Niall Ó Donnghaile (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Holder. A lot of what I had intended to ask him and Ms Boyd has been asked and addressed already, so I will not rehearse those issues. It was important that the very first contribution from Senator Currie referred to the failure of the British Government and certain parties to implement agreements. There are also issues of concern regarding the Irish Government and its commitment to agreements. Even as early as a few months ago this committee engaged with representatives of former political prisoners who have concerns about employment opportunities in this jurisdiction and about discrimination as a result.

We know the Good Friday Agreement calls for the full reintegration of those with political convictions. We have heard overt public statements from senior figures in the Government up to the Taoiseach referring to provisions of the Good Friday Agreement as being divisive and contentious. I refer specifically the provision for a border poll. Across the board, there are responsibilities to adhere to the spirit, word and letter of the agreement.

Like other colleagues, I have engaged with Ms Boyd and Mr. Holder on the issue of checks on buses before, raised it in the Seanad and, when I was a member of the justice committee, with the Garda Commissioner. I have been on the bus travelling to this institution and have seen examples of some of the concerns expressed by people from ethnic minority backgrounds and by people of colour who are Irish or British citizens and who have been checked. It is something I am alert to. The Chair's suggestion that we engage with the Department and Minister for Justice was a helpful one. Because of the cross-cutting issue of the ETA and the travel waiver, we need to go broader than that. There are immigration and policing issues, as well as issues regarding health and education, as Dr. Farry noted, including further and higher education, for students travelling north and south.

There are more general issues for the Department of Foreign Affairs, as outlined by Mr. Holder and Ms Boyd. We have a bit of work to do as a committee. This goes to the heart of the Good Friday Agreement, stability and peace on the island and all the issues raised concerning the protocol and the common travel area. I would hate to see it left, because of the cross-cutting nature of it, to us alone when there are responsibilities for Departments to be alert to this and work to address it. The committee should engage with the British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, and contact her to express our concerns. We should invite other Ministers and other committees. It is important that the relevant joint committees and their members are alert to this issue. I will go away and work on this but I think there would probably be support and agreement across parties if, now we are reopening and able to avail of the audiovisual room, we on a cross-party basis invite the CAJ, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and other organisations to come into the Oireachtas to present to a broader audience, hopefully, on this issue.

Senator Currie and I, along with other colleagues, will attend the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, BIPA, on Monday. The time has passed for us to table issues to be debated at that but we will raise the issue with colleagues from the House of Lords, the House of Commons and political parties across Britain and beyond.

The Minister for Justice, Deputy McEntee, recently met the British Home Secretary. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney, told me in the Seanad that this issue had been raised but that was really it. I am concerned that this is not on the radar of the Government in the way it should be. There is substantial work for us to do as a committee, as parties and as individual parliamentarians. Is there anything beyond what the witnesses have suggested that they think we should do? Those are my suggestions that I offer up.

I raised the issue in September 2019 with the Garda Commissioner. Similar to the witnesses, I had difficulty getting any detail around it. In the course of a Commencement matter debate I had in the Seanad with the then Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Flanagan, no statistics were available in the immediate run-up to the referendum on Brexit or post Brexit. I have a concern that this is not being monitored in the way it should. It is vital that we pursue those statistics and scrutinise them in the way the Chair suggested.