Mr. Les Allamby:

I will simply try to deal with all three points succinctly. I recognise that the Good Friday Agreement was very much about identity rights, it was also about parity of esteem. What we have tried to do as a joint committee in our discussions with the UK Government has been to seek to recognise that this entails recognising both the rights of those who are Irish and those who are British in Northern Ireland. This has different dimensions. I think there are some answers. As Professor Harvey has suggested it is one of the areas that was interrogated in some detail in the advice that was given by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission in 2008. In terms of solutions, a bill of rights is one of the places in which some of these issues could be dealt with. I am not sure that it could be comprehensively argued but the common travel area and having some kind of international treaty or bilateral agreement is where one potentially could deal with some of the issues. It is clear from an White Paper on immigration in the UK that it will, to put it slightly simplistically but not far off the mark, be treating EU citizens in the future broadly in the same way that non-EU citizens are currently treated, so the issue of freedom of movement and the rights of Irish citizens makes the common travel area and some of these other issues even more important. I think answers to some of these questions could be found.

I should comment on the Good Friday Agreement. The rights and what I term the participatory elements of the Good Friday Agreement are unfinished business. It is not just a bill of rights for Northern Ireland, it is the all-Ireland charter of rights - which was mentioned by Professor Harvey, it is the civic forum or some equivalent, none of which has been put in place 20 years on. That is a big gap in terms of the Agreement.

In terms of the representation rights, I think that while there are clearly some EU elements to this, a great deal of it probably falls within the remit of the Irish Government. There are other member states where citizens from outside of the country can vote in elections, so it is not as if that is not an issue that has been addressed in many other member states.