Mr. Padraic White:

I will respond to some of the points made by Senator Quinn. The Dublin-Derry road has two parts, one of which is the N2 from here to Monaghan. After the St. Andrews Agreement and all the excitement about peace, that route was regarded as being of major significance to the whole Border area, opening up the north-west economy and helping to create an all-island economy. It is an eloquent testimony to the lack of public or political interest that we cannot find the €1.5 million to give to Monaghan County Council to advance the planning on our part of it. On the northern side, the planning permission was quashed, and it is now making its way in a leisurely manner through the new planning process. On both sides, one sees a lack of any real political urgency or engagement. It speaks most eloquently to the lack of interest in this subject.

Regarding the Border development corridor, we have a draft solidarity charter. If it is going to work, it must be built on the platform of support from local authorities, North and South, in the Border area.

Given that there are new local authorities in the North, their interest in it remains to be seen as they bed down. Dr. Anthony Soares and I were invited by the Irish Central Border Area Network, ICBAN, to a meeting of its management group which was attended by councillors from North and South in February 2015. We discussed it fully and it was unanimously endorsed by the councillors on both sides. As Dr. Conor Patterson said earlier, at local authority level people want to co-operate. It is almost as if they are trying to do it in a vacuum. I believe the will is there, but it remains to be seen.

I will make one final comment on the Senator's anecdote in respect of the wedding gift and so forth. Members might recall after the Good Friday Agreement the excitement in the South about visiting Northern Ireland. Hundreds and thousands of people from the South who had never been to Belfast visited the area and people were beginning to rediscover Northern Ireland. In my opinion, because of the lack of public and political engagement and the lack of a continuous espousal of an all-island economy, we retreated into our insularity and our separatism. It offends me personally when I hear representatives of the farmers' organisations imply that milk from Northern Ireland that is in our supermarkets should somehow not be regarded as Irish. I find that offensive and totally opposed to any sense we have of common solidarity as an all-island economy.