Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 16 February 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement

The EU and Irish Unity - Planning and Preparing for Constitutional Change in Ireland: Discussion

Photo of Erin McGreehanErin McGreehan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the committee for the opportunity to contribute. The Good Friday Agreement represents a dramatic change in my life as a person from a Border constituency. I never thought I would see it or to be able to speak to the committee about a united Ireland. This conversation needs to be had in a sensitive manner. We are on the hill of change. We can all stay on that hill together and battle against the winds and the elements, or we can fall down like Humpty Dumpty and go back 30 years to where we were. We do not want to go back. Too many lives have been lost and destroyed.

Too much trust has been broken again and again to go back to those things. The report is very interesting but the discussion about it being very like East and West Germany being put back together again is a bit too simplistic. To me we are one island. We have been one island since we left the Continent, probably 1 million years ago, but we are two jurisdictions. I would love to be able to say we would have a border poll in the morning but what would be the price of a border poll in the next two years? Is it that we will have a united Ireland but we will have left a whole pile of our population behind? We did that in the 1920s and we do not want to repeat it. We had a civil war over leaving people behind in the 1920s and we do not want to do it again. We have to learn from our past and from our mistakes.

An awful lot of jurisdictional change would need to be done. We are speaking here about the work the Oireachtas has to do, but what about the work the British Government or Northern Executive might have to do? Where do we converge? Back in the day as a student, I did a thesis on how north Louth, south Armagh and south Down could come together. It was a very aspirational thesis on economic integration. We can only go so far unless someone starts converging, even on the likes of bin charges, electricity or rates. In five years' time, where will all of these come in? A body of work needs to be done very much from the Executive side just as much as it needs to come from the Oireachtas. I would love to see one island yet again in every sort of way but we must not forget the mistakes we made in the past as a country.

I thank the witnesses as this is a great conversation to have.

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