Lord Alderdice:

I thank Senator Blaney for the question and the comment. The first thing I want to pick up on is the contribution of the Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, and not just in terms of structures and proposals. The tone he has taken has been very helpful. It is a thoughtful nuanced tone and sometimes quite courageously so. As is the case with many of these things, it does not always get the positive response that it deserves. He has tried and is trying and I hope he will continue to try to move along the line that he has taken.

In terms of collaboration, there is a lot that could be done to address the practical difficulties that exist. When I was involved as a psychotherapist it was clear that we needed to work together North and South to develop psychotherapy services. This was because we did not have enough people with the qualifications and experience either in the North or the South on its own. I set up the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy which still exists and continues to work. I did not always find it that easy to get colleagues from the North to come with me to Dublin. It seemed to be a shorter route from Dublin to Belfast than it was from Belfast to Dublin. At any rate it was important.

I then began to explore co-operation in psychiatry and medicine generally and in areas such as policing. I wanted to see whether we could arrange for people to do stints in the corresponding organisation on the other side of the Border, such as young doctors doing part of their training in the North or the South and police officers going North and South. I began to run into all sorts of practical difficulties. Some of these may have been excuses but I do not think they all were. There were issues such as pensions. If people took two years out of their pension scheme in the North, were they disadvantaged? It was the same vice versafor people who went from the South to the North. If we start to explore these types of practical questions, we might begin to make things happen that would then not be a problem down the line because they would have already been sorted. This could be the case if we could practically co-operate even more than we do already on healthcare North and South. Particularly in areas of high specialism we need the population of the entire island to make a service viable and this has happened.

If we work on these practical issues people will begin to see it happening, such as when Drew Harris came down to take up a position in the Garda Síochána. This was a very positive message to unionists in the North that there is an openness to working together North and South on policing. This has not always been the easiest thing to work on in either direction. There are practical things that can be done that may well help people to get over some of their anxieties and resolve some very real constitutional, practical and economic issues such as pensions. We can ask how this could be an issue. It is because we have different systems North and South. If we work on these, we might be able to make quite useful progress that would mitigate some of the practical anxieties people have.

From speaking to a number of people in the unionist community in recent times, I know a big concern they have is not whether they will be oppressed on whether Protestant churches would be closed, it is about losing the health service. The health service is anything but ideal. It is anything but perfect. It is not as good as it was, frankly, ten or 15 years ago. Nevertheless people have confidence in it. This could be a key issue for many people if there were a border poll. If people want a border poll to go in a particular way, they may need to work on the issue of healthcare North and South to get the answer they want.