Mr. Seán Kelly:

I again thank members for their warm welcome and comments thus far. In terms of speaking with a single voice, our approach has been to look at all avenues we can to try to get a single message. That is why we have been looking to various bodies such as the North-South Ministerial Council, the British-Irish Council and the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. We have addressed some of these bodies before. They recognise the importance of the environment and those structures are in place. That is one mechanism through which we wish to keep the environment high in the consciousness. Of course, we have also been taking part in the Taoiseach's initiative on civil dialogue and so on. We have been contributing to it and will continue to do so.

In terms of a single voice, Northern Ireland Environment Link has also been working with our counterparts in England, Scotland and Wales because when Brexit arrives, there will be questions that will affect us all. What will it mean for the environment? What is the framework? What will it mean in terms of the great repeal Bill? What will be devolved? We have to work to get our heads around those various mechanisms on some of which there is more information than others. We must also decide what our message will be in terms of the environment and what we would like to see.

Of course, just as Europe's environment is not the same from one side to the other, there are variations at the level of Great Britain ajlso. We are working towards the idea of a shared environmental framework. Given that we are the only part of these islands that shares a land border with another EU member state, our argument is that the framework must go further. That is why we are looking at, to use a much used phrase, not only the North-South but also the east-west dimensions. That is why, in terms of speaking with a single voice, we see this island as a single biogeographic unit, as Mr. Ewing noted earlier. We have mentioned the shared waterways, the marine, the designated sites, the invasive species problems, the migratory species and so on. That is something we want to do. We want to pull this framework together in order that our respective organisations based in Belfast, Edinburgh, Westminster and Dublin will have a framework to enable us to go forward and state what is required for the environment. There will of course be some regional variation in that as well. It will not be the exact same or a carbon copy. We will be saying that at Westminster also. There may be an overall frame but we must be able to feed in what is best locally. That is very much why we are here today and why we are working in co-operation with Mr. Ewing and the membership of his organisation. We believe in bringing together one joint message and we will try to flesh that out a little more at our event on 16 June.