Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is great to see everybody. This is a terribly agreeable committee. I will follow on from something that was said by both Mr. McGrath and Ms Anderson. In fairness, it is in line with what the Minister for Foreign Affairs said to this committee following his meetings with business interests, which is the fact that all that they are interested in is finding solutions. I accept there are difficulties and teething problems that are the outworking of Brexit but it is about delivering results. That is where we need to maintain a certain element of focus.

I also wish to follow up on what Deputy Richmond spoke about and on which everyone commented. What we are talking about is keeping the show on the road in terms of the Good Friday Agreement. It is a case of putting everything into the calendar, whether that is ensuring that the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference happens or making sure that we the North-South Ministerial Council meetings take place properly and are attended by all. We can deal with whatever issues arise. I also support what Deputy Richmond said about the need to look at the possibility of formalising meetings of our two committees. I accept what Mr. McGrath said about the fact that there are multiple committees dealing with multiple issues, but we have a responsibility, in particular, for EU affairs and their impact.

That leads me on to something on which we all agree, that is, Northern representation. Ms Anderson did a significant piece of work on this as an MEP. Barry Andrews, MEP, came before the committee and spoke about the possibility of what I will call the EU-British parliamentary association, but I believe there is another name on it. We would probably need the British Government to be interested in doing it, while it would be under no compulsion to do it. I spoke with our MEP, Chris MacManus, in recent days about the hope he sees in the fact that when the trade and co-operation agreement relating to Brexit was voted on, there was a resolution on accepting that there is a democratic deficit in terms of Northern representation. There are a number of ways that this can be dealt with. Ms Anderson would be better than most at fleshing out what sort of group there could be. Sometimes, the setting can be very informal but we would need it to be formalised as much as possible. I do not think there is any unionist representation here today. We accept that. We are in the situation we are in. Brexit has been destabilising for unionism. We are in the middle of a leadership contest and we will see the outworking of that, but it is an absolute necessity that the Good Friday Agreement train is kept on the track. We must ensure that whoever they are, the leaders within unionism must play their part in that regard.

I will also follow up on what Ms Anderson about a citizens' assembly and just putting a reality to the conversation that is already happening on Irish unity. Following on from what we saw in terms of the vote in Scotland at the weekend, it is apparent that the union is going to change in the very near future. We all know that the North voted to stay in the European Union. There is a responsibility on the Irish Government to step up to the mark in that regard.

In terms of the existing difficulties, we constantly hear that things are going reasonably well between Maroš Šefovi and David Frost, and then we suddenly hear something else. I am interested to hear how the Executive's interaction is going at this point in dealing with the anomalies that exist. There are probably new methods of dealing with issues under the trade and co-operation agreement. I would be interested to hear how the witnesses consider the situation is progressing.

We are also dealing with the British Government. At this stage, one could refer to "Unilateral Johnson" in the sense that the British Prime Minister is constantly threatening to do things. Even people who probably like what they hear do not always see a follow-through, so nobody can guess the outcome of the promises. I would be interested to get a response on that, in particular what the Northern representation could look like and how formalised it could be.