Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 7 June 2017

Seanad Committee on the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union

Engagement with Local Authorities

10:00 am

Photo of Paul DalyPaul Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to be associated with all my colleagues in welcoming the representatives today and in thanking them for giving their time. I have sat here for a long time and we have interviewed various delegates from different areas and sectors. Councillors and council officials are the people who work with the ordinary people on the street on a daily basis. It was great to get down to the individuals. The people who thought up this idea of Brexit, the people who voted it through, and Brussels and Dublin will never hear of the personal problems this will create for individual families and neighbours especially along the Border region, which is the area the delegates represent. If Brexit never arose, the representatives still may have been here today lobbying for the areas they represent. Rural Ireland has been left behind and in particular the north west and Border regions. If the hard Brexit that has been mooted happens, I shudder to think of the situation Donegal and the north west will be in. It will be the last frontier of the European Union sharing a Border with the Atlantic and the UK, apart from a very small stripe down through Sligo-Leitrim. I shudder to think what the situation would have been in many of the Border regions if it was not for the extra funding that came from the EU as a result of the peace process. There was still a lot more that needed to be done. We are now looking at the possibility of losing that. It is imperative we put forward in our report the arguments and points that have been made.

The Acting Chairman asked for statements but I will ask one question. We have had a number of different groups here. A solution for the island that has been mooted is for Northern Ireland to get special status. That would eliminate a lot of the problems the representatives have raised in that there would not be a land border or economic border on the island. It would be more east-west, a line in the Irish Sea and we would take it from there. In itself, that would create a lot more logistical problems in the future. Would the representatives accept that as a solution in a worst-case scenario? What problems would they see emanating from that? How would the all-island status work? Until such time, the Six Counties would still be the UK and we would still be the EU. It might solve a lot of the problems in Border regions temporarily or it might create more. I would like to hear some of the representatives' opinion on that matter before we conclude.

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