Mr. Brian Gormally:

Obviously, the details of the entitlements and so on can be quite complex in terms of social security and things like that. A couple of months ago, I listened to a presentation from one of the advice workers at the Centre for Cross Border Studies. She said that at the moment, they only have to ask people who make inquiries two questions, namely, where do they live and where do they work? These are cross-Border workers and the advice workers can work out what their entitlements are, who pays their pension, and everything else from those two pieces of information. After Brexit, the whole situation will become more complicated but, as yet, we do not know in what ways. The other point, which was mentioned earlier, is that the Tánaiste has stated the social security aspects of the common travel area will be put into a treaty. The extent to which that will deal with frontier workers as a specific section is not known. If I were such a worker, I would want to know what my entitlements would be with a certain degree of legal certainty. I am not sure that a memorandum of understanding would meet that level of legal certainty.

The other thing is that the common travel area refers, of course, to the entirety of the UK and Ireland. While it is an extremely important and historic set of freedoms and represents good neighbourly behaviour, there are specific issues concerning the Border on the island of Ireland and the people who cross it daily for work as well as, as I mentioned earlier, the psychological impact of the Border in terms of how far we have come with regard to peace and whether we are going backwards. It seems that there is a lot to be talked about with regard to the terms of a treaty between Ireland and the UK to deal with the common travel area. There certainly also will need to be specific provisions for cross-Border workers.