Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the last question, until we had a meeting of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, BIIGC, in the summer there had not been one for years. I am not quite sure how many, but it had been quite a few years. We had one in the summer and one in the autumn and we are going to have one in the spring. That suggests there will be up to four a year. We are insisting on the structures of the Good Friday Agreement now being actually used. We need to use them appropriately rather than over-reaching in a way which some people would feel threatened by.

In terms of British-Irish interaction and structures to reinforce that interaction in the context of an intergovernmental summit, the BIIGC and other Good Friday Agreement structures are often associated with Northern Ireland and the joint responsibility Britain and Ireland have as co-guarantors of the agreement in the context of the peace process. There is, perhaps, a need to separate from that in the context of a primarily east-west summit which deals with British and Irish issues. Of course we need to co-operate closely and regularly on Northern Irish issues, but there are many other things we should be doing together. Whether linked to trade, climate, or the marine, there are so many different areas in which co-operation between Britain and Ireland makes sense given our geographic proximity to each other and how well we know each other.

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