Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman for his comments. Reconciliation is key but trust is important. What we find is that people from civic society are participating in the dialogues and are engaging. I am conscious there is an election on and so on.

No one is putting up barriers to the shared island programme. It is important that people feel free to participate irrespective of what community they come from or what political views they have. It is important we maintain that. If someone is interested in education, health or climate change, irrespective of their politics, they should feel free to participate and contribute. As the Chair said, we all benefit from that participation.

This morning, I had some dialogue on the education front, working with Atlantic Technological University and the Ulster universities. We told them to come back to us with proposals and we will provide some funding towards them. They are looking at both the Letterkenny and Sligo campuses for potential developments.

Fundamentally, on Deputy Carroll MacNeill's point, it is about listening, meeting and talking but we have to expand it a bit more than we are doing right now. We should be encouraging greater engagement with younger and newer Members of the Oireachtas. We should be creating secure fora with Chatham House rules where people can engage over weekends to discuss these issues without fear or favour. We are all politicians and people are often very conscious of their base. That was always the issue historically. If someone participated with Deputies or Senators from the Republic and that got found out, it was thought that would damage the person back in their own political base. I will not bore the committee with my own experiences but I always remember what happened in 1992 with Ian Paisley. The DUP was going to participate in an engagement between 12 Members of this House and 12 unionists. At the eleventh hour the DUP pulled out and the late Ian Paisley went on RTÉ attacking left, right and centre the notion that we were going to go up into his constituency. Official unionists and loyalists were then with us so maybe that was the objective. It was fine and it was no big deal in the end but we learned an enormous amount from it.

I am always conscious that we have to respect where people are coming from. We have to respect their challenges. That is the great art of politics. Equally, others have to respect our challenges and where we are coming from. We have moved on a lot and many political representatives here have very open engagement with unionism but we have to make sure we create greater opportunities. The councils are important and we have provided them with seed funding. It is not Border councils alone but all councils on the island. We would encourage councils at a greater distance from the Border to think imaginatively about projects they could share with a council in the North on an ongoing basis. As we have these dialogues, I am conscious that there needs to be a regional focus in the Republic as well. The Good Friday Agreement is not just about the North at the Border level. What do young people in Galway, Waterford or Cork feel?

A very good point was put to me when I spoke to the TASC think tank last week. One woman made the very good point that we all have some view and look at things through a certain political, societal or generational prism, but there are whole new sets of communities emerging on the island that might have a completely different approach to this. They may not be looking at it through the same lens we have historically looked through. That is particularly true of the younger generations. The question is how we engage younger generations on the issue. That is what the dialogue is endeavouring to do because it requires active engagement. We have to work hard to work out how we get more active engagement between different groups. Some of it happens naturally. Deputy Brendan Smith mentioned enterprise. Sport happens naturally and there is lots of interaction North and South in that regard. An article from the Evening Echowas just sent to me by a family member about the time 7,000 Derry fans went down to Flower Lodge, as it was then known, which is now Páirc Uí Rinn. It was Derry City's first game in the League of Ireland against Cork City, I think in 1986.