Niall Ó Donnghaile (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to refer back quickly to some of the comments made by Deputy Durkan. If we are committed to an engagement here, we should not be putting the word of so-called independent experts in front of what he brandishes as individual opinions of MEPs here. As Ms McGuinness has said, rightly, all MEPs come with a vast mandate in their own right. When MEPs are raising legitimate concerns we should not simply dismiss them and put independent experts, nameless as they are, ahead of them. In that spirit, I wish to reference the comments of my colleague, Deputy Martin Kenny. I do not share the view that when he was referring to an elite club he had MEPs in mind. I believe it was those elements of the structures that do not necessary have the mandate that Ms McGuinness and her colleagues have. That is the concern for us.

Reference was made to the absence of the Northern Ireland Assembly. I would love to see it. We could have the assembly up-and-running tomorrow if the political will existed to fulfil outstanding agreements. I do not believe it is too much to ask that those agreements are implemented. However, we are not going to get into a political discussion on that. The point I wanted to make was that when we had the assembly, the British Government put little stake in the views of it. As the British Government has absolutely no support for the expressed democratic mandate of the people in the North, why would it listen to the assembly? It certainly did not listen when the assembly was up and functioning.

We have talked about the arrangements of the Good Friday Agreement and other issues of a cross-Border nature. The elephant in the rooms is any manifestation of a hard border. For me, the question is the exploitation of the re-emergence of a hard border by people who are opposed to the peace process. We know that the Irish Government is scoping out sites for customs checks. It has conceded as much on the floor of both Houses. This comes back to the point Ms Martina Anderson made earlier about the platitudes and plamás around no return to a hard border, borders of the past and frictionless borders. What engagement have MEPs have thus far to ensure that from a European perspective there is no return to a border? If there is a return to a border, then surely that is a definitive clear physical alteration and undermining of the integrity and sanctity of the Good Friday Agreement.