Mr. Chris Hazzard:

The Deputy is right in what he said. We have heard that the constitutional chips have been thrown in the air and nobody has any idea how they will fall. Dick Cheney once talked about the known unknowns, but we are into an arena where we are talking about unknown unknowns in that the map ahead of us is very unclear. We know that the prospect of a hard Border would be a disaster. I have established a Brexit group in my Department and I am working with officials in the Department for Transport in London. When we engage with the freight and transport authorities in the ports, it is clear that this would be a disaster not only for the movement of people but for the movement of goods and services. When we consider some of our key infrastructure projects, and this goes back to my point about the lost opportunities, over the next generation a great deal of work will go into the development and enhancement of an eastern economic corridor, especially between Dublin and Belfast but also including Derry and Cork. We know that councils are very much active on this and are keen to explore the possibility of high speed rail links between those cities, which is something I am keen to explore and that we need to address. The impact of a hard Border on that development would bring us into unknown territory and it would also raise serious questions around funding. As I alluded to in my response to the previous question, through both the Connecting Europe Facility and INTERREG, we have been successful in securing in the region of €100 million in recent years and we can imagine what impact a hard Border would have on that.

I attended the trans-European transport network, TEN-T, conference in Rotterdam earlier in the summer in advance of the referendum result. There is a growing concern across the island of Ireland that we do not do as well when it comes to transport funding because of the isolated and peripheral nature of transport in Ireland. We rely heavily on road transport while the direction of travel throughout Europe is moving away from road to rail transport, but we are heavily reliant on road transport, especially on our eastern corridor. In terms of advancements in the years ahead, I recently met the Confederation of British Industry, CBI, and the Irish Business and Employers Confederation, IBEC, regarding their recent report, Connected, which sets out proposals to deliver large parts of what we want to do. We would have relied heavily on both the North and the South being member states. To return to my first point, it is not only the hurdles that it throws up today but the damage that it does to future opportunities.