Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Senator is correct that we took a lot for granted over many years in terms of the common travel area arrangements. It is not until one seeks out the legal underpinning for this area that one realises it came up short. We have signed the convention and, hopefully, it will be ratified here in the next couple of days. I will briefly outline what happens in the UK. We both signed the convention on the same day. The UK has a 21-day cooling period, which we do not have. We have both laid the convention before the respective Houses. I think it was laid before the Dáil last week, with the motion to come to committee tomorrow morning. The United Kingdom is slightly different. It has a 21-parliamentary-sitting-day cooling period, during which parliamentarians in the UK can make observations or suggestions on the convention. They do this through a privy committee, which is due to sit on 13 March. The cooling-off period ends on 19 March. I genuinely hope that by 20 March, the Parliament in Westminster and the Parliament here will have ratified the convention on behalf of both nations. We were instructed in December to draft this miscellaneous Bill in preparation for a no-deal Brexit to replicate everything from my Department's perspective that is in the convention.

The convention was part of the withdrawal agreement, Protocol 20. In the event of it not being ratified we were going to ratify the legislation on how we will protect Irish citizens and all the payments that are made to them. However, we discovered during drafting it that once the convention had been signed and the intent and goodwill of both parliaments were ongoing, which they are, we did not necessarily need to pass the legislation and that we could pass a regulation to continue doing what we have always done on the basis that the goodwill exists for both parliaments to pass and ratify the protocols. That is true of section 11 of the Bill but not of section 12 because it is not included in the convention.

I will continue to pursue section 11 of the Bill because nobody knows what can happen on any day. However, because of the interactions and the intentions of both of the Secretaries of State for Work and Pensions I have had the pleasure of working with over the last 18 months, I am very positively disposed that the convention will be signed and that what we have enjoyed, from a security perspective, in the common travel arrangements for many years will become subject to a bilateral agreement and then will be subject to law.

With regard to frontier workers, the common travel arrangement is a long-standing arrangement and it means that most Irish citizens can move freely to live, work and study in the UK on the same basis on which UK citizens come here. The rights and entitlements include access to employment, healthcare, education, social benefits and the right to vote. Frontier workers, being persons who pursue an employment activity in one state and reside in another, returning there daily and at least once a week, are provided for in the agreement signed on 1 February in the same manner as they were under European Union rules of social security co-ordination, as provided for in Regulation EC 883/2004. The arrangements we have enjoyed under that directive that we all signed in the European Union in 2004 are enshrined in the bilateral convention. Again, with fingers and toes crossed that all goes well on 20 March, frontier workers will continue to work with the same rights, privileges and responsibilities they have always enjoyed since the European directive was established in 2004. It means people who are employed in Ireland but living in the UK and people who are employed in the UK but living in Ireland will have access to all the family benefits that are available to people in Ireland for family members who are residing in the UK as if they were residing here. It will not matter where one lives and works as long as one lives and works within the two countries.

In addition, the existing arrangements for frontier workers who become unemployed will remain. If a frontier worker becomes wholly employed, the person's contribution record in the state of the employment, for the sake of argument people from Louth who are working in Newry, will remain recognised by Ireland as it is today. There will be no change. That will be ratified within the convention on whatever date it is in March. However, I will pursue the legislation in section 11 of the miscellaneous Bill just in case.