H.E. Dr. Eamonn McKee:

I will also make another point. We have had what I have often described as a hesitant approach to Canada. We have moved from hesitancy to embrace. One of the reasons we had a degree of uncertainty about Canada was because Canada's sovereign is the British Crown. We were not sure what to make of that during the troubles in Northern Ireland. However, we all recognised that the visit of Queen Elisabeth II in 2011 and the follow-up visit of our President to Britain in 2014 represented a historic rapprochement. It came out of the Good Friday Agreement and meant we could look at and engage with Canada in a much more fulsome way without those hesitations and reservations. In the past few decades we have begun to re-examine the complexity of Irish identity and nationalist identity. It is a much more complex thing. That is a good debate to have because it means we are able to look at this and our relationship with Britain, Scotland, Wales and indeed Canada in a much more embracing way that looks at the embrace of diversity of the past and how we have to manage that for the future.