Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I reiterate a call I made in this House several weeks ago to get the institutions of Northern Ireland back up and running. It is intolerable, at this most historic and sensitive time, where the issue of Northern Ireland and the Irish Border is centre stage of politics in Ireland, the UK and Europe, that the only active politician representing the majority opinion of the North in the House of Commons is Lady Sylvia Hermon. The absence of the assembly is inexcusable at a time when we may need it to manage a crash out Brexit that could not be left to civil servants. I encourage the Taoiseach to do everything in his power to see those institutions return.

We are all scratching our heads after the votes in the House of Commons last night. What should, or could, our approach to that be? One option for the Taoiseach in any negotiations or discussions he will have with the UK Prime Minister today, or in the coming days, is to go back a year and two months to the initial agreement of December 2017 which stated that the Irish Border would be maintained open and there might be some regulatory and other checks in the Irish Sea, per se,to allow us do that. That may not be to our advantage in the sense that it might hinder east-west trade. It may be to the disadvantage of the UK because it might like the customs arrangement to which it agreed in the withdrawal agreement. However, it would be one way of responding to the UK Prime Minister by which we maintain our insistence around maintaining our Border and offers a flexible mechanism.

The DUP will not like it. The DUP stopped it after the UK Prime Minister agreed it in December 2017. Given that Prime Minister May and her officials signed off on that agreement with the EU negotiating team, it might be a suggestion to come back to the British Government within what is going to be a fraught two weeks. I put that idea to the Taoiseach.

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