Mr. Michael Farrell:

It should be part of the considerations that it should not be restricted solely to economic issues but that these issues should be there too and there is a responsibility to the people who will continue to be EU citizens. In the same way that Britain will have to pay into the future, the European Union has a responsibility to its outgoing citizens of Great Britain, even if they are leaving, to try to ensure they are left in a good and reasonable situation. It would be useful to bring this dimension into the discussions.

Senator Daly spoke of Operation Gull. I do not want to get into great detail in that area but I believe there is a danger that the Irish Government could be drawn in to a situation of acting as the enforcer of immigration policies for Britain and these would be immigration policies that we would not accept for ourselves. For instance, as I have said, there is prejudice against Romanian and Polish immigrants in Britain and against Roma people. We should be very careful to avoid getting ourselves into a situation where we would be implementing a British immigration policy that we ourselves would not agree with and would not want to enforce in our own situation. I do not believe we would have the power to insist on it but it would be retrograde to have ethnic profiling, etc. carried out in Northern Ireland for the UK. If they want to carry that out in Great Britain, they should carry it out at the mainland immigration points rather than carry it out in Northern Ireland.