Mr. Daniel Holder:

I will start with the legacy issues and then move on to the common travel area.

The amount of secrecy over what is going on with the legacy Bill is very unorthodox. The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland has already found that the Northern Ireland Office, NIO, has breached its equality scheme because of the way it handled the initial written ministerial statement and has not produced its equality impact assessment. There has been no proper public consultation at all on what is going on, which has happened behind closed doors. Our main source of information on this is what seems to be periodically leaked to certain UK newspapers, particularly The Daily Telegraph. The issue Dr. Farry has raised seems to be a disagreement between the Northern Ireland Office and the Ministry of Defence, MOD, about introducing some level of compellability. Let us be clear that the legacy body that has been proposed is the most toothless type of legacy body, with much fewer powers than what was proposed in the Stormont House Agreement or the existing legacy bodies as part of the package of measures. It seems the NIO was for imposing fines for non-co-operation. It seems the MOD was somehow saying that that would be unfair on British soldiers because if they refused to co-operate they would get fines but republicans could just move to the Republic and would therefore be out of the reach of fines. That seemed a very odd position for a UK Government department to take because, obviously, its soldiers would not be fined if they just co-operated with the legacy body rather than refusing to co-operate with it. Also, it seemed a little odd to suggest that it was very easy for anyone questioned as a non-state actor just to somehow move house to get out of receiving a fine. That seemed a very strange position. The MOD was potentially talking about a different model of making the amnesty conditional, but there is no clarity as to what the detail of that was. We all know that all these discussions about powers of compellability were held for years during the development of the package that became the Stormont House Agreement. All the answers to what proper powers the body should have and what levels of immunity could be granted are within the two institutions that were developed, namely, the historical investigations unit, which would have full police powers, and the independent commission for information retrieval, which would protect immunity for protected statements but without an amnesty attached. The solutions to these problems, therefore, are to go back to what was negotiated and agreed before the UK walked away from that.

As for the common travel area, we have taken a position that there should certainly be a treaty. We are very much supportive of the human rights commissions' assessment of and model for this. We are aware of the memorandum of understanding that was drafted. Bits of it have found their way into a legally binding framework on social security. One of the problems with that is that the post-Brexit direction of travel is to restrict the reciprocal elements of the common travel area that were never really part of the common travel area but have now been put as such just for British and Irish citizens. As that will create its own problems, this needs to be something that accounts for the whole population.

The healthcare issue Dr. Farry quite rightly raised is also an existing problem for visa nationals. Obviously, I do not want to go into individual cases but they do exist. I refer to the existing North-South, cross-Border arrangements on children's heart services, the North West Cancer Centre and so on, whereby people or family members have not been able to travel or to avail of those services urgently because of visa requirements. That is very much an existing problem.