Mr. Pat Doherty:

I welcome the Minister and thank him for his presentation. I am aware of and commend the Minister's work with Máirtín Ó Muilleoir on securing the EU funding programmes and Brexit-proofing them up to 2020. I would also like to commend the Minister on his more long-term objective of looking beyond 2020. However, there is no such thing as a soft Border. It is just so many soft words. It is not going to happen. The road on which the British Government is travelling is going to lead to a hard Border on the island of Ireland. That is going to happen. There is an example that Deputy Sherlock mentioned. Amendment No. 86 tabled at Westminster, stating that the Good Friday Agreement would not be affected by Brexit, was defeated. We are now depending on the House of Lords. God help us if that is what we have come to. We are in for a very difficult time.

I have absolutely no doubt that the Irish Government and political parties North and South, with the possible exception of People Before Profit and the Traditional Unionist Voice, TUV, do not want a hard Border. None of the major parties want a hard Border. However, there is a lot of emphasis by the British Government on the common travel area. I came home from Britain in 1968 to my parents place in Donegal and I worked in Derry. I had to cross the Border every day. In Donegal terms, that did not involved travelling north to south but more like east to west. I had to stop at the Irish customs post and at the British customs post both ways every day. I was driving an ordinary car. They would search the boot and the car. There were lorries queued up on both sides of the Border with massive amounts of forms that they had to have filled in by customs clearance agents. There were massive delays. This was all under the common travel area and this was before there was any sign of the Troubles or even the civil rights movement emerging. We should not be naive about the intention of the British Government. It is going to have a hard Border and it does not care in any meaningful way about its impact on Ireland.

I could give numerous examples of how the British Government deals with things. I will give a quite benign one. In 1997, when Mr. Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he came to Belfast and made a hugely pro-Unionist public statement and privately authorised dialogue with Sinn Féin. That is the way the British Government operates all the time, not just some of the time. With regard to Europe, I was part of the Assembly commission and part of the infrastructure committee. We went to Europe as a delegation. As part of our work, we had to meet Irish Government officials who briefed us about what was coming. They told us that most European countries had little knowledge of the reality in Ireland and that they actually believed that there was a train link between London and Dublin.

Their belief was that because there was a train link between Belfast, which was part of the UK, and Dublin, there must also have been one between London and Dublin. That was the level of their knowledge. The Minister's officials told us that and warned us that we had to be careful about how much knowledge we might believe people in Europe possessed. We have a huge job to convince Europe of how big a problem Brexit poses.

The Good Friday Agreement was voted for on the basis of referendums held in the North and the South. It was accepted by 74% of the people in the North and 91% of those in the South. That stands against an advisory referendum on Brexit in the UK. It is quite clear now that it is advisory because it has to make its way through Westminster. We need to face up to these problems and realise that there is a huge amount at stake for the people of Ireland, North and South.

Europe is well able to devise special situations and special circumstances. They have done it for other countries and members of this committee all know the examples. There is enough capacity in the Irish people, political parties and the Government to devise a special status for the North within Europe. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, every citizen in the North is entitled to be an EU citizen. Some of them may not take that up but they are entitled to do so. They are entitled to be Irish, British or both. We need to be focused and clear. The British Government does not care about the impact of Brexit on Ireland. They care about it in terms of the Tory-Conservative vote, mostly in England.