Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Not at all. To Deputy Michael Murphy, with the exception of this foreign affairs meeting, the best and nicest thing I have done today - I am only joking - was meeting the Little Blue Heroes. I thank him for bringing them here. It would warm your heart. It is an incredible initiative by An Garda Síochána. I also thank its members for it. I hope the nine young people here today, and their parents and grandparents, had a wonderful experience.

We intend to expand our diplomatic footprint. We intend to open three new embassies this year. We will then put in place a new global Ireland plan out to 2040, which will identify where we intend to go in the years ahead. I genuinely think we get extraordinary value for money for the footprint. We are now getting an even bigger bang for our buck with some of the reform work that has been done in relatively recent years around the Ireland House model. That brings EI, the IDA, Tourism Ireland and obviously the ambassador and the embassy network into one construct together. We constantly put ourselves under pressure on that stuff.

Quite honestly, the UK-Ireland relationship is at a better place than it has been at any time in many recent years. We have interlocutors in the UK who are back to using the appropriate language around co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement. We had the first Ireland-UK summit. The UK hosted it hosted this year in Liverpool. We will host it next year in Ireland. We also saw the beginning of the reset of the EU-UK relationship, which, again, if I had told the Deputy six or 12 months ago that as much would have been achieved in it as was, people would have said I was a bit naive. It is really quite good. We got that feedback at the North-South Ministerial Council from the northern side. There are real opportunities now and good news for Northern Ireland.

I assure the Deputy that our commitment to the A5, which is a centrally held commitment as opposed to a 2025 line allocation, remains. Yesterday's decision comes as an extraordinary source of disappointment to many. I do not want to cut across the work of independent courts but our commitment from a funding point of view remains.