Ms Martina Anderson:

I will respond directly to the matter of consent in the protocol. The protocol was an ugly compromise. There was nothing perfect about it. Therefore, we all had views on the consent built into it. As Mr. McGrath said, it will be played up as we head towards the next election as, unfortunately, a green and orange issue. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to what has happened in the North as a consequence of this.

It has been played as a green and orange issue in what was said about the Commission making a mistake. We all acknowledge that it was a strategic blunder that should never have been made at the highest level in the Commission.

Let us not confuse that and think it has now caused others to call for Article 16 to be invoked because it was already being called for. Those who were calling for it and then became outraged and offended that the Commission had made such a blunder, utilised that blunder to do the very thing that they had already jumped on the bandwagon in calling for it previously. It certainly did not help.

What Brexit has done for us, in the North, is certainly not the best of both worlds. We have lost hard-won rights. There is no guarantee for workers' rights, consumer rights, commercial rights - things that we have all taken for granted and hard-won rights that needed to be built upon. We all know, as people living in the North, what the British establishment is like when it denies one rights. This establishment wants to ensure that global corporations, oligarchs and elites are serviced and that workers' rights will be thrown under the bus as a consequence, whether they are paternity and maternity rights, and all the rights that we require and that are the floor upon which these rights are built under EU law. We are in for quite a rocky road and will, perhaps, have those rights stripped from us. That is why we are keen that a conversation and focus are given to Article 3.

What Brexit has done in exposing the folly of partition has also ignited a reasonable, calm and logical conversation that has taken place across society about what the form and shape of a new Irish State would look like. We, in the North, are dependent on SMEs for our employment and labour market. Our labour market is mainly made up of SMEs. Approximately 80% of our SMEs trade on an all-Ireland basis. Many of the people who live here are aware of some of what is happening at the moment and I do not diminish any threats that have been made. It is appalling if that is the case.

The Northern Ireland protocol was being targeted and focused on to camouflage a strategic blunder by political unionism who walked their people into the unholy mess in which they find themselves. These threats need to be removed. If people are making threats on social media, that needs to be pursued. If people are taking the registration numbers of cars, they need to be arrested. Unionists, like us all, need to call on those people to stop making the threats. I refer to what is happening at the ports and what is happening with the protocol. We are telling people to be calm, encouraging them to keep calm heads and all that. However, we also need people to be strategic, analyse the situation and not to be dragged into a fool's paradise with what is happening here. With Brexit, right up until December, we were told that people could live with 44,000 jobs being lost here. That is what political unionism was saying : "Go to the chippy" and "the harder the Brexit, the better, as long as we are out of the EU". This is a consequence of all of that. We need to ensure that all-Ireland supply chains are opened up where possible, and the work that can be done to make sure that businesses and workers can be protected, is done. We must ensure that we do have the kind of co-operation that is taking place. I do not agree that it is the best of both worlds, because our world and our rights have been stripped away. That will be the case and that is the trajectory we will be on unless we build on the conversations taking place about a better, new, united Ireland, however long it is going to take.

Let us plan and prepare for it. Let us not be ostriches and put our heads in the sand because the people are way ahead of us. The people are already talking about it and already doing it. There is job of work to be done and this committee needs to be engaging with unionism on what kind of a new Ireland is possible. Will it be an Ireland that will facilitate Orange parades? Of course it will. Will it be an Ireland that is going to acknowledge people's British identity? Of course it will. It will never be an Ireland in the manner of the North, where we are sitting in a Parliament but the only thing Irish or Republican in that Parliament is unfortunately a photograph of the late Martin McGuinness hanging on the wall.