Mr. Michael D'Arcy:

The first research I did on the common travel area was in 2016. I drilled down into its original legislative base. Since then, I have been pointing out to people that it was originally a common exclusion zone that by accident became a common travel area. It goes back to the UK's Aliens Act of the early 20th century. The point Senator Ó Donnghaile made is that removing the commonality of being in the EU, even if we retain the common travel area as agreed in 1921 between these two islands, creates a new set of difficulties with regard to movement on this island, between these islands, and between these islands and elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, there are now only two categories. These are British citizens and international citizens. In the UK legislative sense Irish people have an awkward provision whereby they can be treated as British citizens. This goes back to the 1948 Act.

Senator Ó Donnghaile has raised a very interesting question. It is good that he is doing some research on it. In fairness to business, this is not something that it has focused on in any way to date because there are so many uncertainties about the post-Brexit scenario and so much uncertainty about legislative practice in Westminster and what shape this Act will ultimately take. It is important that the Government puts the case again, just as it did for the protocol, that there are unique circumstances. To what extent these unique circumstances will be reflected in legislation is a question the Government should put to the British Government in order to ensure that the movement of people in economic and personal contexts is not impacted by the introduction of an economic partnership agreement, and that any restriction on the movement of people across the Border for economic purposes should be limited.

This is not just confined to the economic partnership agreement. The other day, someone was telling me how a trip to Belfast had been organised for her child's class. Everyone was very excited about it but the trip had to be cancelled because in the class there were two Ukrainian children who did not have visas. The whole class could not travel. This highlights the complexity of it. We need to get over it. It is up to the system to pull together this data and present it in this way. It is a unique circumstance and it needs to be tackled with unique arrangements for this island. We have heard a great deal about unique arrangements for Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Let us have unique arrangements for this island when it comes to the movement of people in the context of the interface between the common travel area and the wider movement of European citizens and other citizens, be it for tourism, business, social or educational purposes. There is also the issue of recognition of qualifications so that people can move for work and do their work on either side of the Border and support the needs of all-island companies to have this joined-up integrated service base.