Mr. Mark Durkan:

One of the statements made was to the effect that there is no reassurance in hearing the British and Irish Governments say they do not wish to see the introduction of a hard Border. One of my concerns has been that ever since the Brexit outcome, the British Government and, to some extent, the Irish Government have fallen into the trap, as far as we are concerned, of talking about the management of Brexit as only being about offering assurances that there will not be a return to a hard Border and pledging there will be consultation and engagement with the Executive in the North and that as long as those two messages are given, there is nothing else to worry about, whereas I believe Brexit poses much more fundamental threats than those Mr. Fearon touched on.

It is particularly damaging and threatening to the standing of the Good Friday Agreement in the longer term, including to many of its cross-Border operations and a lot of the facilities for better co-operation and co-ordination across the Border, all of which will be lost. Those benefits are not just confined to the Border areas. Some of them stretch wider than that, but many of them are felt particularly and are appreciated in the Border areas and that would be lost.

Mr. Fearon made the point that some of these points are not made in Westminster. Many of them are made in Westminster but they are not well taken there because they are coming from just a few of us. There seems to be an attitude on the part of the Brexiteers that no matter what serious uncertainty is raised, smug certitude is the answer, which leads to all these platitudes about there being no hard Border or anything else. Mr. McDonnell, MP, is struggling with this issue as a member of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. I am stuck on the Exiting the European Union Committee, which dealing with Brexit itself. We have a phalanx of the Brexiteers there. There will be a report from that committee at the weekend in which it will indicate that it will hear evidence in Derry on 23 February. That is the plan currently. Maybe political events will mean that calendar will have to change.

It is important that the sort of points made to this committee would be conveyed and reflected to that broader select committee as well. I would suggest to Mr. Fearon that he change how he is putting some of the points across because of the habit that they have of turning the question around and throwing it away from themselves. If any presentation he made to that committee was as heavily focused on Frontex and those other fears Mr. Fearon has mentioned, they would say that neither he nor they want that, that they would not cause such things to occur after Brexit, but rather that the EU would, and that those concerns should be addressed to it. They have their ways of washing their hands of these matters. We saw that whole syndrome immediately after the referendum - a big boy did it and then he ran away. They tried to clear themselves after doing the damage, which they did not realise they were going to do, but now of course the smugness has come in.

I also hope that in any articulation at that level, including in Mr. Fearon's meetings with Lord Dunlop, that he can emphasise, just as he has done here in the exchange, the Good Friday Agreement itself, both the benefits and how they are under threat of erosion in the future. These people will just try to offer assurances that the Border question is not about them, and then one will find the meeting broadly at an end. I agree with colleagues that in terms of dealing with the Government, one needs more than just dealing with Lord Dunlop. Remember that he is also Minister for Scotland and is, therefore, programmed to say that he cannot do anything special in one part of the United Kingdom and that if he does anything too special in Northern Ireland then it creates a precedent for Scotland. He is absolutely neurotic in avoiding any such thing. It is a matter of putting the message across when one gets to those particular key audiences.

I really appreciate the strength of what Mr. Fearon has said on a number of points today, particularly his blunt point that a lot of the people who are giving assurances about there being no return to a hard Border are not in a position to guarantee that. They get away with the platitude, however, and that is part of the problem and part of the frustration that we have. He is also absolutely correct in thinking that there is not a crock of gold at the end of the Brexit rainbow, which other people seem to think is there, as far as foreign payments and such matters are concerned. It is hugely important that in his conversations with Westminster, when they take place, and with the UK Government, that while he puts his points strongly in regard to the Frontex issues and his particular concerns about the hard Border, that he does not confine it to those areas alone, because the threat here is not just what style of Border controls may be introduced.

The threat here is not just what profile of border controls there might be. The threat is ending up with incipient border-ism. Once one part of the island is in the EU, operating to EU standards and directives, and another part is operating under different ones, then somebody makes it their job to enforce and exaggerate those differences, resulting in creeping tit-for-tat border-ism even when people claim to respect the Good Friday Agreement fully.

After all, we had a bit of border-ism introduced in recent years with the haulage levy. We were told that was not breaching anything but was just something that had to be done. It was not being imposed to force the Border, but it was not possible to make a difference in Northern Ireland just because of our Border situation or because of the Good Friday Agreement. Saying that we see no difference in Northern Ireland leads to that kind of border-ism. The Minister who introduced that borderist measure is now the UK immigration Minister and is giving us the same assurances that he will not do anything to interfere with the Border or whatever, but he actually brought the Border back in haulage terms in a way that it had not existed for a number of years. It shows how much this can happen incrementally and almost accidentally, but nobody can arrest it when it starts.