Mr. Paul J. Farrell:

I thank you, a Chathaoirligh, very much, indeed. It is an honour to be here.

I have long had this thought in my mind and when I saw the advertisement to put in submissions to this distinguished committee, I decided to put an A4 page together to represent the concept that I had in my mind. It is a great privilege to come and spell it out. I do not propose to spend all of the five minutes. To me, this concept has to be looked at as just that - a concept.

There is so much to be discussed before we arrive at this point and before we look at what it is we are talking about physically. The proposal is that we should consider, within a combined structure, that if there is going to be a government in some form, it is a government for the whole island, that we should be prepared to locate that seat of government outside of what is now the Republic, the South or the Twenty-six Counties - I could list all the options I am supposed to use for that - and that we should look at saying it should be in Ulster within what is now Northern Ireland. This fits into two parts of my thinking. I do not believe this is nonsensical from a Dublin point of view. I am looking at a number of civil servants working for the Ministers and the Attorney General, that is to say, the seat of government. There is a comparison with the Netherlands, where the capital is Amsterdam but the seat of government is The Hague. That component here could be somewhere in Northern Ireland, representing the entire island but taking away from Dublin a population or a number of positions roughly equal to the expansion of Dublin in a two-year period. It would be that order of magnitude.

Dublin is expanding at a rate that there is a constant pressure for housing and transport, so this would be a very small gesture. One would take the offices that are in Dublin, including this one, and start afresh. There would be great opportunities for landscape gardening, Chairman, and for wonderful environmental spaces properly developed for the demands of climate change and so forth. This should simply be put into the document as a concept and a proposition to meet much of what is being said on either side of me here today with regard to how open we are and how we would have a proper approach to what a united Ireland would look like. I will not flog the details around measurements and all of that. I have given a little thought to that but it is completely out of place here. That is the proposal I put before the members and I would love the committee to consider it.