Ms Michelle Gildernew:

And the chickens, of course. We could go on forever. Senator Craughwell spoke about first, second and third-class Irish citizens and I think that there is still a very real sense of that. This time 50 years ago, which is not that long ago, although the Minister and myself were not yet alive at the time, my aunt was squatting in a house in Caledon, County Tyrone. She had not been allocated a house because that would have meant that she would have got a vote, a very blunt instrument with which to try to disenfranchise Irish citizens in the North. Such blunt instruments are still being used, as we see in the whole issue around the Irish language, for example. I appreciate that we are not yet back in the Executive but there are very difficult issues involved here, and the way in which those issues have been dealt with by our former partners in government has meant that we cannot go back to institutions that do not work for many people and that are now trying to institutionalise discrimination and bigotry. The Irish language is a big issue for us in Sinn Féin, as is marriage equality, so I would like to draw the Minister's attention to that.

Returning to what I way saying about the situation in Caledon, the Minister's official, Mr. Fergal Mythen, actually came to Caledon with me a long time ago. It is bad to realise that I have known the Minister's officials for 20 years. I feel like Mr. Mythen has been knocking around for a very long time.

I would actually expand the point raised earlier about citizens' rights. We have citizens from outside Ireland who now live and work in Fermanagh and South Tyrone and made it their home. Their children are Irish and hold Irish passports but because they have come from other parts of the world and settled in the North of Ireland, they now have different citizens' rights. If two people come from Poland and one ends up living in Emyvale, County Monaghan, and the other in Aughnacloy, County Tyrone, the person in Emyvale has more rights to Irish citizenship and naturalisation than the person in Aughnacloy. This is an anomaly in the Good Friday Agreement that we now need to rectify. As part of the citizenship debate, I would like us to look at the new Irish who have made their home in the North of Ireland.

I would also like to say to the Minister that poverty, and child poverty in particular, is much more endemic in the Border corridor and that Brexit is going to throw up all kinds of challenges in this regard. There has been talk of hard and soft borders but what we need to see is no Border at all.

The way the Border was when we were growing up and the way the two jurisdictions operated, with their back-to-back to infrastructure, meant that people living on the Border got the thin end of the wedge every time, whether it was in respect of roads infrastructure, broadband or access to services and the situation endures to some extent. In County Fermanagh, one of the issues we have is access to GP services. In Rosslea, the GP has retired and there is no active GP in the area. They are closer to GP services in Clones or parts of County Monaghan but they cannot access those at present. There are plans to bring about a north-west school of medicine on the part of the Ulster University co-operative project, based in the Magee campus, to train doctors and medical staff North and South who want to live and work in the west. It will affect counties Donegal, Sligo, Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone equally and it is a really exciting project. I spoke to people about it last week and they said it cannot happen without ministerial sign-off. If it is not signed off by springtime, we cannot have a December 2018 intake. It does not look like we are getting around the Executive table any time soon but there are important issues that affect the Irish Government which we would like to be expanded and moved on.