Ms Emma Sheerin:

Thanks but I do not have an awful lot to add. Ms Anderson has covered a lot of the questions that were posed, particularly around the four-year period and the consent mechanism under the protocol. We can see already that Ms Arlene Foster and political unionism have referred to that, as have various commentators, as a sort of mini-Border poll or unity referendum. To my mind we are in a period of constitutional change; Brexit forced that. It forced a situation where the people of the North are no longer in the arrangement they previously enjoyed, when they were dragged out of the EU. While we are in this period of flux, obviously the dominance of political unionism within the Assembly is gone. That majority has now been removed. There are very significant and valid calls for the British Government to start planning for and putting in place the processes to hold a unity referendum, as per the 1998 Good Friday agreement. That agreement provides that the British Secretary of State can call such a referendum whenever it is felt there is an appetite for it. Successive polls are now showing that there is such an appetite and we are in that space of constitutional change. I would reiterate that the most important thing at this time is dialogue. We need cool heads. We need to have conversations to work out how we are going to operate this. I am sure I do not have to tell committee members because they already understand that the British Government has a very bad record in Ireland. People talk about the best of both worlds but while we are still under the control of the Westminster Parliament, we are not in the best of both worlds. People had to adapt and make arrangements. Businesses grew and operated in the system they were in because that was the place we were in but going forward it makes much more sense for businesses to be operating on a North-South basis than it ever did on an east-west basis. That is my contribution to the discussion on that issue.