Lord Caine:

I was a special adviser to six Conservative Secretaries of State, going back to Mr. Peter Brooke in 1991 and finishing with Ms Karen Bradley in 2019. I completely agree with the comments made by Lord Hain, Ms Ritchie and others on the personal relationships. They are crucial. Like Ms Ritchie, I am a member of the British–Irish Parliamentary Assembly and look forward to that body being able to meet physically in the not-too-distant future. We have had a couple of remote meetings. I totally agree on the need for the relationship to be strong.

As somebody who was ever-present between 2010 and 2019, I would like to push back slightly on the extent to which some people perceive the relationship between the UK and Irish Governments to have deteriorated. For most of the time I was in post, the relationship was pretty strong. There was a very good relationship between Mr. David Cameron and Mr. Enda Kenny. The various Secretaries of State with whom I worked co-operated very closely with Mr. Eamon Gilmore, Deputy Charles Flanagan and the current Minister for Foreign Affairs. In 2014 and 2015, when working on the Stormont House and Fresh Start agreements, we spent something like 25 weeks in talks that necessitated the very closest co-operation. In the end, we got two agreements out of it.

Conscious that I am speaking on the fifth anniversary of the date of the Brexit referendum, I am aware that things have not been easy over the past five years, possibly because of Brexit. Lord Hain talked about formal and informal meetings. A lot of business was done at the margins of European meetings. In 2014, I remember having to get something to Mr. David Cameron very quickly about the Stormont House talks and he just happened to be with Mr. Enda Kenny at a European Council meeting. They were able to get together very quickly and come back with a very quick joint response, which was really helpful. There is probably a need to use the existing British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference more frequently or, possibly, if some people in Northern Ireland have sensitivities about that, think about some new institutional structures through which we could continue to deepen and strengthen the bilateral relationship between our two countries, which, as others have said, is crucial.