Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I suppose one of the startling facts about the situation relating to the Border is that there are more land crossings between North and South than there are between the EU and all of the countries to the east of it, which would make one mindful of the scale of the problem we face. I have one specific question, as colleagues have touched on many areas.

On our position on the European Court of Human Rights because it forms part of the Good Friday Agreement, the UK has been trying to leave the European Court of Human Rights for a long time. Long before Brexit, they have been giving out about it. The Irish position, I would propose, and hope the Minister would support, is that, whatever about Britain - being England, Scotland and Wales - retaining jurisdiction and being able to leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, Northern Ireland should remain under it. It is desperately complex to see, if a country is leaving, how the European Court of Human Rights would still have such jurisdiction, but that might be. Norway and Switzerland may be under the European Court of Human Rights and countries which are not necessarily in the EU would come under that court.

As my colleagues have pointed out, the British public representatives do not understand the scale of the problem they face. Mr. Dan O'Brien pointed out that this is like doing 55 trade negotiations simultaneously, and one trade negotiation can take seven years. When one is trying to conduct not only trade negotiations but a fishery agreement, a security agreement, a health agreement and an education one all at the same time, it beggars belief. The problem here is we need to make a special case for Northern Ireland because the European project is, in essence, a peace process. The EU itself is a peace process. Northern Ireland still is a peace process and this has the potential to destabilise the peace process. That is the way we need to get our European colleagues to understand it. This has the potential to destabilise Northern Ireland.