Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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The common theme of what Deputy Brendan Smith, Senator Mark Daly and Mr. Pat Doherty, MP, have said is that we need to be careful not to overestimate the knowledge that other European parliaments might have about Ireland. I could not agree more. Furthermore, I cannot see why we should think that they have a very high stock of knowledge in that regard. The Dutch parliament is preoccupied with the election that is coming up there. Do members think the parliaments of Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania are spending a lot of time considering Ireland's plight? Europe is a crowded marketplace of interests. When we get to European Council negotiations, we cannot rely on the fact that everybody around the table will have anywhere near as high a level of knowledge about our circumstances as we do. Of course they will not. That is why we are in the room. It is our job to do that.

I am not at all surprised to hear what Deputy Brendan Smith said about their engagement with the Dutch parliament. I would expect that if one went to many other European parliaments they would have a degree of knowledge about Ireland and Northern Ireland, but I would not expect them to have anywhere near the level of appreciation of the details that we have just discussed. That is why in the coming years - because this will take years - the Government will play a strong role in explaining what is our Irish national interest. We will also explain why we believe it is in the interests of Europe that our needs in this area should be met.

Senator Mark Daly spoke about the relationship between economic and political stability, and he is right. That is why I believe these programmes matter. Deputy Brendan Smith spoke about what we need to do beyond 2020. I agree with him that said need is there, but we have a lot of work to do to get to the point where we will have those programmes in place. If we did not have funding stability in place up to 2020 we would be having a very different kind of committee hearing now, and justifiably so. We have that commitment in place, however, and in recognition of the Deputy's point, we must now start examining other models that would allow us to construct an argument about the replacement of these funding streams. For example, we will be looking at what happens in Sweden and Norway, as well as relations between France and Switzerland. We will be examining whether there are models there that would allow for the development of a new approach for the funding programmes to which the Deputy referred.

As regards the points made by Pat Doherty, neither I nor the Government want to see a return to the circumstances he has mentioned. We will do everything possible to ensure that does not happen. The Taoiseach has been clear that this Government does not want to see a return to a hard Border with the kind of friction that Mr. Doherty has described. He made an important point in that the movement of people and goods can be different things and we need to be cognisant of that. We clearly need to do everything possible to ensure that the kind of Border arrangements described by Mr. Doherty do not return to our island.