Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would like to raise the issue of EEA+ status in respect of Northern Ireland. Theresa May has ruled it out in seeming to opt for the hard Brexit option. I take the point that resistance to that idea would probably come from London rather than from Brussels, although I am not too sure how excited Brussels would be about it, either. It would set a precedent for part of the country remaining and getting the benefits of the EU. Would British companies then establish themselves in Northern Ireland in order to have the best of all worlds? They could be able to trade in the UK and the EU. I am not too sure how that would work in practical terms. The EU has challenged us to come up with solutions that are within current EU law, although those law can obviously be amended. If Belfast was going to remain in the EEA and also remain in the UK, a London-based company would just establish a subsidiary there, allowing it to do its operations in a sterling area. As we have found out with everything else, there is a caveat to every solution we come up with until eventually we end up back where we started. The mantra from the EU is that Brexit is not going to be a success. Britain's objective is to make it a success but the EU's is for it not to be. Would Northern Ireland remaining in the EEA+ be regarded as a success in some instances? A lot of UK companies and financial houses could transfer to Belfast because they would have access there whereas if they were in Britain they would not have it.

There is also the issue of the European Court of Justice. Everyone is kind of talking around the issue but it is part of our remit here. Our position must be that Ireland needs to be sorted first before the trade element is done. It also must be our position that Northern Ireland remains under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, no matter what the British Government or Westminster decides to do in terms of pulling it out of it. While Britain might leave, Northern Ireland should remain. That is part of our negotiating position. In the absence of that, EU citizens in Northern Ireland, of whom there are many hundreds of thousands, would have no access to justice under EU law.