Ms Alison Grundle:

Ms Sugden and Professor Shirlow spoke about identity, so I will talk about it as well. I am the product of a Northern Protestant father and a Dublin Catholic mother. I consider myself to be as Irish as I am British. I am not a unionist. I spent an awful lot of my youth in this city. I was probably about 15 before I realised that Dublin was not actually home; my mother just called it that so we did too. I am very much a Northern and Southern citizen of this island.

I will address a very pragmatic point. Members will see from our paper that we respectfully disagree with the fact that the committee has lumped constitutional change in with building a better future. We do not agree that those two things sit together at this point. We are opposed to constitutional change but we want to build a shared island that offers prosperity to everyone on it. Tagging it with the most divisive issue on this island guarantees that there will not be the type of conversation we want to have. That is a very strong feeling among the three of us.

I will make a very practical point about how we have this conversation and how we plan it. The committee rightly acknowledges that Brexit prompted a constitutional debate. I am a remainer. My greatest fear is that we go down the same path. The reason it is a genuine fear is that I do not believe we can plan for a united Ireland at this point because the British Government will not engage. The Northern Ireland Assembly will not engage. The petition of concern would not get through the Executive if we had one. How can you plan without engaging your two largest stakeholders? It is not just about people. It is about legislation. It is about decades of disruption. I would be very interested to hear how people who favour this position think we could go about planning because I do not think we can.

We talk about identity, public assets and institutions but beyond that, there are many other issues we need to talk about. It is not about painting the post boxes green; it is about very pragmatic things like how we would ensure a digital infrastructure remained in the North. It is owned by a UK-based multinational corporation and is scaled to meet the needs of 70 million people across the UK.

On a practical level, who would own it? Would BT sell it? Who would have the funds to buy it? It is built on a regulatory regime that exists in the UK. If BT continued to operate in Northern Ireland, then it would have to operate one part of the network under a completely different regulatory regime. What happens if we have divergence in data protection technology between Britain and the EU? That is one practical example. Northern Ireland cannot face a situation where it does not have digital communications after unification while we sort this out, but BT will not engage in that conversation. I wanted to make that practical point.