Mr. Maro? ?efovi:

My thanks to the Deputy for the invitation. I hope that, Covid permitting, progress on the protocol will allow us to have that visit as soon as possible. Of course, it would be an occasion to come again to the committee. I would prefer to do it in person rather than via my computer. My thanks to the Deputy for the invite.

One of the questions concerned the mechanism. As I said, we want to ensure that we learn from the past and, therefore, we want to introduce a horizontal oversight mechanism, including the clearing house and the central role on the level of services that is played by the Secretariat General. This will ensure that it will have proper assessment of the situation and that the proposals for political decisions are properly done and assessed.

Another question concerned the work of the joint committee or specialist committee. Before we arrived at any decision of course we discussed it in great detail with member states. I can tell the committee that Ireland is one of the most vocal, active and engaged member states. We talk to our Irish friends and partners frequently at expert level, at ambassadorial level and at the top level of political representatives, including the Taoiseach, Tánaiste and the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

This will continue in the future and the high quality relationship the Commission has with Ireland prevented us from making that mistake graver because, as I said, we never activated Article 16 thanks to the intense interaction which took place between the Irish top-level representatives and the European Commission.

Concerning the border crossing points and IT systems, we agreed with Chancellor Gove - and this should be the topic for the next joint committee - that we will get the proper overview of where the UK is with the implementation of the protocol and the commitments and engagements agreed upon in our meeting in December. For example, for border crossing points we agreed a so-called open book approach, which has worked well since last summer. This approach means that UK authorities have been transparent about how construction works are continuing, the roadmap to completion of the works and when the border crossing points would be fully operational. We aim to achieve that in the summer of this year.

We agreed it would be good to have the same approach when it comes to the IT customs systems. We understand it is a massive undertaking to adjust the database to this new kind of relationship and we would like to hear - and this is also, I understand, a commitment from Michael Gove - what stage we are at in terms of making IT access available to the European Commission and the European Union and what are the major problems. There are issues with the migration of the IT system, which we understand. When will these things happen, what are the problems and when and how they will be fixed? This is the information I hope we will get and hear from our British partners and counterparts. That is the best way to proceed on all issues listed in both of our letters. Currently, our experts working in the specialised committees are frequently in touch and we hope to have more clarity on these issues, which will open the possibility of moving closer to full implementation and the resolution of other problems that are popping up. These problems are natural in such a massive relationship as that we are building and forming into a new shape and which was triggered by the UK leaving the European Union.

On different stakeholders, when we have a joint committee session it is the norm and there have always been interventions from the First Minister of Northern Ireland, Madame Foster, and the deputy First Minister, Madame O'Neill. It is the standing practice that both representatives intervene in our deliberations. Often, representatives of Ireland intervene in these discussions and we usually have the presence of most EU member states in such discussions. That is a good practice which we will definitely continue with so the voice of Northern Ireland is properly heard when we discuss issues in the joint committee.