Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I wish the Cathaoirleach well and congratulate him on his appointment. It is a wonderful position that comes with responsibility. It is a prestigious position in the sense that this is the only Oireachtas committee that also includes the voices of MPs.

The job of work for this committee is expressed in its title, that is, the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. It fits in with the programme for Government. I was glad to see in the programme that the Government remains steadfast in its support of the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement in full.

I think we get our guidance from that. We did some very good work in the previous committee and I commend the previous Chair, Fergus O'Dowd, for the work he did with us. We worked in a very collegiate way. The focus of our work was, notwithstanding the legacy issues we had to deal with - the legacy Act is still very much to the fore and something we will discuss in parallel - around the constitutional future. In July of last year we did the finance and economic report and brought in experts to do a really good report on that. We have other work to do in terms of using that report in the way we intended. We had spoken about a launch in the North and I would like to see that happen.

We went on to do a report on women and the Constitution and that report contains very rich information and other details we can use in policy formation. The previous committee agreed that the next area we would examine would be health and an all-island healthcare system and I very much look forward to doing that. We realise that work will be quite substantial and will probably take approximately six months. A good basis has been formed by the previous committee.

I wish the Cathaoirleach well and I know everybody here will want to work to fulfil the programme for Government among other matters.

I refer to the cross-party motion on presidential voting rights for Irish citizens in the North that was recently passed in Stormont. We have a lot of interesting and very important work to do and I look forward to working with the Cathaoirleach.