Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister's statement that there is a dedicated Brexit unit in the Department and that it has been possible to increase the number of personnel in key embassies. The brief we got from the Department states funding for Brexit related activities across programmes will impose resource challenges on the Department this year. I hope there will be adequate resources to deal with this very important issue.

When colleagues of the Minister from the Foreign Affairs Council visit this country and are meeting, I hope they will go outside the capital to the Border. I welcome the fact the President of the Bundestag is visiting the Border area next week. He will be in the Dundalk area along with colleagues from the Bundestag. While we can all read memos and files and go to capital cities and hear about the challenges facing countries, there is nothing to beat going to the coalface and meeting the people who will be directly affected by what will happen in a few years. I acknowledge there are time constraints when Ministers visit other countries but I hope that, where possible, colleagues and people of influence from other member states will be brought to the Border. Let them see that we have, thankfully, made so much progress and that we do not want to undo it. When a person exits County Cavan into County Fermanagh, he or she does not know it unless he or she is a local with local knowledge. This represents a huge change from the era in which people such as I grew up. We have seen significant changes since the late 1990s.