Dominic Hannigan (Meath East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Thank you. Many of us are concerned about the issue. I was previously chairman of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and saw the great work done by the cross-Border institutions established under the Good Friday Agreement, such as InterTradeIreland, Waterways Ireland and Foras na Gaeilge. Professor Todd's written submission referred to the deepening levels of engagement between the two parts of the island in other areas, and many of us are members of the North-South Inter-Parliamentary Association that was established a few years ago and whereby Members of the Stormont Assembly meet in plenary session with Members of the Dáil and Seanad. In the forthcoming plenary session, we will discuss the issue Professor Todd raised of improved health links. There are doctors in the North who specialise in deep brain injury and we will discuss how we can ensure people in the South can benefit from this. Here in the South, we are very good at treating congenital heart disease and we are trying to find ways people in the North can get improved access to southern services. Anything that impacts on this relationship is of deep concern to us, as is the Border issue.

The Border issue has been pointed out to us in the past in some of the discussions we have had with other witnesses. From what we are being told, the reasons the UK wants to withdraw converge around two areas, first, the loss of sovereignty to Europe, which a cohort of people feel is a very important issue that merits a BrExit. Second, there is a cohort of people who are less concerned about sovereignty but more concerned about the impact of immigration into the UK. There are two very distinct groups of people on both sides. If Ireland were to remain in the EU and the UK were to leave, a person from Madrid or Paris who wanted to go to the UK could come to Dublin using his or her passport, without a visa, and then travel by bus or train across the Border into the UK without showing his or her passport. If a motivation for the UK to withdraw from the EU is monitoring, limiting and controlling immigration, how would we play our part in it? What would Ireland be asked to do to ensure access of other EU citizens to the North of Ireland was controlled?