history of colonisation, famine and conflict resolution.
The Government has not condemned the bombing of Iran as a breach of international law, with political calls for Martin to raise the issue with US president Donald Trump.
Bombardments continued in Iran, Israel, Lebanon and the wider region over the weekend as the conflict entered its second week. Strikes on fuel depots in Tehran left the capital, with its peacetime population of almost 10 million, under dense, dark clouds on Sunday.
On Sunday evening, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the former supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed by an Israeli missile strike on February 28th, was chosen as Iran’s new supreme leader.
He becomes the third supreme leader of the Islamic republic after his father, who ruled for 37 years until his death at the outset of the current war, and Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the revolution in 1979. He is considered to be a hardliner with close ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
US president Donald Trump warned in an interview with ABC News that whoever is selected as the next supreme leader “is not going to last long” without the approval of the United States.
Meanwhile, water desalination plants in Iran and in the Gulf have come under fire. Some states in the region depend almost entirely on desalination for drinking water. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said a strike on a facility in Bahrain came only after the US had hit an Iranian desalination plant on Qeshm island, affecting the water supply for 30 villages. “The US set this precedent, not Iran,” he said on social media.
The US military confirmed a seventh member of its armed forces had been killed. The wider death toll in the conflict is unclear, but hundreds or more have been killed in Iran and Lebanon, while two Israeli soldiers were killed in southern Lebanon. Two people were killed in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, the kingdom’s first casualties.
Concern over energy prices and other economic disruption remains high. Minister for Foreign Affairs Helen McEntee has asked her department to assess the need for a further Government charter flight out of the region, including whether it would depart again from Oman or elsewhere.
Gas prices have risen dramatically since the intense air campaign began more than a week ago. Iran has in effect closed the Strait of Hormuz, the sea route through which a fifth of global seaborne gas shipments pass.
– Additional reporting by New York Times and Reuters
