Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It should at this juncture be clear even to Deputy Micheál Martin that at the heart of the crisis and the hiatus in the institutions in the North is the fact that the DUP has not embraced the Good Friday Agreement. We can only have a functioning system of power-sharing where we have parties that are open to power-sharing. We cannot indefinitely suspend the expectations of an entire society and tell people to wait and then wait some more while one party, the DUP, refuses to play ball. Those are the facts. Nobody regrets more than I the fact that the agreement in February was not taken over the line but responsibility for that rests at the feet of the DUP. Responsibility for the toxic relationship between the Tories and the DUP rests with Theresa May and Arlene Foster, respectively.

I agree with Deputy Martin when he says the North needs to be a priority for the Taoiseach, that the commitment needs to be strong and that the channels of communication need to be open, which is fair enough. However, frankly, I do not think it is fair and it is not dealing with the very challenging realities to play a game of make-believe and to say everybody is wrong in this scenario. The difficulty and the fault squarely lie with one party, and that party is the DUP. We need to try to resolve that but we can only do it if we are prepared to say that out loud and to challenge Arlene Foster in particular in that regard.

Can the Taoiseach tell us what he said to Chancellor Kurz on the issue of migration? Did he challenge him? Did he challenge his partners in government? As to our management of migration here, I think it has been fairly disastrous. One only needs to look to the system of direct provision to have proof positive that, far from managing migration, we are failing spectacularly in that regard.

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