Neale Richmond (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to welcome the delegation back to Leinster House. I appreciate the three councillors' contributions on a series of key areas.

Given the day it is, I wish to pick up on a topic Councillor McCarthy raised. Almost all of the delegates are members of the Brexit interregional group in the Committee of the Regions, which doubtless has a vital role to play. I appreciate from experience the strong relationship between members of the Committee of the Regions from Northern Ireland and the delegation from Ireland. It is a powerful relationship, especially as the two who tend to attend the most are from unionist communities.

Regardless of what happens today or whatever deal happens, we must look towards the future and see the potential for the Committee of the Regions to push the agenda of furthering Ireland's ties with the rest of Europe. It will become increasingly important, and we have seen this in areas such as logistics, where we are opening up new shipping lanes to Santander, Rotterdam, Zeebrugge and Duisburg, as well as energy connectivity with the Celtic interconnector between France and Cork.

We must consider the issue on a local and regional level. Once upon a time on county councils, we talked about twinning but during the austerity years, that developed a bad reputation. It is important, however, and it has potential. There were many historical reasons for my old local authority being twinned with Holyhead and Cherbourg in France, which made sense when a ferry used to depart from Dún Laoghaire but it does not do so anymore. There is no active twinning in progress with any other EU member states despite the fact that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown is not only an historic area but also a major commercial hub for the Sandyford business district as well as Dundrum Town Centre. How can the Committee of the Regions best encourage local authorities in Ireland to engage with the other 26 member states to develop new twinning associations for our towns and our counties, as well as a regional link? Some of the relationships we have with American cities and so on make a great deal of sense, but much more needs to be done.

Councillor Murphy described the travelling he has done, and I know it is the same for every one of the nine full members and nine alternate members. Twinning is important and full of potential. Europe is so much closer than we think. If we take Horizon 2020 and ERASMUS Plus as examples, the deep roots of future relationships between our third level institutions and our civic society with European partners can, and will, come from our local authorities. It will not come from central government or the agencies such as Léargas which implement these programmes. Rather, it must come from the European officers that Councillor McCarthy mentioned. I hope that the local authorities in turn put resources behind the European engagement officers at a local authority level. I am not just saying that somebody should be designated as a European engagement officer even though he or she has 17 million other jobs to be doing.

There is great potential in this regard. Will the delegates tease it out for the committee?