Mr. Peter Sheridan:

At the outset I should say that many people in the room will know of Co-operation Ireland, particularly colleagues in Northern Ireland, but for the record, we are an organisation that has been involved in peace building in this island since 1979. For a number of years we have seen a core part of our business as building reconciliation, underpinning the Good Friday Agreement, normalising the relationships between Britain and Ireland and between people in the North of Ireland and the South of Ireland. We see that as critically important.

I have a very diverse board and the chairman is London-based. The former Taoiseach, John Bruton, is my Vice-Chairman. I have people such Peter Robinson, the former First Minister of Northern Ireland, on the board, and several people from America and from the Republic of Ireland. Some of them will not have taken the same view as others on the board so we took a neutral position. Some people were of the view that we should leave Europe and some were not of that view, so we took a neutral position on it. However, we were able to have general agreement on many of the issues the members would be aware of already, but it is worth putting those on the record.

As an organisation, we are fortunate in that we are a company limited by guarantee, both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland, and we have separate charitable status in the United States. However, that means that whatever happens, we will remain an EU partner because we have our base here in Dublin, as well as an office in Cork. The board members see our role as continuing to work to ensure that the relationship between Ireland and the UK remains and that there is no diminution in that.

The protection of the peace process is critical. It is only last year that we had the Fresh Start agreement and, the year before, the Stormont House Agreement, which shows the still-fragile nature of politics in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement is a guarantor of that agreement, therefore, an important part of our work is to ensure there is no diminution or unravelling of the Good Friday Agreement. I do not want to overstate it but there is a danger that, ultimately, this could lead to some civil unrest, particularly with regard to the Border.

The board members are agreed that we want to avoid the risk of economic isolation and on the need for measures to protect the economy, particularly in Northern Ireland. They want to minimise barriers to trade and people movement across the Border. The maintenance of the common travel area is important, and there is recognition that leaving the EU could raise issues of identity in ways that none of us can yet see. It would be fair to say that many people in the North, particularly northern Nationalists, had become settled after the Good Friday Agreement within the context of Northern Ireland within the context of Europe. I do not believe that was the same as being satisfied to be within Northern Ireland within the context of the UK, so that issue of identity could be raised again. Many northern Nationalists saw devolution as part of that and in terms of any recentralising of devolution, for example, given that agriculture, energy and so on are devolved matters, how are they to be negotiated by a central Government that no longer has the same control? That raises matters of identity again for us.

The board members are clear that they want to protect the positive relations built in recent years between North and South and between east and west.